Call for Panelists

 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers

New Orleans

April 10 – 14, 2018

Media and disasters

Convened by Kevin Glynn (Northumbria University) and Julie Cupples (University of Edinburgh) 

Disasters, like other events, don’t come pre-equipped with meanings, but must be put into discursive and narrative frameworks before they can be made sense of and understood. In the current conjuncture, characterized by increasingly acute and widely felt crises of the global neoliberal economy, climate systems, and political institutions, the discourses and knowledges through which disasters are known and understood are themselves shifting and mutating. Such shifts and mutations are abetted by the fact that, in the contemporary technological environment, the victims and survivors of disasters often have direct access to the means of media production and distribution in ways that were once all but unimaginable. This has created possibilities for the amplification and circulation of alternative and socially marginalized knowledges, voices, and perspectives capable of challenging the most established representational conventions, narrative frameworks, tropes and discourses for the signification of disaster. This session invites papers that explore the shifting meanings, representations and discourses of disaster in a variety of media and contexts. We are particularly interested in media practices through which indigenous, black, working-class, queer and women’s knowledges and experiences of disaster contest familiar discourses of vulnerability and resilience and challenge forms of inequality and dispossession that structure the uneven impacts of disasters.

We also invite papers that explore topics that might include (but need not be limited to) the following:

• Disasters and media convergence

• Disaster and the Trump presidency

• Disaster journalism

• Disasters and “fake news”

• Disasters and austerity politics

• Social media and disasters

• Disasters in film and television

• Disasters and community media

• YouTubing disaster

Please email paper titles and 200-word abstracts to Kevin Glynn ([log in to unmask]) and Julie Cupples ([log in to unmask]) by October 25, 2017. Potential panelists should also submit their abstracts directly to AAG by October 25, 2017.