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AAG 2017 CFP: "Geographies of extinction: space, biopolitics and temporality" A central projection of the Anthropocene – an era during which humans have become an earth-altering force – is that it will result in large-scale species extinctions. Dubbed the ‘6th mass extinction’, scientists forecast that as much as 35% of all biota on earth might be lost by the middle of this century (Thomas et al., 2004). As a consequence, the concept of extinction has leveraging power in policy and discourse at planetary scales: it is linked to debates about climate risks, it provokes questions about sustainable resource use, and thwarting extinction has become the mainstay of the biodiversity conservation movement. Extinction, however, has a much longer history as a political concept and can be found in projects as diverse as 1980s anti-nuclearism and 19th century social darwinism. Indeed, it was the infamous German geographer and proto-fascist Friedrich Ratzel who used the concepts of survival and extinction to make sense of both the biosphere and inter-state politics. Despite the opportunities that the analysis of extinctions offers up for understanding the governance of life in the Anthropocene, extinction has until recently remained a marginal theme within human geography. The nascent body of work in geography includes mapping into the representational politics and material practices of extinction, the concomitant violences that attend them and aesthetics they herald (Yusoff, 2012). Others, drawing upon phenomenology and bio-semiotics have sought to articulate extinction from posthumanist standpoints (Smith, 2013), opening up questions about whether one can examine extinction from other-than-human perspectives or through nonhuman lifeworlds. Cognate disciplines such as environmental history has looked into extinction discourses in the human context, the dual ideologies of imperialism and racism they enact (Brantlinger, 2003). In a more biopolitical vein, geographers have attended to conservation practice as a mode of administering nonhuman life (Biermann and Mansfield, 2014), besides foregrounding underlying logics and calculative technologies through which extinction is rendered visible and made meaningful (Agar, 2013). Bringing the fields of political ecology, political geography, environmental humanities and cognate disciplines into dialogue, this session seeks to attract critically minded work from a whole range of theoretical backgrounds to reflect on the question of extinction. Submissions will address issues such as: • Species extinctions and their relationship to human extermination • ‘Extinction’ as a concept in the history of geographical thought • Colonialism; ‘eradication’ of communities; violent practices of hunting animals • Chronophobic devices (IUCN/redlist, extinction clock, doomsday clock) • Death and extinction in indigenous cosmologies • Forecasting, future catastrophist biopoltics and resilience • Phenomenologies and more-than-human perspectives of extinction Please get in touch with a title and short (250w) abstract before 7 October to Maan Barua ([log in to unmask]) and Ian Klinke ([log in to unmask]).