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UPRISING GEOGRAPHIES: URBAN RESISTANCE AND SECURITY
 
Convenors:

Sara Fregonese (Royal Holloway University of London)
Adam Ramadan (University of Birmingham)
 
If Terror was central to popular and official understandings of security in the past decade, might Uprising be key to urban, national, and global geographies of security in the current one?
 
Since the end of 2010, the uprisings of the ‘Arab Spring’, the anti-austerity protests across Europe, occupations and encampments in global cities, and the Summer 2011 riots in London, suggest a new political moment of mass disaffection and disobedience. Beyond the specificities of individual events, uprisings worldwide have demonstrated the presence of shared concerns about social justice, human rights, and democracy for transnational geographies of solidarity and organised resistance.
 
In response, discourses and practices of state and urban security are shifting from the spectre of major terrorist attacks to managing popular disobedience and policing its spaces. As uprisings create new tactics and practices of territoriality, states reassert their sovereignty through new arrangements of policing and securitisation. From Cairo and Homs to Athens, Madrid, and New York, we have seen strong and often violent collisions between resistance movements and state security.
 
Cities constitute physical and symbolic terrains for socio-political change. If 2011 has seen the inception and revival of geographies of mass protest and resistance in cities all around the Mediterranean, 2012 sees the continuity and spreading of these practices (and responses) to urban spaces worldwide. How are these collisions reshaping the political geographies of communities experiencing uprising? What are the likely scenarios, the spaces, practices, and performances emerging from the uprisings?
 
We invite contributions from a variety of theoretical approaches and real world case studies, on or around the following themes:
 
-  the uprising and post-uprising city
-  State responses, resilience, resistance
-  protest spaces and camps
-  transnational geographies of uprisings
-  experimental urban politics
-  tactics, relationships, and discourses of uprising
-  security discourses during and after uprising
-  everyday practices of security in the wake of uprising
-  uprising and post-uprising geopolitical imaginations
-  sovereignty and territory in the age of uprising
 
Please send abstracts (250 words max) to [log in to unmask] by MONDAY 22 OCTOBER 2012.

http://everydaygeopolitics.wordpress.com/2012/10/05/uprising-geographies-cfp/



Dr. Sara Fregonese
British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow
Department of Geography
Royal Holloway University of London
Egham, Surrey  TW20 0EX  UK

Telephone: +44 (0)1784 276 291
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Research profile: http://tinyurl.com/6dl3gkd
Twitter: @SaraFregonese
'Spaces of protest'  workshop podcast: http://tinyurl.com/7ac43tb