Geography has long been concerned with challenging the conceptual and material boundaries of our social world. Geographers have demonstrated the ways in which inherited ontologies are neither universal nor timeless, but are instead spatial and historical productions—a perspective which complicates, for instance, conventional notions of space (Massey 2005), nature (Harvey 1996), race (McKittrick 2006), and gender (McDowell 1999; Wright 2006). Such work demonstrates how the terms of our existence are products of the time and place within which we exist. Though we experience the world as real, our foundational truths are necessarily partial and fragmented for they are historically and geographically constituted—we might broadly characterize this perspective as post-foundational. 

We look to post-foundational inquiry to enable a questioning of the previously unquestioned foundations or grounds from which ideas are built, actions are justified, subjects are authorized, and politics are licensed. Post-foundational critique is not against foundations per se, nor does it claim that there are no foundations. Instead, it emphasizes that nothing is determined with certainty; there is no final origin or foundation to which we can appeal and the impossibility of any final foundation is the condition of possibility for a panoply of “contingent foundations,” those competing yet ultimately unsuccessful attempts to ground a social order (Butler 1992; Marchart 2007). 

Thus, rather than taking the claims of a social order as given, the aim of post-foundational geographies is to historicize, politicize, and spatialize “sedimentations of power and place” (Landau et al. 2021, 27). Post-foundational geographies becomes a deconstructive practice of what Landau et al. (2021) refer to as [un]grounding, an act of rendering foundations contingent, revealing the ways in which any given claim is an attempt at once to ground and unground material and conceptual boundaries. A post-foundational geography does not attempt to locate an original or more authentic foundation for being, nor does it insist on establishing counter-claims based in identity or metaphysics. Instead, it traces the ways in which the forms and categories of reality were never foundational, original, or natural to begin with, but have been produced and defined as such through practices of knowledge and power. 

For this session, we seek papers that conspicuously center and enact a praxis of [un]grounding, that approach ontology as a central site of inquiry for geographic thought. These might include 

• deconstructive, genealogical, or contingent readings of geographic objects (e.g., housing, borders, crime)

• critical race, racial formation, and racial capitalist approaches

• myth-making, demythologization, anti-authoritarianism

• critiques of method, accounts of methodological contingency

• post-foundational political and cultural ecologies

• post- or anti-disciplinary projects, histories of the present

Please submit abstracts to Coleman Allums (coleman.allums@uga.edu) and Matthew Harris (mattharris@uga.edu) by November 1, 2022. Decisions will be communicated by November 7.

References

Butler, J. (1992). Contingent foundations: Feminism and the question of ‘postmodernism.’ In: Feminists theorize the political. (21-39). Routledge. 

Harvey, D. (1996). Justice, nature, and the geography of difference. Wiley.   

Landau, F., L. Pohl, and N. Roskamm (2021). [Un]grounding: Post-foundational geographies. Transcript Verlag.

Marchart, O. (2007). Post-foundational political thought: Political difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, and Laclau. Edinburgh University Press. 

Massey, D. (2005). For space. SAGE. 

McDowell, L. (1999). Gender, identity, and place: Understanding feminist geographies. Wiley. 

McKittrick, K. (2006). Demonic grounds: Black women and the cartographies of struggle. University of Minnesota Press. 

Wright, M. (2006). Disposable women and other myths of global capitalism. Routledge. 

Organizers: Coleman Allums, Matthew Harris | University of Georgia
Discussant: Paul Robbins | University of Wisconsin-Madison

Critical responses to positivism and scientism have proliferated across philosophy and the social sciences throughout the last half-century (Foucault, 1970; Haraway, 1988; Law, 2004; Feyerabend, 2010; St. Pierre, 2019). While Geography and other disciplines have at least partially absorbed these critiques (we might point, for example, to Katz, 1996; Massey, 2005; Ettlinger, 2014; Cockayne et al., 2017; or Allums, 2020), a closer reading reveals that now-conventional distinctions between qualitative and quantitative, activist and not, objective and subjective, or scientific and traditional/vernacular/embodied knowledges do not necessarily account for the more fundamental divisions between antagonistic approaches to inquiry. If research produces the phenomenon it purports to describe, positivism constrains what is produced and described in ways we can never fully grasp; in multiple registers, lingering or latent positivist assumptions underpinning geographic inquiry still structure researcher subjectivity, participants, data, and the field as stable entities while articulating the relationships between them. Positivism and scientism narrow the scope of what constitutes research—geographical, social, critical, or otherwise; they render analysis the only mode of inquiry capable of producing legitimate knowledge at the expense of other modes of engaging, questioning, connecting, interpreting, speculating, and living our world.    

With the foregoing in mind, we welcome papers that treat one or more of the following:

What are the limitations of positivist ways of knowing, and how do these particularly limit geographic inquiry? Limitations could reflect critiques of method, data, interviews, fieldwork, validity, coding, subjectivity, representation, language, knowledge, or critique itself.

What modes of inquiry or approaches to research do you employ to address the ethical, ontological, and/or epistemological constraints of positivist geographic research? Approaches could include postqualitative inquiry, thinking with concepts, problematics, social and minor theory, decolonial thought, Black geographies, speculative methods, or experimental forms.

How is critical geographical inquiry uniquely positioned to challenge or disrupt positivist or instrumental epistemic hegemonies within the academy and beyond?

Abstracts should be submitted to coleman.allums@uga.edu and mattharris@uga.edu by November 16th. Decisions will be communicated by November 18th so that participants can submit abstracts to AAG by the new November 19th deadline.

References 

Allums, C.A. (2020). Traces: Philosophy, interpretation, and method in postqualitative human geography. Professional Geographer, 72(1), 88-95.

Cockayne, D., Ruez, D. & Secor, A. (2017). Between ontology and representation: Locating Gilles Deleuze’s ‘difference-in-itself’ in and for geographical thought. Progress in Human Geography, 41(5), 580–99.

Ettlinger, N. (2014). Delivering on poststructural ontologies: Epistemological challenges and strategies. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 13(4), 589–98.

Feyerabend, P. (2010). Against Method. London: Verso.

Foucault, M. (1970). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. New York: Vintage Books.

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science questions in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14(3), 575–99.

Katz, C. (1996). Towards minor theory. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14(4), 487–99.

Law, J. (2004) After method: Mess in social science research. New York: Routledge.

Massey, D. (2005). For space. London: Sage.

St. Pierre, E. (2019). Post qualitative inquiry in an ontology of immanence. Qualitative Inquiry 25(1), 3–16.

The election of Donald Trump alongside the rise of explicitly nationalistic political movements across Europe has impelled critical scholars to reevaluate the contours and content of reactionary ideologies—including nativism, (neo)fascism, protectionism, and xenophobia—at multiple scales. A recent call for papers points to the importance of thinking through the spatiality of these movements, calling upon scholars to “consider the persistent and resurgent histories of right-wing populisms” (IJURR, 2018) as part of a broader investigation into the articulation of right-wing politics and urban space. 

This session takes up the challenge of theorizing reactionary politics in urban space. Within the broader theme suggested above, we are particularly interested in work that engages the banality (Arendt, 1963/2006) of the forces of reaction in the racialized metropolis. Urban events such as Charlottesville suggest a hyper-visible and self-aware white nationalist populism is on the rise—how do we make sense of (and contest) less explicit, though also violent, manifestations of fascism, nationalism, and other forms of reactionary politics in urban space? How do these articulate with other violent regimes that reproduce and operate within the urban? In what ways do they respond to, grow out of, or otherwise relate to material conditions engendered by neoliberal and austerity urbanism?

With the foregoing in mind, we welcome papers that speak to such diverse themes as:

• Neoliberal failure, austerity urbanism, and the politics of reaction
• Revanchism, redevelopment, and policing
• The politics and aesthetics of whiteness
• Affect and the politics of ressentiment
• Urban & global crises of racial capitalism
• Democracy, liberalism, and fascism
• Immigrant and refugee spaces in the reactionary city

Please send a brief abstract of your project to Coleman Allums (coleman.allums@uga.edu) and Scott Markley (scott.markley@uga.edu) by October 12th.

References
Arendt, H. (2006). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. New York: 
Penguin Books. (Original work published 1963)
IJURR (2018). Right-wing populisms and the city. Retrieved from http://www.ijurr.org/wp-
content/uploads/2018/01/CfP_Right-wing-populisms-and-the-city-2018.pdf

Last year’s presidential election breathed new life into—and shined new light onto—one of the more contentious and protracted themes to occupy left political praxis and theory in the last century: Race? Or class? Decades of critical scholarship tell us that this polarized construction fails both to explain the contemporary world and to produce emancipatory political possibilities to fundamentally change it (See, e.g., Hall 1980, Robinson, 2000, Roediger, 2017). Nevertheless, the power of this particular duality remains seductive.

As scholars of the urban—and especially as geographers—we are called to consider these thorny, interrelated problems as they mark and are marked by the urban landscape. Yet the constellation of issues which the race/class binary responds to, is produced with, or otherwise engages is made all the more difficult to contend against or otherwise resolve as the hegemonies of racial neoliberalism (Goldberg, 2009) and neoliberal urbanism (Brenner & Theodore, 2002) have ossified in recent decades.

With the foregoing in mind, this session aims to interrogate the interconnections between race and class, capitalism and white supremacy as they are manifest in metropolitan space in the era of (late) neoliberalism. Explicitly rejecting the race/class binary in favor of intersectional and synthetic analysis, while also welcoming the particular challenges and possibilities of theorizing race and class (and contesting interstitial injustice) under neoliberalism, we invite participants to speak to the following themes:

• Racial and class struggles over sub/urban space
• Racial neoliberalism and economic development
• Race/class dimensions of housing finance or policy
• Economic and racial inequality under (late) neoliberalism
• Suburbanization of poverty and racial diversity (or segregation)
• Spaces of concentrated poverty and bounded blackness
• Commodification of diversity

Participants should submit abstracts to Coleman Allums (coleman.allums@uga.edu), Scott Markley (scott.markley@uga.edu), and Taylor Hafley (taylor.hafley@uga.edu) by the 20th of October. Notification of acceptance will be communicated to participants by the 22nd, and participants must be fully registered by the 25th.

References

Brenner, N. and Theodore, N. 2002. Cities and the geographies of ‘actually existing neoliberalism.’ Antipode. 34(3):349-379.
Goldberg, D. T. 2009. The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Hall, S. 1980. Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance. In Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (1980), pp. 305-345.
Roediger, D. R. 2017. Class, Race, and Marxism. London: Verso.
Robinson, C. J. 2000. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press.

Suburban Geographies of Crisis and Change

The 2007–2008 subprime mortgage crisis brought widespread attention to the conditions of suburbs in the United States, triggering a proliferation of critical interventions from across disciplines. These interventions investigated issues such as the “suburbanization of poverty,” suburban redevelopment, and the suburban socioeconomic and demographic changes that transpired during the years leading up to the crisis. This work has contributed to a reassessment—in theory and praxis—of the ways in which scholars and activists engage with numerous social and economic questions, which, for a long period, were considered the exclusive domain of the urban.

Now a decade removed from the advent of what has been called the Great Recession, we are interested in the post-crisis developments that have begun to unfold on the political, social, economic, and racial/ethnic landscapes of US suburbs. This session seeks to reveal and untangle the interacting processes undergirding these recent developments. In doing so, it aims to lend insights into the changing—or in some cases, persistent or recurrent—character of the suburban patchwork.

Within this basic framework, we invite critical contributions that speak to the following themes:

• Suburbanization of poverty
• Suburban gentrification and redevelopment
• Cityhood and annexation
• Race and racialization
• Spatial inequality and mobility
• Neighborhood inequality and residential segregation
• Housing construction and demolition
• Suburban planning
• Local political governance and economic development
• Suburban neoliberalization and (sub)regional competition
• Education & community resources

Potential session participants should submit abstracts (250 words maximum) to Coleman Allums (coleman.allums@uga.edu) and Scott Markley (scott.markley@uga.edu) by October 17th, 2016. Notification of acceptance into the session will be provided by October 21st. Participants will then be expected to register and submit their abstracts through the AAG website by October 27th.