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**** Apologies for Cross-Posting***
CFP AAG 2017: Theorizing from Economies of Death to Livable Lives
Annual Meeting of Association of American Geographers, Boston MA, April 5-9,
2017
As a theoretical framework, “economies of death” draws attention to economic logics that render some lives killable and others grievable in hierarchies of power (Lopez & Gillespie 2015). Capitalism, as we know
it, is dependent upon precarity, or the politically induced heightened precariousness and premature death of (some) lives for its continuation. Specifically, “economies of death” highlights the devaluation of certain lives and bodies based on particular socially
constructed ‘differences’ (e.g., race, gender, sexuality, species, intelligence and cognition, etc.) and how these devaluations materialize in slavery, genocide, land dispossession, incarceration, foreign policy, war making, hate crimes, sexual violence, and
other historical and contemporary practices that are reliant on racist, sexist, classist, speciesist and ableist ideologies.
But this framework is not just about death and killability; it also demands an affirmative politics that centers an ethic of care based in a social ontology of relationality that encompasses
a non-anthropocentric conceptualization of life—human, non-human animal, and environment—as a recognition of the importance of
livability.
Indeed, implicit in the question of what makes some lives disposable and/or killable is an underlying moral imperative to consider what makes a life livable.This is not to imply that we seek a
singular and closed universal notion of what livability can
or should
be. Nor are we focused on understandings of livability that provide metrics rating livability or the “livable city.” Rather, we aim to explore considerations of livability
in which life is not reduced to either bare life or its productivity, and in which livability is understood through a lens of more caring relational ontologies. “A world’s degree of liveability might well depend on
the caring accomplished within it. In that sense, standing by the vital necessity of care means standing for sustainable and flourishing relations, not merely survivalist or instrumental ones” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2012, 198). We are interested in these sustainable
and flourishing relations, in how interdependent entanglements can emerge that foster vitality and caring.
In this paper session, we seek theoretical and theoretically-rich empirical papers that make the move from the deeply troubling capitalist logic which informs “economies of death,” toward an affirmative
ethics of relationality that takes into account what livable lives might look like, and how these futures might be imagined. What is it precisely that is lost or stripped away when a life is made killable? How might a life be transformed from being killable
to being livable? How can scholars theorize not just killability, but also
livability, in human and nonhuman contexts? Thus, informed by an economies of death attention to killability, how is a theory of livability built? If the first two questions are about
particular embodied conditions, then how might these be expanded into a broader theory that, while not attempting to put forth a universalizing ethic, opens space for a hopeful and affirmative future-looking theory? Furthermore, how might a hopeful future-looking
theory of livability be taken up across species- and disciplinary-boundaries as a post-anthropocentric framework?
Please send titles and 250-word abstracts to Tish Lopez ([log in to unmask])
and Katie Gillespie ([log in to unmask])
by October 1, 2016.