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*** Apologies for cross-posting*** AAG 2019 Rethinking the Fix: Development, Planning, and the Normalization of Poverty Caroline Keegan (University of Georgia) and Eric Goldfischer (University of Minnesota) Geographers who work with social justice movements--particularly in the North American context--often are called upon to augment activists’ arguments that focus on the systemic nature of racialized capitalism at the root of injustice (see Robinson 1983). Yet this approach only seems to scratch the surface of popular discourses that feed into harmful policies. For example, homeless activists and scholars have argued for years that homelessness is caused by the commodification of housing and exacerbated by anti-homeless policing (Smith 1996, Mitchell 2003, Willse 2015, Picture the Homeless 2011, 2018) yet the “fix” has been a massive shelter-industrial complex that fingers individual behaviors as the cause of homelessness rages on. Similarly, farmworkers’ struggles for social reproduction have long been seen as unfortunately incidental to the agricultural labor process -- to be “fixed” through publicly funded labor camps or philanthropic food assistance -- rather than as an integral part of a violent industry (McWilliams 1939, Walker 2004, Minkoff-Zern 2014, Mitchell 1996, Hahamovitch 2010). Such examples echo a longstanding discourse that frames poverty as a natural, albeit unfortunate, effect of capitalist development (see Smith 1984); a discourse that proliferated a multitude of public and private programs to combat poverty through individual job training, emergency assistance, temporary housing and other social programs but not the very logic of racialized capitalism. For this session, we seek to investigate the idea of the “fix” and the life that it takes on within labor processes, planning discourses, capitalist development projects, and, at times, in activist and philanthropic organizations. We do so in the spirit of Clyde Woods’ (2002) refusal of the social autopsy, and in a desire to move beyond a simple denaturalization into a grounded, curious questioning of sociospatial arrangements. We invite geographers geared toward praxis, with the goal of reframing the problem in order to reimagine more just cities and economies. Given this broad goal, we invite papers that draw from: * Critical urban planning * Activist-Scholarship and praxis * Abolitionist scholarship and activism * Social reproduction and feminist political economy * Labor rights * Housing justice * Poverty “fixes” and charity * Critical urban geography * Critical political ecology and critiques of technocratic approaches * Public health * Development and the State * Land justice, indigenous rights * Neoliberal state responses Please submit abstracts and statements of interest to Caroline Keegan ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) and Eric Goldfischer ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) by October 15. Best, Caroline Keegan _______________________________________________________________________________ PhD Student, Department of Geography Instructor, GEOG 1101 Human Geography University of Georgia 210 Field Street, Room 204 Athens, GA 30602 ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the CRIT-GEOG-FORUM list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=CRIT-GEOG-FORUM&A=1