AAG 2013: UPRISING GEOGRAPHIES DOUBLE SESSION
Protest Camp Research Network member Adam Ramadan along with colleague Sara Fregonese are running a double session at the Association of American Geographers Conference on ‘Uprising Geographies’ in Los Angeles on April 11, 2013 in the San Bernardino of the Westin Hotel. The line-up features Research Network members Anna Feigenbaum, Fabian Frenzel and Sam Halvorsen.
If Terror was central to popular and official understandings of security in the past decade, might Uprising be key to urban, national, and global geographies of security in the current one?
Since the end of 2010, the uprisings of the ‘Arab Spring’, the anti-austerity protests across Europe, occupations and encampments in global cities, and the Summer 2011 riots in London, suggest a new political moment of mass disaffection and disobedience. Beyond the specificities of individual events, uprisings worldwide have demonstrated the presence of shared concerns about social justice, human rights, and democracy for transnational geographies of solidarity and organised resistance.
In response, discourses and practices of state and urban security are shifting from the spectre of major terrorist attacks to managing popular disobedience and policing its spaces. As uprisings create new tactics and practices of territoriality, states reassert their sovereignty through new arrangements of policing and securitisation. From Cairo and Homs to Athens, Madrid, and New York, we have seen strong and often violent collisions between resistance movements and state security.
Cities constitute physical and symbolic terrains for socio-political change. If 2011 has seen the inception and revival of geographies of mass protest and resistance in cities all around the Mediterranean, 2012 sees the continuity and spreading of these practices (and responses) to urban spaces worldwide. How are these collisions reshaping the political geographies of communities experiencing uprising? What are the likely scenarios, the spaces, practices, and performances emerging from the uprisings?
Session 1
Chair(s):
Adam Ramadan
12:40 PM Author(s): *Jared Van Ramshorst – San Diego State University – Abstract Title: Networks of Emotion: Understanding Spaces of Emerging Social Movements
1:00 PM Author(s): *Sam Halvorsen, University College Longon – Abstract Title: Subverting Space: Territorial Practices and the Occupy Movement
1:20 PM Author(s): *Anna Feigenbaum – Rutgers University & Bournemouth University, *Fabian Frenzel – University of Potsdam, Patrick McCurdy, Dr. – Ottawa University – Abstract Title: Speaking of Occupy: Place, politics and communication in protest camps
1:40 PM Author(s): *Irene Molina – Institute for Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala University – Abstract Title: Militarization and Uprisings in Post-welfare Swedish Suburbs
2:00 PM Discussant: John Agnew – University of California – Los Angeles
Session 2
Chair(s):
Sara Fregonese – Royal Holloway University of London
2:40 PM Author(s): *Adam Ramadan – University of Birmingham – Abstract Title: Uprising and the Camp: the Palestinian revolution in Lebanon
3:00 PM Author(s): *Jonathan Rokem – Ben-Gurion University of Negev
Marco Allegra, Dr. – CIES – University of Lisbon, Irene Bono, Dr. – Università degli Studi di Torino – Abstract Title: Rethinking Cities through Protest – The Arab Spring and the Mobilization of Urban Dissent
3:20 PM Author(s): *Elisa Pascucci – University of Sussex – Abstract Title: Aid, Security and Neoliberal Urbanism in Cairo: spatial practices of containment after the Mustapha Mahmoud protest, 2005.
3:40 PM Author(s): *Sara Fregonese – University of Oxford – Abstract Title: Mediterranean uprisings: towards a hybrid geography of sovereignty
4:00 PM Discussant: John Agnew – University of California – Los Angeles