Call for Papers: Annual Meeting of the AAG (Los Angeles, April 9 – 13, 2013)
Post-colonial Urbanisms: African Connections and Innovations
Across many disciplines, increasing attention is being paid to the notion of urbanisms. This move situates classic, ongoing geographic interests in the materiality and social reproduction of cities and towns within a domain that emphasizes questions of political agency, social cohesion and marginality, and the changing forms, scales, and capacities of governance. While post-colonial urbanisms vary greatly, many are informed today by new appropriations of development discourses, new migrations and settlements, diverging social imaginaries, sharpened inequalities, and complex, uneven interactions
with technology.
By focusing on African urbanisms, we wish to draw attention to processes that characterize the contemporary social, political and economic moment in Africa, and the Global South more generally. We hope to explore the disciplinary and creative capacities of urban planning and policy in managing local exigencies and risks before the global gaze. We also hope to look beyond teleologies of poverty and the ‘slum’ that view urban residents as objects in need of control, intervention or improvement by officials and experts.
We seek empirical and comparative accounts that focus on African connections and African innovations that draw from particular urban
locales, but may also extend far beyond them:
Policy mobilities linking African urbanisms with other post-colonial urbanisms
Innovative informalities and the planning endeavors that seek to govern, enroll or disperse them, such as ‘slum’ clearances and villagization programs
Negotiations of belonging by migrants and strangers in the city
Challenges in the rescaling of urban governance, such as experiments in multi-sector collaboration and tensions between or within bureaucracies
Everyday social and ecological practices that produce, transform, or destroy space
Appropriations of partially implemented or abandoned urban plans
Displacement at a variety of scales—within rural camps and informal settlements and from sub-national regions to new settlements in diaspora
Precarity and new regimes of violence that mobilize flexible labor and produce social dis/order
Participation within, and contestation of, city visioning processes
New mobilities, services and networks that reshape relations of rural with urban, and locale with continent
Abstracts and conference registration numbers due October 1, 2012 to the Session Organizers:
Jesse McClelland, PhD Student, University of Washington Geography (jmcclell@uw.edu)
Léonie Newhouse, PhD Candidate, University of Washington Geography (leonien@uw.edu)
For general information on the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers:
www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting