Race and Space: The Materiality of Difference

Call For Papers: Association of American Geographers, annual meeting:
April 12-16, 2011, Seattle, WA

Race and Space: The Materiality of Difference

Co-organizers: Rachel Brahinsky (UC Berkeley Geography) and Kate
Derickson (University of Glasgow)

This session seeks to put scholars in conversation who are drawing out
the vitally important connections between racialization and the
production of space. We’re interested in these processes from a
theoretical perspective – but even more so because of the way they
play out in people’s everyday lives. Thus for this session, we are
particularly interested in papers that tease out the materiality of
space-race relationships. How do racial constructions connect to
spatial ones and vice versa – and why does it matter? If “race” makes
spaces, or if racialization occurs in and through space, then how are
these processes sedimented and resisted in everyday life?

This call for papers is devised in the spirit of drawing connections
between class- and capital-centered literatures on the production of
space and critical race literatures that aim to destabilize “race.”
This session therefore seeks both to extend the body of race-space
literature that is emergent in Geography and to open new pathways of
research and analysis, perhaps using interdisciplinary methodologies
to tease out how race and class (and other stratifications) interact
with space. Local, regional, national, and global studies are all
encouraged.

We invite scholars from across disciplines to submit abstracts that
may include (but aren’t limited to):

• Intersections of racialization with gender, class, or religion
– and space
• The ways in which financial crises are borne out through both
spatial and racialized patterns
• Ideologies and spatialities of Whiteness
• How race-space relationships play out in cities, rural spaces
or in “nature”
• Spatialities of post-racial thinking
• Race and space, post-9/11 – or in the context of the Obama presidency
• Urban (re)developments of the past and future
• Ethnographies of racialized space
• Genealogies of race-space research in the discipline
• Race and nature, in its various formulations
• Approaches for developing social justice praxis in this vein of thinking