Call for papers: AAG 2012, New York City, February 24-28, 2012

http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting

Border Matters!

Organizer: J.J. Zhang (Durham University)

There has been an understanding of borders as static, unmoving, and fixed – something that people have to work around rather than something that is reproduced by them. This often statist and static nature of the border has received much scrutiny of late as it has become increasingly difficult of such a concept to capture the dynamics of societal transformations. The spatiality of the term and the infinite ways in which this space can be theorised call for a more critical interrogation. The ubiquitous border certainly does not exist only in its real form; imagined and perceived borders are equally important. As such, there is a need to deal with happenings on the ground, a need for a more grounded approach on bordering practices and performance, a need to ask the ontological question of ‘who does the bordering?’ This session attempts to capture some of the on-going effort to re-theorise the ‘border’. We are particularly interested in explorations of ‘border’ through the lens of materiality and identity. We invite papers that deal with, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Theoretical interrogation of ‘border’
• Materiality and identity at/across the border
• The political and/or social life of things associated with concepts of ‘border’
• The ‘corporeal turn’ in the theorisation of ‘border’
• A re-conceptualisation of ‘border’ in the everyday lives of ordinary people
• Mobility and the politics of border crossing
• The state and beyond in (cross-)border analysis
• Border economy: consumption practices and identity construction (both national and self)

Please email abstracts to J.J. Zhang <jiajie.zhang@durham.ac.uk> by 9 September 2011.