CALL FOR PAPERS:
ACME SPECIAL ISSUE ON ENFORCED DISAPPEARANCE
*Revised Submission Deadline: Tuesday, March 1, 2011*
Spaces, Selves, Suffering, Societies:
Global Perspectives on Enforced Disappearance
This special issue of Acme: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies,
seeks to expand current research and scholarly analysis of the phenomenon of
enforced disappearance, and its impact on spaces, selves, families, societies
and futures, by explaining the spatio-political logics of enforced
disappearance as a tactic of terror, and its impact on an array of spatialized,
social-relational and political scales across the globe.
More specifically, and following the innovative contributions to the study of
enforced disappearance made by Geographers, including Fernando J. Bosco (2001,
2004, 2006, 2007), and Melissa Wright (2004, 2005, 2006), this ACME special
issue initiative aims to further develop geographic concepts and methods toward
deepening current understandings of how enforced disappearance as a tool of
political violence, yields its power and generates profound human effects.
Indeed, enforced disappearance may be understood to shape conflict processes
and outcomes of violent contests, while also elucidating the connective role of
space, self and family (Joseph, 1999), in what Thrift (2007, p. 273) terms the
"phenomenologies" of violently divided societies, and terrorized national
spaces (Paasi, 2008). Furthermore, resistance to the prevalence of enforced
disappearance in particular zones of conflict and terror has mobilized
intensely spatialized, largely public responses from collective, civil society
movements (Bosco, 2004). These resistance efforts also constitute attempts to
enforce global conventions intended to outlaw and eradicate the practice of
enforced disappearance from political landscapes worldwide (see UN Convention
for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance, 2006).
This call for papers thus seeks contributions which advance perspectives on
societal responses to enforced disappearance, and its aftermath, in a variety
of global contexts. Particularly, we solicit papers which employ critical
geographic thought, methods, and interpretation, with the aim to further
scholarship concerned with how this complex phenenomenon may be studied in
radical ways. Geographers have much to contribute in mapping and analyzing
enforced disappearance as an evolving, immensely geographical phenomenon of
political violence and human suffering.
Suggested topics for papers include, but are not limited to:
*Self, Home, Society: Narratives of Survivor Families of the Disappeared and
Blurred Public/Private Spaces;
*Space and Place-Based Civil Society Activism and the End of Enforced
Disappearance;
*Shifting National Landscapes, Restoration of Human Rights Culture and
Curtailing Spaces of Impunity: Charting Geographies of Accountability Toward
the Disappeared in Regional, Comparative Perspective;
*Literary Renderings and Representations of Lived Geographies of Enforced
Disappearance and its Impact on the Spaces and Places of Everyday Life;
*Spaces of Memorialization, Remembrance and Forgetting: Mapping Personhood and
the Recovery of the Disappeared in Post-Conflict Societies;
*Mapping Psychological Spaces of Fear and Terror and Social-Relational
Geographies of Healing and Testimony;
*The Disappeared Body and Sociopolitical Spatialities of Representation of the
Disappeared;
*Gendered Responses to the Experience and Survival of Enforced Disappearance,
Loss and the Lived Spaces of Family Life;
*Scale, Power and Resistance in Transforming Subject Positions of Survivors of
the Disappeared;
*Critical Geographical Analyses of the Globalized, Transnational, and Uniquely
Spatialized Proliferation of Extraordinary Renditions and the Geographies of
War and Terror Waged Through Disappeared Bodies and Selves;
*Film, Popular Imaginaries and the Globalization of Historical Memories and
Accounts of Enforced Disappearance in Near-Past and Contemporary Cinema.
*All papers must conform to ACME guidelines for referencing and formatting
manuscripts. Further information about these guidelines may be found at the
ACME website:
http://www.acme-journal.org/
*Please send abstracts and paper proposals to ACME Special Issue Guest Editors,
Kevin M. DeJesus, Iman Humaydan and Fernando J. Bosco, at the following email
address:
[log in to unmask]
NB: Ensure to include in your subject line, “ACME Special Issue on Enforced
Disappearance”.
References
Bosco, F. (2001). Place, Space, Networks, and the Sustainability of Collective
Action: The Madres de Plaza de Mayo. Global Networks: A Journal of
Transnational Affairs, 1 (4), 307-329.
Bosco, F. (2004). Human Rights Politics and Scaled Performances of Memory:
Conflicts among the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina. Social and Cultural
Geography 5 (3), 381-402.
Bosco, F. (2006). The Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Three Decades of Human Rights
Activism: Embeddedness, Emotions and Social Movements. Annals of the
Association of American Geographers, 96 (2), 342-365.
Bosco, F. (2007). "Mother Activism and the Geographic Conundrum of Social
Movements” Urban Geography, 28 (5), 426-431.
Bosco, F. (2007). Emotions that Build Networks: Geographies of Two Human Rights
Movements in Argentina and Beyond. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale
Geografie, 98 (5), 545-563.
Joseph, S. (1999). In Search of Baba. In: Intimate Selving in Arab Families (pp.
53-76). S. Joseph, (Ed.). Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Paasi, A. (2008). Territory. In J. A. Agnew, K. Mitchell, and G. Toal (Eds.), A
Companion to Political Geography (2nd edition), (pp. 109-122). Malden, MA:
Blackwell Publishing.
Thrift, N. (2007). Immaculate warfare: the spatial politics of extreme violence.
In D. Gregory and A. Pred, (Eds.), Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror and
Political Violence (pp. 273-294). New York, NY: Routledge.
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR). (2006).
International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced
Disappearance. Retrieved from
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/disappearance-convention.htm
Wright, M. (2004). From Protests to Politics: Sex work, women's worth and Ciudad
Juárez Modernity. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94 (2),
369-386.
Wright, M. (2005). The Paradoxes of Protests: The Mujeres de Negro of Northern
Mexico. Gender, Place and Culture, 12 (3), 277-292.
Wright, M. (2006). Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism. New
York and London: Routledge.
