{"id":606,"date":"2016-10-21T09:23:31","date_gmt":"2016-10-21T13:23:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/umdmuseumcert.wordpress.com\/?p=606"},"modified":"2016-10-21T09:23:31","modified_gmt":"2016-10-21T13:23:31","slug":"call-for-papers-american-association-of-geographers-panel-demographic-fantasies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/msmc.umd.edu\/index.php\/2016\/10\/21\/call-for-papers-american-association-of-geographers-panel-demographic-fantasies\/","title":{"rendered":"Call for Papers American Association of Geographers Panel- Demographic Fantasies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Call for papers: Demographic fantasies and fever dreams: taco trucks, lesbian farmers, burkini bans, and the basket of deplorables<\/a><\/h2>\n

American Association of\u00a0Geographers Conference 2017 Boston,\u00a0April 5-9<\/span><\/span><\/b><\/h2>\n

This panel is sponsored\u00a0by the Political Geography Specialty Group<\/p>\n

Following recent calls for critical and feminist human geographers to take demographic<\/span>change seriously (Robbins & Smith 2016), we are inviting submissions about the origins of\u00a0demographic<\/span> fever<\/span> dreams and fantasies.\u00a0<\/b>We\u2019re interested in the work that they do, the danger that they pose to building solidarity across difference, but also the potential for play and subversion that is embedded in their vivid specificity. Traditionally, critical human geography has overlooked or ignored demographic<\/span> change, and yet global demographic<\/span> shifts are animating and inspiring political movements worldwide. Often, these shifts are mobilized in political discourses through specific demographic<\/span>fantasies to instill anxiety and fear of perceived threats to the success of nations. These fantasies rely on normative ideas of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious difference, but also invent compelling narrative justifications for those ideas and a means for them to mutate and multiply.<\/div>\n
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In the 2016 US election cycle, for example, we have recently been privy to a deluge of\u00a0\u00a0<\/b>dreams and fantasies: a migration-engendered epidemic of \u201ctaco trucks on every corner,\u201d[1]<\/a>\u00a0an Obama-sponsored invasion of lesbian farmers to undermine red state agricultural strongholds,[2]<\/a>\u00a0and a \u201cbasket of deplorables\u201d containing half of all Trump voters. We describe these as fever<\/span> dreams and fantasies because of their\u00a0strikingly specific and dream-state<\/b>\u00a0features that leap from numerical measures and policy into a surreal and multivalent landscape of threat\u2026or delight.<\/div>\n
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As we consider the political purpose of these demographic<\/span> fantasies, the fears underlying them, and how the vivid imagery ties into fears of white masculine decline and panic, we wonder how we can unravel these oddly specific imaginaries. Beyond the US election, we also read an underlying element of demographic<\/span> fantasy in worries about the presence of burkinis on French beaches, attempts to ban \u201csharia law\u201d across the southern US and Europe, the rhetoric surrounding the Brexit, and numerous other global cases. In each of these instances, a vivid and fantastic fiction is used by figures with political power to amplify, imagine, and obscure demographic<\/span> patterns of migration, birth, or mortality to consolidate political power or to dismiss or undermine class tensions and create fictions communities of homogeneity.<\/div>\n
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While it is easy to be smugly dismissive of fears about an unlikely takeover by \u201cothers,\u201d here we hope to more carefully consider the content, deployment, and mechanisms of these vivid demographic<\/span> imaginaries of threat. In so doing, we hope to build on, but also disrupt and complicate theoretical explorations in feminist political geography, which evoke the embodied life of territory and borders and the political life of demography (among others, Baldwin 2012; Bialasiewicz 2006; Dixon and Marston 2011; Fluri 2014; Gilmartin and Kofman 2004; G\u00f6kar\u0131ksel and Smith 2016; Jones and Johnson 2016; Massaro and Williams 2013; Pain and Staeheli 2014; Roberts 1998; Robbins and Smith 2016; Silvey\u00a0 2005; Smith, Swanson, and G\u00f6kar\u0131ksel 2016; Smith and Vasudevan in progress).<\/div>\n
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We invite papers exploring demographic<\/span> fantasies through political speech, popular culture, government policy, or other venues, and engaging with questions such as the following (but not limited to these):<\/div>\n
\u2022\u00a0\u00a0 What political and cultural work do demographic<\/span> fantasies do, and how do they do it?<\/div>\n
\u2022\u00a0\u00a0 What role do gendered, sexualized, and racialized body politics play indemographic<\/span> fantasies?<\/div>\n
\u2022\u00a0\u00a0 What are effective responses to demographic<\/span> fantasies? What is the potential for play and subversion (e.g., the social media responses to taco trucks on every corner, and the \u201cbasket of adorables\u201d)?<\/div>\n
\u2022\u00a0\u00a0 How do demographic<\/span> fever<\/span> dreams travel across contexts and political lines?<\/div>\n
\u2022\u00a0\u00a0 How do demographic<\/span> fantasies explicitly or implicitly engage with temporal and metanarratives and geographic imaginaries (such as the dangerous and uncertain future, and porous borders)?<\/div>\n
\u2022\u00a0\u00a0 How might we respond to or understand the flights of demographic<\/span> fantasy that emerge from rumors, exaggerations, or denials of seemingly incontestable truths? Especially when drawing attention to the fallacy only fuels the fantasy?<\/div>\n
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Please send abstracts to Sara Smith (<\/b>shsmith1@email.unc.edu<\/b><\/a>),Banu G\u00f6kar\u0131ksel (<\/b>banug@email.unc.edu<\/b><\/a>) Chris Neubert (<\/b>neubertc@live.unc.edu<\/b><\/a>), by October 17th, 2016.<\/b><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Call for papers: Demographic fantasies and fever dreams: taco trucks, lesbian farmers, burkini bans, and the basket of deplorables American Association of\u00a0Geographers Conference 2017 Boston,\u00a0April 5-9 This panel is sponsored\u00a0by the Political Geography Specialty Group Following recent calls for critical and feminist human geographers to take demographicchange seriously (Robbins & Smith 2016), we are inviting … Continue reading Call for Papers American Association of Geographers Panel- Demographic Fantasies<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,9,1],"tags":[20],"class_list":["post-606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-event","category-professional-development","category-uncategorized","tag-conferences"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/msmc.umd.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/msmc.umd.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/msmc.umd.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/msmc.umd.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/msmc.umd.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/msmc.umd.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/msmc.umd.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/msmc.umd.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/msmc.umd.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}