[Geogwaste] 2nd CFP: Geographies of Sacrifice Zones

[Perkins, Harold]

Apologies for cross-posting...

Hello All,

Please see below for two separate, yet related CFPs for the 2014 AAG regarding 'Geographies of Sacrifice' and 'the Place of Sacrifice in Security Discourse and Geography.'

Cheers,
Harold

#1
Call for Papers: AAG Meeting, April 8-12, 2014

Session Title: Putting the Sacrifice in Sacrifice Zones
Organizers: Alec Brownlow, Dept. of Geography, DePaul University, cbrownlo at depaul.edu<mailto:cbrownlo at depaul.edu>; Harold Perkins, Dept. of Geography, Ohio University, perkinsh at ohio.edu<mailto:perkinsh at ohio.edu>
Sacrifice zones are increasingly well-documented, yet persistently under-theorized. Typical accounts of sacrifice zones include industrial, extractive, or military activities that render certain locations dangerous for communities who do not reap the rewards of those damaging activities. Occupants made to suffer are predominantly ethnic and racial minorities, though increasingly there is awareness in environmental justice studies that sacrifice zones are also correlated with lower class white communities, too. While the primary scale at which sacrifice is documented is the region, areas as small as individual urban neighborhoods are also considered sacrificed. Thus sacrifice as a spatial concept includes everything on a scalar continuum from something as large and nebulous as Appalachia to something as small and specific as the Manchester neighborhood in Houston, Texas. A common narrative throughout these varying accounts is the idea that human health and environmental quality in individualized contexts are 'given up' for the betterment of some much larger whole, often society or the economy broadly defined. Examples include energy production, jobs, economic expansion, and militarization. These are but a few of the reasons why a 'few people in some far flung location' are harmed in the name of 'progress for everyone'. Certainly these kinds of accounts of sacrifice zones have been crucial to the success of the environmental justice movement and have provided those who study environmental justice in academia much to consider. However, in this paper session we seek to build on these contributions to expand our understanding of the geographies of sacrifice.
Specifically, we are keen to include papers in this session that further theorize the notion of sacrifice in relation to the spatiality of sacrifice zones. Rather than a flat ontology of sacrifice zones as bounded/discreet regions, this session is aimed at elaborating how sacrifice is produced, legitimated, contested, and even de-centered discursively and materially through space and time. In other words, how is sacrifice made spatially explicit through the everyday and extraordinary events that unfold and make up our lives in a predominantly capitalist world. In keeping, we seek papers that push beyond the commonly understood spatialities of sacrifice and in so doing elucidate how the notion of sacrifice pervades our existence and how its specter is imbued in commonsense notions of our world and our place in it. By extension we are interested in papers that explore how the notion of sacrifice is constitutive of, and potentially subversive to, hegemonic socio-political formations under capitalism. Theoretically innovative topics are especially welcome.
Topics may include, but are certainly not limited to:
1. Sacrifice and the (laboring, sick, gendered) bodily/family scale
2. Sacrifice and its role in the formation of capitalist hegemony; and/or sacrifice and the struggle toward non-capitalist counter-hegemonies
3. Sacrifice and (social, political, cultural) identity
4. Considerations of sacrifice as a multi-scalar process of production and consumption
5. Labor politics in relation to the concept of sacrifice.
6. The 'everyday' in relation to sacrifice/ living in a sacrifice zone
7.  Sacrifice and the exercise of state power (military, economic expansion, etc)
8. Collective versus individualized notions of sacrifice and their political import.
9. Sacrifice in relation to various forms of environmental governance.
10. Sacrifice, sovereignty, and bare life

If you are interested in participating in this session, please notify us (cbrownlo at depaul.edu<mailto:cbrownlo at depaul.edu> or perkinsh at ohio.edu<mailto:perkinsh at ohio.edu>) of your interest and tentative title as soon as possible, and send an abstract by November 15th. Accepted participants will then be expected to register and submit their abstracts online at the AAG website by to December 1st, 2014.

#2
Call for Papers: AAG Meeting, April 8-12, 2014

The Place of Sacrifice in Security Discourse and Geography Alec Brownlow, DePaul University, Department of Geography Harold Perkins, Ohio University, Department of Geography

Sacrifice - of people, places, and things - is part and parcel to security geopolitics. Indeed, to a great degree, we in the west have come to expect security, widely conceptualized, to come with attendant costs. This is, a sacrifice whose destruction or loss, though perhaps publicly bemoaned, is ultimately and tacitly consented to by that same public as appropriate or necessary for the survival or perpetuation of some normatively derived, culturally identifiable and hegemonic "greater good". Consider, for example, the nuclear 'sacrifice' of the U.S. inter-desert west and southwest - its communities, its resources, its landscapes, its social and ecological history - during the Cold War. The destruction by the state of this interior region - identified, labeled, and packaged as a 'national sacrifice zone' by the U.S. Department of Defense - was marketed by the state and consented to by a fearful and anxious public as a necessary and acceptable cost to keep the external threats of the Soviet Union and global nuclear holocaust at bay. Security seems, thus, a powerful political and ideological discourse; one that not only can demand and justify sacrifice, loss, and destruction (often at a tremendous spatial scale, human and environmental cost) but, indeed, conditions a culture of consent among the wider public; a consent, that is, to the sacrifice of others if not necessarily a consent to be sacrificed one's self. Security is a discourse that is both enabled by and dependent upon the exploitation of an imagined community that is itself socially constructed around and motivated by some perceived shared mutual interest or identity (e.g., nationalism, lifestyle, ideology); the consent to sacrifice largely stems from a fear that this interest or identity is vulnerable - a fear fomented by security narratives directly. Insofar as security narratives have multiplied and become increasingly diverse since the end of the Cold War and the global spread of a neoliberal political economy, an exploration into the geopolitics of security and the geographies and spaces of sacrifice is both timely and urgent.
The purpose of this paper session is to more deeply explore and develop theory around the apparent relationship between security and sacrifice and its growing influence over social, political, economic, and environmental geographies at all scales. Our goal is not simply to identify examples of security through sacrifice, but to explore their dialectical tendencies at multiple scales, in diverse contexts, and in all of its socio-spatial complexity. For example:
*       What are the scalar implications for sacrifice under different security narratives and regimes? How, for example, do security discourses at national, global, regional, or urban scales translate into or correspond with the scale of any accompanying or proposed sacrifice?
*       How do security and sacrifice work dialectically to construct scale?
*       What are the nature and the geography of consent to sacrifice? How are these constructed? How are they resisted?
*       How is the security-sacrifice relationship taking shape and/or manifesting itself under different security regimes and narratives - for example, climate security, energy security, environmental security, border security, identity security, etc.?
*       What is the contingent nature of the security-sacrifice relationship across space and over time?
*       How has the security-sacrifice relationship transformed under neoliberalism?
*       What is the institutional structure and identity of respective security discourses and how do these influence the politics and identities of sacrifice?
*       Among different security discourses, how is sacrifice enabled and made legitimate? What identities, communities, and/or sensibilities are appealed to?
*       How are 'the sacrificed' determined, framed, and justified? How are they 'othered' as appropriate and/or normative sacrificial subjects under different security discourses and regimes?
*       How are the 'spared' determined, framed, and justified? How are they positioned, and how do they position themselves, vis-à-vis 'the sacrificed'?
*       What, who, and where are the normative sacrificial subjects under different security regimes?

If you are interested in participating in this session, please notify us (cbrownlo at depaul.edu<mailto:cbrownlo at depaul.edu> or perkinsh at ohio.edu<mailto:perkinsh at ohio.edu>) of your interest and tentative title as soon as possible, and send an abstract by November 15th. Accepted participants will then be expected to register and submit their abstracts online at the AAG website by to December 1st, 2014.


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