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Apologies for cross postings, we are looking for one more paper... CALL FOR PAPERS: WAR, WORKERS, AND WORKPLACES Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, 17-21 April, 2007 San Francisco, CA New security measures introduced over the past five years have transformed countless workplaces. Hotel workers are increasingly subject to biometric surveillance with their personal histories and current movements monitored by transnational corporate employers. Transportation workers have experienced dramatic shifts in their everyday working lives in the context of the national securitization of mass movement. They have challenged the institutionalization of racial profiling and crackdowns on undocumented migrants in their ranks, the trespass of their privacy rights, and a sustained attack on job security. Labour actions by port workers were deemed a security threat when the US administration invoked the Taft-Hartley Act. Border guards have been armed with new weapons and seen their numbers increase rapidly, while they fight government attempts to casualize their work. A teachers union has been dubbed a ‘terrorist organization’ for asserting the right to collective bargaining. Undocumented migrant workers have been subject to increasingly frequent deportations and more punitive policies in the name of national security. These contemporary cases would suggest a simple relationship between national and economic security - war and securitization have largely fostered the casualization of work and an attack on workers and organized labour. But we can complicate this picture if we consider historical examples or if we look at exceptional forms of work today. Historically, moments of crisis like war have allowed labouring citizens to make forceful political claims and institutionalize new forms of entitlement. Mid-century mass war, for example, fostered the expansion of social entitlements through the nationalization of identities and economies. In many countries, suffrage for minoritized groups including women and people of colour was ‘earned’ through war work. War has been a highly productive occasion for political and economic ‘innovation’. Social technologies, disciplines, and industrial practices have repeatedly spread from the military and wartime industry to reshape civilian work. Taylorism, Fordism, welfarism, and neoliberalism are all intimately entangled with war, and entire fields of work have been regulated and re-regulated for national war efforts. This includes the more obvious examples of heavy industry and munitions, but less clearly militarized forms of work too. For example, in many places, the historical geography of sex trade work can only be understood through a military history. The gendering and racialization of civilian and military work is deeply tied to war. 'Rosie the Riveter' is an obvious but still important historical trope of radical change in the gendering of work at wartime. There are also contemporary forms of work that complicate simple narratives of security. Soldiers may indeed see their immediate bodily insecurity intensify today, but countless national governments have enhanced the material and socio-cultural rewards of war work. Meanwhile, a new ‘international division of labour’ is painfully evident in the rise of private military companies and the expanding work of mercenaries. This session invites papers that consider the intersections of war and work. Contemporary and historical investigations that complicate our understanding of war, workers and workplaces are particularly welcome. Topics might include: -Bridging labour studies and critical security studies -The racialization of work through war -Theorizing collective security in relation to war and work -Social, economic, and national security -Biometrics in the workplace -Mobility and security -Militarized workplaces -Precarity -Gendered workplace ‘insecurity’ -Nationalization and casualization -Border security as a labour issue -The military as a workplace -Organized labour and national security policy -Fear at work -War and welfare Please send expressions of interest to Deborah Cowen, division of Social Sciences, York University <[log in to unmask]> before October 4, 2006.