CFP – AAG 2020 – New Directions in Subterranean Geopolitics (abstract submission deadline: 18 October 2019)

Sadly I’m not able to go to this – but if interested abstracts are due by 18 October 2019.

Call for Papers: American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting (AAG) 2020, April 6-10, Denver, CO, USA.

Session Title: New Directions in Subterranean Geopolitics

Session Organizers: Klaus Dodds (Royal Holloway University of London), Ian Klinke (University of Oxford) and Chih Yuan Woon (National University of Singapore)

Sponsored by the Political Geography Specialty Group

This proposed session will broach the interface between the subterranean and geopolitical. Subterranean geopolitics, as a starting proposition, is one that is attentive to the material and imaginative. It builds on an interdisciplinary body of work that have sought to re-evaluate the flatness of geopolitical and cartographic imaginaries. Within geography, scholars have insisted that geopolitics needs to account for and investigate the depth dimensions of human and more-than-human life. To put it another way, they are interested in how understandings of the politics of space morph and change when depths alongside surfaces are brought into conversation. This research inquiry has opened up opportunities for the interrogation of several pertinent questions: how can we grasp and understand such (sub-surface and ‘lesser known’) spaces? How are they rendered visible and sensible as opposed to being invisible and incomprehensible? How are they being subjected to various forms of control and exploitation? Are subterranean encounters also characterised by counter-movements and resistance politics?

This session welcomes both conceptual and empirical engagements with subterranean geopolitics. Presentations can draw on a number of thematic directions such as, but not limited to:

• The constructions, representations and imaginations of subterranean geopolitics in official discourses and popular cultural mediums
• The elemental qualities (e.g. air, rocks and water) that shape and impact upon the ‘playing out’ of subterranean geopolitics
• The institutional, legal and political arrangements that govern subterranean geopolitics and the resultant resistances and challenges
• Living and experiencing subterranean geopolitics and their affective/emotional dimensions
• Methodologies to research and negotiate the complexities of subterranean geopolitics

Interested participants should submit an abstract of no more than 250 words to Klaus Dodds (k.dodds@rhul.ac.uk), Ian Klinke (ian.klinke@ouce.ox.ac.uk) and Chih Yuan Woon (geowcy@nus.edu.sg by 18 October 2019. The organizers will notify authors of acceptance in the session latest by 25 October 2019. Details about attending the conference are available from the AAG website: https://www2.aag.org/aagannualmeeting/

Picture credit:  Cheyenne Mountain Complex — Colorado Springs, Colorado from https://www.history.com/news/inside-the-governments-top-secret-doomsday-hideouts

 

 

 

 

 

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