AAG 2019 CFPs

2019 AAG CFP: Frontiers of Rent and Rentiership in the Green Economy

Sarah Knuth (Durham University) and Tyler Harlan (Cornell University)

Across multiple spheres and spaces today, geographers have argued that “contemporary capitalism is different”; that, as Birch, Ward, and Zeller (2017) maintain, “it is increasingly dominated by forms of rentiership rather than entrepreneurship.” Whether described as value extraction (Birch 2017) or value-grabbing (Andreucci et al. 2017), rentiership implies a transfer of economic value to the owner of a resource, rather than the creation of economic value through productive activities. While debates continue about the nature and future of surplus value production in late capitalism, its significance and temporalities over the longue durée, and its regional vs. global character (e.g., Silver and Arrighi 2003), it is clear that rentiership has gained prominence as a mode of accumulation in the present era. Moreover, recent interventions argue that rentier imperatives are colonizing and imperiling technologically advanced sectors often framed as the ‘saviors’ of capitalism, capable of infusing it with fresh value and innovating fixes for its other spiraling contradictions (e.g., Mazzucato 2015; Christophers 2016; Birch 2017; and see Storper and Walker 1989; Ekers and Prudham 2015). In this session, we take on a key contemporary frontier for these turbulent questions of rent, rentiership, and (post)capitalist futures: the green economy.

Our focus on the green economy builds on established political economic and ecological critiques of green capitalism, ranging from work on green urban infrastructure financing to rural resource enclosures (McAfee 1999; Fairhead et al. 2012; Christophers 2018; Langley 2018). Yet, rather than emphasize the arenas where green accumulation occurs – be they conservation (Büscher and Fletcher 2015), restoration (Huff and Brock 2017), decarbonization (Bumpus and Liverman 2008), or others – we aim here to foreground the specific mechanism(s) through which value is appropriated, which we suggest increasingly occurs through rentiership. We understand the green economy as a ‘frontier’ of rentiership in two key modes: as an extensive expansion of large-scale land conversions and ‘grabs’ for the inputs and infrastructure (such as renewable energy installations), and as an intensive expansion into novel realms and asset classes (such as bioprospecting and risk) (e.g., Johnson 2013; Goldstein and Johnson 2015; McCarthy and Huber 2017; Rignall 2016; McEwan 2017; Knuth 2018; and see Walker 2017). We argue that these parallel forms – and, particularly, novel ways in which they are being interconnected – remain an outstanding empirical and theoretical challenge for contemporary political economic and ecological scholarship, over and above both fields’ now-extensive engagements with value (e.g., Kay and Kenney-Lazar 2017) and recurrent invocations of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2003). These developments span rural, urban, and industrial geographies. Moreover, they suggest deepening entanglements between traditionally construed forms of rent/rentiership: rooted in, for example, monopoly control over land, money, or intellectual property – all embedded in complex ways with state powers and permissions. As such, they demand ongoing engagements across political ecology, political economy, and their established remits in rural land relations, on the one hand, and urban-industrial geographies, on the other.

In this session, we seek contributions that engage these new rent frontiers in the green economy empirically and/or theoretically. Questions to consider include (but are not limited to):

Please send titles and abstracts (max 250 words) to Sarah Knuth (sarah.e.knuth@durham.ac.uk) and Tyler Harlan (tyler.harlan@cornell.edu) by October 17. We will respond by October 20. (For references, please click here).

AAG 2019 CFP – "John Wesley Powell and his legacy on American geography and future in the arid West"

Organizers: Drs. Thomas Minckley and Chen Xu, Department of Geography, University of Wyoming

With the success of his first expedition 150 years ago (setting out on May 24, 1869) down the Green and Colorado rivers, John Wesley Powell became a major voice and leader in understanding the lands and people of the Arid West. He was the first director of the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institute and second director of the US Geological Survey. The anniversary year (2019) of his first expedition calls for an examination of John Wesley Powell's impact on the Geography of the West through the mapping of the region, the description of the physical geography, and the understanding of cultures past, present, and future. This session looks to examine these themes and solicits presentations.

We envision presentations that look at the past, present, and future of the Arid West in the intellectual spirit of one of the first major scholars in the region. We hope to facilitate dialogs on scientific research, technology evolvement, and community engagement for creating a sustainable future of stakeholder-based resource (e.g., water) management.

Specific topics include (but are not limited to):

· Social, cultural, historical contexts of peoples of the West (human geography)

· Water science and technology (GI / data sciences)

· Natural resources of the West (physical geography)

· Natural resource science education and community building (education)

Please send us your name, abstract, paper title, and PIN to Thomas Minckley (Minckley@uwyo.edu) and Chen Xu (cxu3@uwyo.edu) by Oct. 21, 2018.

AAG CFP 2019: Critical Environmental Justice (EJ 2.0)

This session is jointly sponsored by the Energy and Environment Specialty Group (EESG) and the Cultural and Political Ecology (CAPE) Specialty Group.

Critical environmental justice, or EJ 2.0, expands on “first generation” EJ scholarship by explicitly taking an interdisciplinary, intersectional, and multi-scalar approach to examining and alleviating disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards, in a way that deepens the practice of direct democracy (Carter 2016; Pulido 2017; Pellow, 2016). Pellow (2016:223) suggests that scholars should investigate questions of intersectionality (in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.); more readily undertake multi-scalar analyses of the “causes, consequences, and possible resolutions of EJ struggles”; examine the degree to which inequality and power relations, including state power, are perceived as being entrenched; and better account for the ways in which human and non-human populations experiencing violence are deemed “expendable”. In this session, we seek papers that draw on critical race, feminist, anti/post-colonial, queer theory and beyond to engage with EJ 2.0 conceptually, theoretically, and empirically. We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary, critical EJ praxis that incorporates critical physical geography, radical citizen science, community-based engineering, informal STEM, and other approaches. We see this session as an opportunity to focus on the content of critical EJ, as well as to refine our methods and analytical approaches to critical EJ research.

Please send abstracts or interest in serving on a panel to Erin Goodling (eringoodling@gmail.com) and Anthony Levenda (anthony.levenda@asu.edu) by October 12th. We will get back to you by October 15th with more information.

**This session will be organized in collaboration with Dean Hardy and Ellen Kohl’s session to be advertised separately.

Carter, E. D. (2016). Environmental justice 2.0: new Latino environmentalism in Los Angeles. Local Environment, 21(1), 3-23.

Pellow, D. N. (2016). What is critical environmental justice?. John Wiley & Sons.

Pulido, L. (2017). Geographies of race and ethnicity II: Environmental racism, racial capitalism and state-sanctioned violence. Progress in Human Geography, 41(4), 524-533.

CFP AAG 2019: Rethinking the Politics of South Asia’s Infrastructures: Towards New Scalar, Methodological, and Theoretical Approaches

Organizers: Yaffa Truelove, University of Colorado at Boulder; Heather Bedi, Dickinson College

This paper session brings together scholars working across South Asia’s diverse infrastructures to query new scalar, methodological, and theoretical approaches attentive to infrastructural politics in the region. In what is now termed the “infrastructural turn,” a growing interdisciplinary scholarship conceptualizes infrastructure as a socio-material assemblage of both human and non-human associations. By revealing the simultaneous social, cultural, political, and material dimensions of infrastructure, this literature illuminates the differing agencies and power relations that shape socio-technical systems. Broadly, this work demonstrates that infrastructures are not only projects of state-making that articulate new temporalities, spatialities, and modes of state power (Rankin, et al., 2018; Murton, 2017; Harvey & Knox, 2015; Bedi, 2018), but infrastructures often exhibit “a life of their own” in shaping sociality, everyday experiences, and subjectivities in often unpredictable and unanticipated ways (Amin, 2014; Simone, 2004; Meehan, 2014; Anand, 2015; Millington, 2018; Truelove, 2016; Sabhlok 2017). Within this burgeoning field, scholars of South Asia have brought the region’s diverse colonial and postcolonial histories and contemporary geopolitical dynamics to the forefront in interrogating the politics, poetics, and power of a broad range of infrastructural projects: from roads and energy procurement to urban water, waste, and dams. In this paper session, we seek to bring scholars working on the politics of South Asia’s infrastructure into conversation in order to deepen understandings of the region’s complex infrastructural geographies, and build bridges that span across studies that focus on the urban, rural, extra-territorial space, and zones of exception. Possible paper topics might include, but are not limited to:

• The environmental, political, aesthetic, social, and historical registers of infrastructures in the region
• The material and organizational infrastructures of social life in South Asia, including the role of the state and other mediating institutions
• Violence, pacification and dispossession that result from securitizing, militarizing, or splintering infrastructures
• The use of infrastructure to normalize land acquisitions and/ or population displacement
• The social relations that connect the body to infrastructure, necessitating particular everyday practices and/or labor that reinforce gender/race/caste/ ethnoreligious power geometries
• New theorizations regarding the temporality and spatiality of South Asia’s infrastructural projects
• Nascent methodological approaches attentive to the scalar dimensions of infrastructure, including the body, neighborhood, national and global scales (and their entanglement)
• Intersections between infrastructure, uneven development, and marginalization
• The tensions between conflicting infrastructural imaginaries, and their accompanying discursive and material forms of power
• The socio-political dynamics accompanying infrastructural decay, repair, disruption, and maintenance
• The role of “expert knowledge” and/ or techno-politics in shaping infrastructural (in)visibilities, trajectories, and futures

If interested in participating in this paper session, please send an abstract of no more than 250 words to Yaffa.Truelove@colorado.edu and bedih@dickinson.edu by October 10th, 2018. We will get back to all authors within one week.

CFP AAG 2019: Theorizing the Just City in the Era of Climate Change

Co-Organizers: Joshua Long (Southwestern), Jennifer L. Rice (University of Georgia), and Anthony Levenda (Arizona State University)

Climate change, as both a socio-ecological process and a policy issue, is dramatically changing urban environments and the practices of local governance. Whether ignored completely, or a chief concern among urban planners and policymakers, we are now in an age of “climate urbanism” (Long & Rice 2018) where resilience, preparedness, and adaptation to a changing climate are essential problems for urban governance. The patchwork of action and inaction on climate change in the world’s cities, furthermore, has created a complex landscape of socio-environmental injustice. For example, where local policies on climate change have been enacted, scholars have noted that many of these policies and programs are likely to exacerbate urban inequality, further marginalize underrepresented populations, and reinforce environmental privilege through securitization and militarization (While et al. 2010; Oels 2013; Marzec 2016; Hodson & Marvin 2017; Long & Rice 2018). In urban areas where officials have not acted on climate change, essential infrastructures are threatened, marginalized populations are left vulnerable to extreme weather events, and carbon-fueled capitalism remains unchallenged or unregulated. As such, we suggest that the only challenge greater than building the climate resilient city is building the socially just and equitable climate resilient city. We argue that this is becoming increasingly difficult as the world transitions from the planning paradigm of sustainable urbanism to one of “climate urbanism.” This session seeks contributions from scholars considering questions of climate change from the intersection of social/environmental justice and urban theory.

We invite scholars interested in advancing theoretical perspectives on this area of research to submit abstracts related to urban equity and/or justice in any of the topics below. We invite all perspectives and disciplinary concentrations; however, recognizing that much of the research on these topics has traditionally come from scholars in the global north, we especially encourage scholars who focus on cities of the global south and/or marginalized populations of cities in the global north.

We are seeking potential panelists and presenters on the following topics:

- Housing Affordability and Accessibility in the Era of Climate Change

- Smart Urbanism and Climate Change

- White Privilege, Environmental Racism, and Climate Action

- Transportation and Access in the Climate Resilient City

- Financing the Climate Resilient City

- Climate-Oriented and Climate-Friendly Infrastructure

- Urban Migration, Surveillance, and Securitization in the Era of Climate Change

- Digital Infrastructure in the Era of Climate Change

- Corporate Power and Political Influence in the Climate-Friendly City

Interested participants should send abstracts to jlong@southwestern.edu, jlrice@uga.edu, and anthony.levenda@asu.edu by October 8th. Please indicate your preference for a panel, paper session, or no preference. We hope to notify selected participants of their acceptance by October 15th. Please feel free to email the co-organizers with questions.

Call for Panelists AAG 2019: Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene

Panel Session Organizers: Nino Antadze (University of Prince Edward Island), Lauren Gifford (University of Colorado, Boulder)

*Please note this is a panel session. You can still participate if you're already presenting in a paper session!*

Scientists argue that we have entered a new epoch in planetary history-the Anthropocene. For the first time in our planet's existence, a single species, homo sapiens, is driving planetary-scale changes (Steffen, Grinevald, Crutzen, & McNeill, 2011). Scholars also agree that the scale and intensity of the changes in the Anthropocene, and more importantly, the leading role that humans play in these changes, necessitate rethinking some of the fundamental questions about what it means to be a human, what binds us together, and how we want to live on this planet (Gibson-Graham, 2011; Palsson et al., 2013; Schmidt, Brown, & Orr, 2016). Understandings of the Anthropocene are radically changing perspectives and action "in terms of human awareness of and responsibility for a vulnerable earth" (Palsson et al., 2013, p. 4). At the same time, this irreversible global transformation has pressing and profound implications for environmental injustice, the unfair treatment of vulnerable communities through unequal distribution of environmental harms (Agyeman et al., 2016; Bullard, 1983; McGurty, 1997).

From its origins as a social movement against environmental racism, the concept of environmental justice has evolved to cover a diversity of issues (e.g., food, energy, climate, urban planning) and geographic scales (e.g., the global manifestations of environmental injustice), as well as environmental injustice claims in relation to the non-human world (Schlosberg, 2013). Global environmental justice scholarship and activism is moving beyond demands for equity in the distribution of environmental harms and benefits, toward calls for structural transformation of economic systems, and the reimagining human-environment relationships amid social, political, economic and environmental crises. This panel aims to stimulate the interdisciplinary conversation around what implications the analytical construct of "the Anthropocene" can have on environmental justice scholarship. Panel participants will propose and discuss some of the ontological, epistemological and methodological questions they deem relevant to studying environmental justice within the political and imaginative contexts of the Anthropocene.

We explicitly do not suggest possible themes, as we hope to facilitate exposure to wide ranging discussion on the broad theme of Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene. We are looking for 2-3 additional contributors to join our panel. If interested, please send your name, institutional affiliation, and a list of two or three topics that you would like to address to session organizers (nantadze@upei.ca and lauren.gifford@colorado.edu) for consideration. For references please click here.

CFP AAG 2019: Geographic Research on Harmful Algae Blooms (HABs)

The occurrence of Harmful Algae Blooms (HABs)-including Cyanobacteria and Red Tides-are becoming an increasing concern worldwide with notable serious outbreaks in recent years in China, South America, and within the United States in the Great Lakes (most notably Lake Erie, Lake Michigan), Chesapeake Bay, Texas, Florida and other regions. HABs consist of organisms that can severely impact oxygen levels in waters bodies, led to marine life declines, and present environmental and human health concerns with release of toxins released from the algae. On occasion HABs can blooms can last from a few days to many months resulting in extended long-term impacts to communities and aquatic ecosystems. Decay of the organic matter use up even more of the oxygen, creating unhealthy systems for fish and other species-via formation of “dead zones” in water bodies. HABs are driven by an increase of nutrients into water by both natural and human sources, with the two most common nutrients are: phosphorous and nitrates. The sources of these can come from agricultural runoff, industrial discharges excessive lawn fertilizer applications in urban areas, and direct release of municipal sewage. Research has indicted that higher water temperature and low circulation are contributing factors in many water bodies. Geographers worldwide and in the United States are making important research contributions to understanding the complex natural and human factors that are resulting in HAB outbreaks and considering the wide range of physical and cultural issues, plus potential solutions, to address their occurrences and impacts. The aim of this session is to highlight the variety of such work being conducted by geographers and foster the concept of a potential future research networking and collaborations on this important and serious issue.

For more information and to submit papers, please contact Dr. Patrick Lawrence at patrick.lawrence@utoledo.edu