CALL FOR PAPERS
INVESTIGATING GEOGRAPHIES OF JUSTICE MOVEMENTS
A paper session of the 101st Annual Meeting of the Association of American
Geographers (AAG), Denver, 5-9 April 2005
Justin Beaumont, Urban and Regional Research Centre Utrecht, Utrecht
University, THE NETHERLANDS, Email [log in to unmask]
Walter Nicholls, Department of Sociology, California State University,
Long Beach, UNITED STATES, Email [log in to unmask]
The proposed session aims to provide a forum for systematically covering
the interest among certain scholars in the complex and variable
geographies of justice movements. There are at least three strands
informing this theme. First, recent work on the “urbanization of justice
movements” (Nicholls and Beaumont 2004) has drawn attention to the ways
that movements seeking social, economic, environmental justice might
become increasingly rooted in urban areas. A major feature of this
territorialization process is the particular configuration of state-civil
society relationships that underpin justice movement consolidation. This
body of work, however, has less to say about the precise, intricate and
often variable geographies (i.e. degree of territorialization/
inter-scalar make-up) of these movements in different urban contexts.
Second, we believe that the recent “spatial turn” within social movement
scholarship (Martin and Miller 2003) stands to gain from perspectives
that, on the one hand, pay more critical attention to competing
approaches to intrinsic “spatiality”, and on the other, highlight the
role of justice movement contestation as one element of larger,
inter-connected networks operating at a variety of spatial scales. And
third, contemporary theorizations of state transformation on multiple
spatial scales (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Brenner et al 2003) have
sparked considerable discussion on processes of state restructuring and
the urbanization of neoliberalism in Western Europe and North America.
Far less is however known, theoretically and empirically, about the role
of contestatory actors in the formation of these “new political spaces”.
Building on two sessions at the 99th AAG Annual Meeting in New Orleans,
the proposed session strives for theoretical enrichment and empirical
advance through paper presentations and discussion in the context of one
or more of the following themes:
· The territoriality of justice movements;
· Scaling justice movements;
· The relational geography of justice movements;
· Movements and new state-spaces.
Please express your interest in participating along with an outline of the
paper you have in mind at the very first opportunity. Final abstracts (250
words max.) and your PINs should be sent to both session organizers by 14
October 2004. You should consult the AAG website (www.aag.org) for online
registration and abstract submission instructions.
Justin Beaumont
Walter Nicholls
September 2004
|