African Geographical Review – Special Issue Call for Papers
Out of Place, Into Extremis:
Critical Geographic Perspectives on the State of Forced Migration in Africa
Guest Editors: Kevin M. DeJesus, Rhode Island College and Daisuke Maruyama, Kyoto University
This special issue of African Geographical Review seeks to provide a comprehensive, contemporary compendium of perspectives on forced migration across the African continent. This initiative draws from critical geographical analytical frameworks to elucidate the experiences, dilemmas, trends and interventions in the experience of internally displaced persons, refugees and refugee returnees from every sector of the continent. This special issue is conceived of as an analytical and empirical resource for which those scholars across disciplines, refugee advocates and humanitarian professionals may utilize to further apprehend the great complexities of the human geographies of survival forcibly displaced persons engender in their quest to locate spaces of refuge. Indeed, as Feminist Critical Geographer Jennifer Hyndman noted so presciently over a decade ago, the very acts of mobility/immobility, border crossings and the pursuit of humanitarian supports amidst grave circumstances, is both immensely spatialized and politicized.[1]
Displaced persons endure complex ecological, political, sociological and material factors which shape the making of new geographies of everyday life amidst often dreadful conditions. This special issue intends to center geographic thought and analysis in the critical assessment of policy and practice concerning refugee and IDP policy-making, humanitarian intervention, contexts of contested borders of selves and nations, local reception and the challenges of return and reintegration. The geographies of return and so-called reintegration encompass profoundly vital questions and problematics, across scales, whereas making place upon returning to a home perhaps only known long ago, if ever, often engenders new dislocations. The spectrum of the experiences of flight to return are inherently, dynamically and vitally geographical, and therefore, it is the goal of this special issue to comprehensively consider this wide range of human experiences and processes that displaced persons often creatively contend with in the face of sharply-scaled social, economic and political barriers, borders and bureaucracies.
Papers concerning the following themes, and those others related to the critical geographies of forced migration on the continent are welcome. Particularly, scholars from the continent are encouraged to participate in this project.
-Scaling injustice: Critiques of country-specific refugee and IDP policy approaches/macro-level critiques of global refugee regimes, aid to refugees/IDPs in Africa;
-Paradoxes, Problematics and Purpose in the Production of Humanitarian Space: Critical approaches to refugee and IDP encampment as a spatial strategy of humanitarian management and the role of the nation-state;
-National citizens and Pan-African Approaches: Forced migration and the role of national borders in forcibly transnational lives amidst a quest for unified policy (i.e. 2009 African Union Convention on Internally Displaced Persons);
-Protecting Self and Place: Transit refugees, geographies of resources, and resistance to forced re-location;
-Making sacred space: The role of religion, the religio-political and religiously inspired actors in humanitarian aid provision and social-psychological needs in extremis;
-Livelihoods and Local Resources: Ecological change and resource development/destruction: innovations in policy and practice
-Spatial analysis, crisis mapping, and human rights of the displaced: Reflections on Africa
-Spaces of change: Cultural anomie, coping and emergent social practices in everyday spaces of living refuge (i.e. refugee/IDP encampment and shifts in dowry practices);
-Re-inventing home: Spaces of the family and the experience of flight, long-term displacement and re-location;
-Spatializing social structure and communities dislocated: Social organization and re-organization in emergency and long-term spaces of refuge;
-The experience of displacement and how gender works: Women and men in the meeting of everyday material and social needs amidst shifting contexts of place;
-Spatial organization of social spaces of refuge: Re-conceiving of refugee encampment and the humanitarian spatial imagination
-Urban and Rural Spaces of Refuge: Critical mappings of urban and rural implacement of displaced persons, macro-urban refugee policy, informal spaces of refuge and localizing community solidarity and proximity, urban and rural livelihood resources.
Key Project Details: Please send your abstract of 250 words, by October 30, 2013, with the subject line: “AGR Special Issue” to: kevinm.dejesus@gmail.com
Selected manuscripts are due by January 3, 2014
For authors guidelines, please see here:
[1]Hyndman, J. (2000). Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Far from creating a borderless world, contemporary globalization has generated a proliferation of borders. In Border as Method, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson chart this proliferation, investigating its implications for migratory movements, capitalist transformations, and political life. They explore the atmospheric violence that surrounds borderlands and border struggles across various geographical scales, illustrating their theoretical arguments with illuminating case studies drawn from Europe, Asia, the Pacific, the Americas, and elsewhere. Mezzadra and Neilson approach the border not only as a research object but also as an epistemic framework. Their use of the border as method enables new perspectives on the crisis and transformations of the nation-state, as well as powerful reassessments of political concepts such as citizenship and sovereignty.
