AAG 2019 CfP Inhabiting Borderlands - Panel without papers / Deadline November 8

Dear all,

Please find below a Call for Participation for a Discussion Panel (no abstracts or papers required) taking place at the AAG 2019 Conference in Washington DC (April 3-7). The Panel is titled “Inhabiting Borderlands” and it aims at exploring ways of governing difference beyond biopolitical imaginaries.  

Presenters do not have to submit a paper; the panel will consist of 6 participants introducing one or two provoking ideas to discuss with the others and the audience. However, to promote a collective conversation, they will receive a common reading and will be asked to send their key points in advance.

The deadline for registering to the conference as panelist without abstract is November 8 and here it is the link. 

If you are interested in participating, please send an email to Mara Dicenta dicenm@rpi.edu

Thank you! 

Confirmed presenters: Mara Dicenta (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), Stephanie Rutherford (Trent University), and Mark Jackson (Bristol University). Possibly attending: Dagmar Lórenz-Meyer (Charles University Prague) and Stephen Hinchliffe (University of Exeter)

Inhabiting Borderlands

Biopolitics has become an important frame for social geography (Rutherford and Rutherford, 2013), in the form of biopolitical geographies (Agamben, 1998; Mbembe, 2003; Valencia, 2012) and what Rutherford and Rutherford call vital geographies(Rutherford and Rutherford, 2013), that would include more vitalist approaches on how more-than-human lives are governed through politics of protection, abandonment, securitization, and care (Blue and Rock, 2010; Braverman, 2015; Clough and Willse, 2011; Colombino and Giaccaria, 2016; Hinchliffe et al., 2017; Lorimer, 2010). 

However, most of these works remain in the “biopolitical imaginary” (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, 2009) that posits different qualifications of life as the center of politics. This imaginary goes along governing through exclusion. In defining and protecting certain lives, others are excluded, proper-improper life. Anthropocentrism of Foucault has already been tackled (Asdal et al., 2017; Blue and Rock, 2010) and we could say that there is not only an anthropological machine but also a “zoological machine” (that produces ideal non-humans to protect while abandoning others).

The question, however, is how to move beyond the biopolitics of exclusion-inclusion. Several authors have proposed to inhabit borderlands (Hinchliffe et al., 2017: 135), learn to be exposed to difference (Asdal et al., 2017; Dicenta, n.d.; Haraway, 1993), stay with the trouble (Haraway, 2016), communitas, or practices that respond to forms of inclusion rather than exclusion (Esposito, 2009; Hinchliffe and Ward, 2014), and partial rather than “either/or” responses  (Despret, 2016; Haraway, 2016; Stengers, 1997).

In this panel, we look for contributions that explore and provoke forms of inhabiting borderlands for governing difference. Works can be empirical, theoretical, conceptual, minor, experimental, speculative… As primers for ideas: 

• The use of third terms to overcome dichotomies
• How to think from dichotomies, not to make the world dichotomic (Mignolo, 2012)
• Double-Binds (Bateson et al., 1956)
• Forms of “staying with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016)
• Novel concepts
• Research that brings worlds apart together