I still have a couple of spots open in this paper session. send me an
abstract if you are interested in joining us.
-nathan clough
2010 AAG CFP
(In)secure space: Security, dissent, and contemporary urban social struggles
In the last decade scholars of policing and security have noted a shift
away from the policing of criminal populations and toward the
securitization of city spaces. During the same period a vast array of
protests, riots, and other demonstrations based on the occupation of urban
space have emerged in a wide range of geographical contexts. From the
proliferation of post-9/11 technologies for socio-spatial control, to
anarchist and poor people’s direct actions; from community policing to
the racialized abandonment of whole neighborhoods; from the proliferation
of private security forces in ostensibly public space, to protest permits,
free speech zones, and the rising figure of urban insurrection;
configurations of security and dissent are in flux at a wide variety of
scales. Alongside, and in opposition to the development of the new spatial
governmentalities based in a biopolitics of threat, activists and militants
are developing new strategies and tactics to subvert contemporary forms of
social control and create new spaces of social struggle. This session seeks
to explore the contours of the new socio-spatialities of security and
dissent in a manner that goes beyond liberal critique. By questioning
binaries such as public/private, free speech/terrorism,
universal/particular, local/global, this session will encourage radical
analyses of contemporary urban social struggles.
The format will be a paper session followed by a panel discussion.
Empirical and/ or theoretical contributions are welcome.
Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:
-the relationship between anti-imperialist insurgency in Iraq, Afganistan
etc and domestic movements and security/policing programs
-the circulation of strategies and tactics between social movements
-alliance politics in the face of state repression
-the politics of ‘free speech zones’ and protest permits
-the spaces and imaginaries of the city in the age of ‘less-lethal’
security technologies such as tasers, sonic weapons, and rubber bullets
-the spatialities of contemporary protest events
-squatting, occupations, and the creation of liberated zones
-the relationship between capitalist crisis and social movements
-state anxiety over the specter of resurgent Left activism
-relations between radical and progressive groups in the age of Obama
-street politics and policing
-the relations between neoliberalism, crisis, and insurrectionary discourse
and action
-class composition, race, and antagonism in the present moment
-the geographies of violence, direct action, and sabotage
For more information, or to submit an abstract for this paper session
please contact Nathan Clough at [log in to unmask]
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