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Call For Papers: Critical Geographies of Environmental Impact Assessment Association of American Geographers, Annual Meeting, April 12-16th, 2011, Seattle, WA. Session Organizers: Nicole Becker (Concordia University, Montreal, QC) and Kevin Gould (Concordia University, Montreal, QC) The emergence of so-called rational approaches to decision making in North America and elsewhere in the 1960s produced a range of environmental management tools. Of these, environmental impact assessment (EIA) is the most widely used and recognized. Today, EIA is a global industry, practiced in over 100 countries by a range of professionals working in corporations, governments, NGOs and multilateral financial institutions. The majority of existing research evaluates EIA on its own terms, asking whether it is implemented efficiently, attracting acceptable levels of public participation, amassing sufficient and precise information, contributing to sustainable development, etc. This session seeks to take the study of EIA in new directions using the tools of critical human geography. Inspired by existing critical studies of EIA including Bartlett (1990)Rutherford (1999) and Goldman (2005) among others, we are interested in asking questions about the material and meaning-making work of EIA. How does EIA reshape the taken-for-granted boundaries between society and nature? How does EIA constitute what counts as an environmental or socioeconomic impact? How does EIA help to create experts and expertise? How do the public participation components of EIA help to bring new imagined communities and new publics into being? How are practices of EIA incorporated into processes of marketization and neoliberalization? We see these questions as urgent because EIA is so widespread and because the technical language and practice of EIA conceals its tremendous capacity and creativity in transforming material arrangements and meanings. We invite presentations from a range of theoretical perspectives. We are especially interested in seeing theoretically informed analyses of particular EIAs and EIA processes. Possible themes for the papers include but are not limited to: EIA and the making of knowledges and materialities EIA and the creation of the culture/nature boundary EIA and the creation of experts and expertise Participatory practices of EIA and the creation of new publics and imagined communities How politics are framed in and out by EIA practices EIA as both a tool and a threat to radical environmental politics Neoliberalization and EIA EIA and the creation of markets Genealogies of EIA EIA and dispossession References Bartlett, R. 1990. Ecological Reason in Administration: Environmental Impact Assessment and Administrative Theory in Managing Leviathan: Environmental Politics and the Administrative State, R. Paehlke and D. Torgerson (eds). Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. 81-96. Goldman, M. 2005. Imperial Nature: the World Bank and struggles for social justice in the age of globalization. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press. Rutherford, P. 'The Entry of Life into History' in Discourses of the Environment, E. Darier (ed). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc. 37-52. -- ____________________________________ Kevin A. Gould Assistant Professor Department of Geography, Planning and Environment Concordia University Hall Building, Room 1255-13 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W. Montreal, Quebec, H3G 1M8 (514) 848-2424 ext 5480 [log in to unmask]