CFP: Urban-environmental reconfigurations: making cities and citizens through neoliberal and environmental politics

Apologies for cross listing

Urban-environmental reconfigurations: making cities and citizens through neoliberal and environmental politics

Call for papers: Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Boston

April 15-18, 2008.

Organizers: James McCarthy, Penn State; Kevin Ramsey, University of Washington

Major urban reconfigurations are always crucibles of contemporary politics. In the current era, neoliberalism and environmentalism are among the most prominent political problematics evident in and contested through reworkings of urban spaces and polities. Moreover, they are often linked: for instance, previously dominant narratives such as environmental justice often cast urban residents as potential victims of environmental ills and the state as responsible for protecting them from (inequitable) harm, while more recent discourses are likely to cast residents, or entire communities, as agents with the moral capacity and responsibility to transform their own social and environmental conditions through voluntary actions. Similarly, the production of environmental amenities has become a significant feature of inter-urban competition in an era of devolved governance and competition. Such shifts raise questions about the proper role for the state in cultivating and privileging particular subjectivities, the differential capacity of residents for participating in such transformations, and the politics implicit in these cultural and environmental projects.

In this session, we invite participants to present work on urban reconfigurations that speak to these or related issues.

Potential paper topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Urban infrastructure and environment

• Community (re)development

• Urban environmental engineering

• Connections between urban and environmental politics and social movements

• The naturalization of urban politics

• Urban political ecologies

Expressions of interest and/or abstracts (250 words or less) should be sent to James McCarthy (jpm23@psu.edu) and Kevin Ramsey (kramsey@u.washington.edu)

by October 25, 2007.