[Apologies for cross postings]

AAG CFP – The Daily Life of Police Violence

Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting

April 5-9, 2017

Boston, MA

 

Organizers:  

Christina Heatherton, Trinity College

Jennifer Ridgley, Carleton University

Ted Rutland, Concordia University

 

In 1979, the Boston-based Combahee River Collective responded to a string of unsolved murders of Black women in the Boston area. This session, inspired by their attempt to “intervene and change the parameters of dialogue,” calls for papers that shift prevailing discussions of policing by focusing on under-recognized spaces, forms, and subjects of police violence. Moving beyond the most spectacular and well-documented instances of police injustice, the session seeks to document and analyze the daily life of police violence.

 

A significant amount of current critical research and analysis in geography focuses on the policing of public streets and parks – conventional “public” spaces. While policing practices like stop-and-frisk and racial profiling as well as the criminalization of public space are undoubtedly critical issues, this call for papers is motivated by an attempt to map less “public” spaces, spaces in which different police practices and different forms of police violence occur. In such a mapping, we hope to render visible the intimate, intrusive, and less-visible forms of police violence and intimidation – practices through which patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, nationalism, racism, settler colonialism, and class exploitation produce ambient landscapes of domination. Echoing the work of feminist scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw, this session will also analyze how these less-recognized forms of violence are constitutive of other more visible/public forms of police violence and control. By exploring police violence from diverse and neglected perspectives, this session seeks to map new relationships and intersections, critical for scholarship and praxis.

 

Some topics and questions we would like this session to explore include:

 

–  How are social movements bringing new forms, spaces, and subjects of police violence into view? How can their work shape our understanding of policing and the policing of public and less public spaces?

 

–  What new forms, subjects, and sites of police violence come into view when public confrontations with the police are placed on a broad continuum of spatial encounters?  

 

– What methodologies can bring under-recognized forms, spaces, and subjects of police violence into view? What challenges does this kind of research entail? How can these challenges be addressed?

 

–  How might such an analysis reconceptualize the role of policing in: the production and management of space; the production of social hierarchies tied to race, class, and gender; and/or the movement of capital?

 

–  How might the struggle to reform and/or abolish the police be recalibrated accordingly?

 

For more information, or to submit an abstract to this session, please contact Jennifer Ridgley at [log in to unmask]. Please submit abstracts by October 31, 2016.

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