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A little late in the day... please contact me ASAP if you are interested in these sessions. Philip Kelly Call for Papers - Association of American Geographers, Annual Meeting, Chicago, March 7-11, 2006 Southeast Asia Sessions: 1) Food/Commodity Networks 2) Migrant Identities The Southeast Asian Division of the Asian Geography Specialty Group will sponsor two sessions at the AAG meeting in Chicago. Both are rooted in an approach to area studies that seeks to problematize a traditional approach that constructs a bounded region that is the object of expert, usually outside, knowledge. Instead we see the region as constructed and arbitrary in some senses, but useful as a means of comparative learning about convergent and divergent developmental experiences, and as a way of focusing attention on particular places for both grounding theory and empirically exploring intersecting global processes. Both sessions therefore work from the notion that the region is a permeable construct, traversed by economic, political, cultural and social processes that can carry studies of Southeast Asian places to other scales and other places. We seek papers that focus on two such processes – the integration of Southeast Asia into global food and resource commodity networks, and the reworking of identities through the process of migration in and from Southeast Asia. We hope that the sessions will also provide the basis for a social gathering of geographers working in Southeast Asia or with Southeast Asian migrant communities elsewhere in the world. 1) Globalizing Food and Commodity Networks in Southeast Asia This session seeks to explore the ways in which Southeast Asian food systems and natural resource commodities are increasingly integrated into globalized networks of investment, trade, retailing, and regulation. Processes of interest include: certification processes for food products and resource commodities; alternative production and consumption arrangements; the expansion of European supermarket chains into SE Asia; the role of non-corporate networks in regulating linkages to global markets; agrarian change resulting from integration into globalized commodity markets; commodity chains and transformations at village and household scales. 2) Migration and Identity in/from Southeast Asia This session explores the identity transitions and transformations that Southeast Asian migrants (and their left-behind families) undergo as a result of relocation. The movements might include rural-urban or lowland-upland migration within national boundaries, temporary (but possibly long-lasting) assignments for contract work elsewhere in Asia, or permanent settlement in North America, Europe, or Australia. How do migrants recompose and renegotiate gender/generational/ethnic/class/place identities in their new settings? How does migration rework identities in places of out-migration? What images of rural origins persist for rural-urban or transnational migrants and what are the material effects of these imaginaries? What is the future of sub-national regional identities in a context of greater mobility? To participate, please contact (by September 30th): Philip Kelly, Southeast Asia Area Director, Asian Geography Specialty Group. Dept of Geography, York University, Toronto, Canada. [log in to unmask] Conference Details: http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/index.cfm <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Dr Philip F. Kelly Southeast Asia Area Director, Asian Geography Specialty Group, AAG Associate Professor, Department of Geography, York University, 4700 Keele St., Toronto, Ontario, Canada. M3J 1P3. Tel: 1-416-736-2100 ext.22499 Fax: 1-416-736-5988 www.yorku.ca/pfkelly