Bases, Bunkers, and Ports: Shifting Geographies of Militarization
[please circulate widely!] AAG 2015 CFP:
Bases, Bunkers, and Ports: Shifting Geographies of Militarization
In her article, “Making War at Home in the United States,” Catherine Lutz defines the term "militarization" as "the simultaneously material and discursive nature of military dominance" (Lutz 2002). She further argues that militarization describes a tense process through which societies organize the production of violence. Yet rather than straight-forward or uncontested, as the exercise of military power is often depicted, this process is often contradictory, unstable, and actively challenged.
As events in Ferguson, Missouri, during the past year demonstrated, painfully, militarization is also “intrinsic to the political and economic operations of modern nation-states” (Kaplan 2011). Ongoing forms of surveillance and the securitization of ports, urban spaces, and other sites/sights in the U.S. and throughout the world reveal further instances of the militarized foundations of everyday life. Upon closer scrutiny, projections of security against abstract, foreign enemies elsewhere often turn out to be precisely focused on up-close dissent. Furthermore, the militarization of information (biometrics, big data, and such) constitutes another way in which everyday life is increasingly structured by (while also structuring) projects of “security”. These emergent geographies of militarization and their histories call for sustained scholarly investigation.
This paper session seeks to bring together innovative scholarship on contemporary forms of militarization, at the material and discursive registers, and which foreground, analytically, the spatialities of securitization, surveillance, and violence. In particular, we hope to develop, as analytical lenses, several key spatial nodes in the process of militarization and the production of violence; thus: bases, bunkers and ports. Far from fixed categories or easily controlled spaces, we provisionally theorize “bases, bunkers, and ports” as dense sites through which militarization — as a contested process— takes material shape.
In addition to more traditional scholarly methods and analysis, the paper session also seeks artists, activists, journalists, and authors; modes of art, research, and creative critique which, along with the discipline of geography, has worked to expose the everydayness of militaritarization. Along these lines, this session encourages scholarship that examines aesthetics, visuality, and in particular, contestations of militarization. For example, what representations have “bases, bunkers, and ports” elicited and what sorts of temporal ruptures, countermeasures, or social transformations do they propose?
Possible paper topics for this session include:
- The spatialities of new surveillance technologies (e.g. data servers, fusion centers, air/space/coastal port surveillance, etc.)
- Race, biometrics, and “digital epidermalization” (Browne 2010)
- The militarization of U.S. law enforcement, and biopolitics of cities
- Geographies of detention, incarceration, migration, and rights
- Militarized environments, toxic cleanup sites, and the “weaponization of nature” (Hamblin 2013)
- Military humanitarianism, human terrain systems, and the role of academia in military knowledge and optics
- Modes of representing and visualizing militarization in art and literature
- Visual cultures of militarization; scopic regimes and visibility/visuality under militarization
- Spaces of (il-)legality, protests, and gazes of security
- Cartographic or counter-cartographic practices
- Monuments and military memorialization; the spatial politics of memory and forgetting
Note: This paper session takes place in conjunction with a speaker series on militarization through the American Studies Program and the Militarization Studies Group at UC Davis in the Spring Quarter of 2014. We are particularly interested in working with scholars hoping to develop their paper as a journal article or book, as part of a collected, broader publication on these themes.
Please email an abstract and short (2-page CV) to Javier Arbona ([email protected]) and Lindsey Dillon ([email protected]) by Friday, October 10th (the deadline for AAG abstracts is November 10th). Thank you!
Please email an abstract and short (2-page CV) to Javier Arbona ([email protected]) and Lindsey Dillon ([email protected]) by Friday, October 10th (the deadline for AAG abstracts is November 10th). Thank you!
Browne, Simone. "Digital epidermalization: race, identity and biometrics."Critical Sociology 36, no. 1 (2010): 131-150.
Hamblin, Jacob Darwin. Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism. Oxford University Press, 2013.
Kaplan, Caren. "The Balloon Prospect: Aerostatic Observation and the Emergence of Militarized Aeromobility." In From Above: War, Violence, and Verticality. Adey, Peter, Mark Whitehead, and Alison Williams, eds. London: Hurst, 2013: 19-40.
Lutz, Catherine. “Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis.” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (September 1, 2002): 723–35.
