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Apologies for cross-posting.

We are potentially looking for 1, maybe 2 papers to round out our sessions.

*CFP: AAG Annual Meeting, New Orleans, April 10-14, 2018.*

*Transpacific Infrastructures*

*Organizers*: Wesley Attewell (The University of Toronto), Emily
Mitchell-Eaton (Trinity College), Richard Nisa (Fairleigh Dickinson
University).

In recent years, the term “transpacific” has attained new significance as a
way of naming and illuminating the two-way “traffic in peoples, cultures,
capital, and ideas between ‘America’ and ‘Asia’, as well as across the
troubled ocean that lends its name to this model” (Hoskins and Nguyen,
2014: 2). This interdisciplinary field of inquiry has approached the study
of the transpacific from a diversity of perspectives. Certain strands have
focused on exploring the militarized regimes of imperial and (settler)
colonial violence that have “constituted a structuring force” of
transpacific world-making and diasporic community building (Camacho and
Shigematsu, 2010; xv; Cruz 2012; Espiritu 2012, 2014, 2016; Friedman 2013,
2017; Ly 2017; Man 2017; Yoneyama, 2016). Others have foregrounded the
transpacific as a “geocultural formation at once constituted by and deeply
constitutive of global modernity” (Yao, 2017: 81). Still others have traced
the geoeconomic flows of capital and racialized labour that were set in
motion as part of broader capitalist projects of accumulation and
dispossession (Flores 2015; Rhook 2017). Important efforts have also been
undertaken to decenter the United States-East Asia axis as the dominant
geographical framework for transpacific analysis, pointing instead to
other, more long-standing and lateral, yet equally transpacific geographies
of Indigenous and Pacific Islander solidarity building (Banivanua-Mar,
2016; Rhook, 2017; Te Punga Sommerville, 2012, 2017).



These otherwise distinct trajectories of research are linked in two ways:
first, by their foregrounding of the important role played by “everyday
peoples in the appropriation, contestation, or deliberation of regional and
global hegemonies” (Camacho and Shigematsu, 2010: xv); and second, by the
ways in which they all gesture towards the importance of paying closer
attention to the geographies of transpacific formations (see, for example,
Banivanua-Mar 2016; Espiritu 2016; Friedman 2017; Man 2017; Rhook 2017).



Despite this spatial turn in the study of the transpacific, geographers
have been slow to engage with these concepts. We wager, in contrast, that
the recent geographical work on infrastructure offers a productive lens
through which to map the spatial circuitry of transpacific formations.
Following Deborah Cowen (2017) and Michelle Murphy (2013), we adopt a more
extensive definition of infrastructure that encompasses both physical
structures (such as military bases, transportation networks, and
pipelines), as well as “the spatially and temporally extensive ways that
practices are sedimented into and structure the world”. We ask: what kinds
of tangible and intangible infrastructures underpin processes of
transpacific world-making? How are these infrastructures assembled? How are
they disassembled? What kinds of life-sustaining and life-eliminating
forces are being enabled or unleashed as part of such processes of assembly
and disassembly? And ultimately, how can such transpacific infrastructures
be reclaimed for socially and environmentally just ends?



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-- 
Wesley Attewell
University of Toronto, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow.

B.A (hon.) in Geography, UBC.
M.A in Geography, UBC.
PhD in Geography, UBC.