It’s that time of year – the run-up to the American Association of Geographers conference, with a flurry of paper calls and session organizing. I’m really happy to announce something that Melissa Fernández and I have been cooking up as part of a larger collaboration that she kindly initiated with enormous energy.
The collaboration starts with the idea, one could say, of “de-exceptionalizing” the crisis. That is, if unilateral colonial administrative decisions —here, we started thinking about the fiscal control board the U.S. Congress imposed on Puerto Rico— are presented as exceptional measures to avert a “humanitarian” crisis, then what are the actually-existing, common contexts of such governmentalities? We focused a lot of our attention on how such crises function beyond the legal jargon that underpins them. What are the emotional sensibilities that transform the abstraction of calculable debts into something material — something present in people’s lives that they understand through crisis logics and not merely as an individualized effect?
Secondly, we also had many hours of discussion around the importance of crisis in urban transformations, and started to talk about many communal and artistic modes of resistance that took the urban condition as a right to fight for. However, the paper call is not strictly urban by any means and in fact, we hope to bring attention to many geographic contexts where crisis-modes transform, restrict and violate rights, belongings, and relations.
Last but not least, we also spent a lot of time talking about the circulation of notions of home/land; the transposition of home to diasporic contexts, given the migration of dispossessed subjects to find a base elsewhere… And the ways in which imaginations of home worked to manage labor discipline, political participation, moral obligations, gender norms, and acceptable identities in new wage contexts for crises exiles.
Anyway, the call explains best what we came up with…
Continue reading AAG 2017 CFP: Crisis-modes: logics, practices and re-articulations