Apologies for cross postings...
2nd Call for papers:
Theorizing the Spatialities of Contentious Politics
Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting,
2009, Las Vegas, March 22-27
Byron Miller, Department of Geography, University of
Calgary, [log in to unmask]
Walter J. Nicholls, Department of Sociology, California
State University, Long Beach, United States,
[log in to unmask]
There has been a recent surge of interest in the
spatialities of contentious politics. Contributors to this
literature have encountered a number of interesting
theoretical issues and tensions concerning the spatial
constitution of social movements.
First, geographers have drawn from various major
theoretical traditions to interpret social movements
including anarchist theory, Marxism, social movement
theory, post-structural theory, etc (Routledge 1993;
Miller 2000; Harvey 2001; Featherstone 2008). Each of
these traditions introduces different assumptions about
the nature of ‘actors’, their capacities to mobilize
collectively, recurrent stumbling blocks, and their
potentials for changing political and economic systems.
While some assumptions and concepts may differ in profound
ways, others may overlap and complement one another,
permitting us to create a more robust theoretical
framework for understanding the spatialities of social
movements. The first major aim of this session is to
provide an arena where scholars can begin a dialogue
concerning the major theoretical divergences and potential
convergences in the burgeoning literature on the
spatialities of contentious politics.
Second, geographers have drawn on well established
geographical concepts like place, territory, scale, and
networks to interpret the spatial constitution of social
movements. The application of these concepts in mutually
exclusive ways has helped scholars carefully analyze a
variety of spatial mechanisms underlying social movements.
However, there has been concern over the viability of
concepts suggesting geographical fixity in a world of
mobility and flows (Amin 2004; Marston et al 2006; Massey
2007). The debate over basic geographical concepts (also
see Brenner 2001; Leitner and Miller 2007) has important
implications for geographical theories of collective
action. Several geographers have recently sought to
resolve this debate by suggesting that these concepts
reflect specific spatial mechanisms that play distinctive
yet complementary roles in the geographic constitution of
social movement (Leitner et al 2008). For these scholars,
the analytical task at hand is not to discover which
concept is ‘best’, but to identify the ways in which
different spatial mechanisms become articulated in
actually existing social movements. The second major aim
of the session is therefore to discuss how recent debates
over basic geographic concepts affect our abilities to
theorize the spatialities of collective action.
This session aims to initiate an open dialogue over how to
theorize the geographies of social movements. It invites
spatially-inclined social scientists to contribute papers
that address these two general theoretical tensions in the
literature.
If you are interested, please submit an abstract of one
page or less by email by October 3rd.
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