Klinger Issues Call for Papers for AAG Annual Meeting
Julie Klinger, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, is co-organizing a paper and panel session on frontiers at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, which will be held in New Orleans from April 10 – 14, 2018. Klinger and her co-organizer Teo Ballvé of the Department of Geography and Peace and Conflict Studies Program at Colgate University have issued a call for papers.
From the text of the call for papers:
Frontiers are socially produced spaces. As Anna Tsing puts it, they are ‘conjured’ into being through anti-local and extra-local powers. The frontier as a concept, debate, field site, and object of study has a long and storied history in Geography (See, for example, Holditch 1899; Hills 1906; Browne 1929; Foweraker 1981; Blomley 2003; Hecht 2005; Redclift 2006; Barney 2009; Moore 2015; Peluso and Vandergeest 2011; Ballvé 2012; Watts 2012; RGS-IBG 2013; Hecht 2016; Klinger 2017, inter alia), but the term has received comparatively little attention relative to the discipline’s other spatial keywords—region, location, scale, place, territory, etc. Leaving aside the question of international “borders,” the proposed session seeks papers that examine the spatiality of frontiers from critical perspectives and in the present moment.
In particular, this paper and panel series proposes to explore how contemporary frontiers are produced by and how they continue to shape contemporary societies. The basic premise here is that all frontiers are the real-and-or-imagined “edges” of something for someone, but this call for papers purposefully leaves open the question as to what exactly the frontier in question is the “edge of.” Paper topics could range from state power to resource extraction; from expansionist cultural projects, to urbanization, and much more. Through a collection of papers, the sessions aim to answer the questions: How should we conceptualize today’s frontiers? How are these frontiers being created? How do they work and what work do they do?
You can read the entire call for papers here.