Borders, bodies and biometrics CFP

AAG 5th-9th April 2005 * Denver, Colorado. 

This call for papers requests innovative and original contributions to the proposed session ‘Borders, bodies and biometrics’ planned for the 2005 Association of American Geographers Conference in Denver, Colorado. Building on sustained interest in mobility within the discipline, and session on the mobile body in previous years, we hope to ‘humanize’ accounts of mobility, through a renewed emphasis on the most corporeal aspects of movement. Many studies in mobility have become overly utopian, highlighting an increasingly mobile world comprised of networks, flows, virtual travel and fluid societies. We would seek to nuance such accounts by looking at how movement is registered, understood, and initiated at the intimate scale of the body. Actor-network, cyborg and hybridist theories have done much to highlight the intricate relationships between the fleshy text of the body, technology and space, and it is this work that we would seek to extend. The session also seeks to add depth to foucauldian understandings of the body as a site where all forms of power are ultimately registered and experienced. Also of interest to us is the relationship between the body present and the body absent - virtual bodies that are constituted through software code and forced into informational categories of security and suspicion. We seek papers that explore this collision between the corporeal and incorporeal body.  

It is anticipated that accepted papers would form a special edition of an international journal or appropriate edited collection. The remit of this session is intentionally broad to encourage innovation, yet we would particularly welcome papers covering the following themes: 


- The experience of biometric and surveillance security technologies

- Regulation of movements of bodies through space

- The spaces and places of border crossings such as air and sea-ports 

- Embodiment, movement and pain

- Imprisonment, bodily restriction and electronic tagging 

- Eugenics, racial profiling and immigration control

- Writing, marking and categorizing bodies 


Abstracts should be sent to each of the co-organisers, Joanne Maddern, Gareth Hoskins and Peter Adey, using the contact details below by Monday 4th October.

Participants whose papers are accepted for the session should register for the conference at www.aag.org and inform the session organisers of their participant number before the registration deadline of Thursday 21st October.

Session Organisers:

Joanne Maddern   E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Lecturer in Human Geography,
Department of Geography,
Nethergate,Dundee,
DD1 4HN.

Gareth Hoskins   E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Lecturer in Human Geography,
Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences,
University of Wales Aberystwyth,
Aberystwyth,
SY23 3DB, UK.

Peter Adey   E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences,
University of Wales Aberystwyth,
Aberystwyth,
SY23 3DB, UK.




Joanne Maddern
Lecturer in Human Geography
Department of Geography 
Nethergate
Dundee
DD1 4HN

Email: [log in to unmask]
Telephone: 01382 344786
Facsimile: 01382 344434 (International: +44 1382 344434)