Please see below for our CFP AAG 2018:
Anxious/Desiring Geographies
AAG Annual Conference New Orleans April 10-14, 2018
Call for Papers: “Anxious/Desiring geographies.”
Organizers: Jeremy W. Crampton (Kentucky, USA), Nick Robinson (RHUL, UK), Mikko Joronen (Tampere, Finland)
At this political moment we seem beset by anxieties from every direction. Automation is identified as an existential threat to jobs. Vulnerabilities
from political violence increase anxieties of the subaltern. Climate change and the inauguration of the Anthropocene threaten our wellbeing. Nast (2017) credits the financial crisis with being “psychically traumatic.”
At least since Gregory’s identification of the inadequacy of representation, which he dubbed “cartographic anxiety” (Gregory, 1994), geographers have
meaningfully contributed to understandings of the affective politics of anxiety. Attention has been paid to a geopolitics of fear that is experienced on both an everyday and global level (Pain and Smith, 2008), and to sexual desires and identities (Bell and
Valentine, 1995). Brown and Knopp (2016) identified a biopolitics of the state’s anxieties in the governance of the gay bar.
In this session we seek papers that deepen our geographical understandings of anxiety, desire and/or the possible relationship(s) between them.
Is anxiety a mental disease that can be diagnosed and treated (APA, 2013), founded on lack, or can it be deployed more positively (Robbins and Moore,
2012)? Is anxiety the only affect that does not deceive (Lacan, 2014)? What is the relation between anxiety, desire and place? What might a politics of locationally affective resistance look like (Griffiths, 2017)? How is desire productive of spaces? How do
anxiety and desire circulate and relate to subjectivities and the material body? Are there particular places and spaces that are invested in anxiety or desire, and what is the lived experience there?
Topics that address these questions include but are not limited to:
Please send a title and abstract of 250 words to
[log in to unmask],
[log in to unmask],
and Mikko Joronen [log in to unmask]
by October 15th.
References
American Psychiatric Association. 2013
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association.
Bell, D. and Valentine, G. Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities. London: Routledge.
Brown, M. & L. Knopp. 2016. Sex, drink, and state anxieties: governance through the gay bar.
Social & Cultural Geography, 17, pp. 335-358.
Gregory, D. 1994. Geographical Imaginations. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Griffiths, M. (2017) Hope in Hebron: The political affects of activism in a strangled city.
Antipode, 49, 617-635.
Lacan, J. 2014. Anxiety. Seminar Book X. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Nast, H. J. (2017) Into the arms of dolls: Japan’s declining fertility rates, the 1990s financial crisis and the (maternal) comforts of the posthuman.
Social & Cultural Geography, 18, 758-785.
Pain, R. and Smith, S. (Eds) 2008.
Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Robbins, P. and Moore, S.A. 2012. Ecological anxiety disorder: diagnosing the politics of the Anthropocene.
cultural geographies, 20(1) 3–19.
Sioh, M. 2014. A small narrow space: postcolonial territorialization and the libidinal economy. In P. Kingsbury and S. Pile (Eds),
Psychoanalytic Geographies. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.
__
Jeremy W. Crampton
Professor of Geography
Director, Committee on Social Theory (On Leave, Michael Samers, Interim Director)
University of Kentucky
KY 40506