[URBANTH-L]CFP AAG: Spatializing "Camps:" Lived Experiences and Built Environments of Confinement

[Alessandro Angelini]

please excuse the cross-listing...

Call for Papers
Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting,
Washington DC April 14-18, 2010**

*Session: Spatializing “Camps:” Lived Experiences and Built Environments of
Confinement*

Over the past two decades there has been a resurgence of interest in refugee
camps, asylum and detention centers and other spaces in which people are
confined. Many academic working on such sites have described them as
“non-places,” “states of exception” and “camp-villes” revealing the peculiar
juridico-political conditions of such sites and defining the subjugation of
its inhabitants. However, refugee and internment camps, detention centers
and other such sites are not only proliferating but many have also aged over
the past half century.  These sites are becoming increasingly complex as
their spatial logics have expanded and evolved. The evolution of the built
environment in camps and the development of networks of such spaces indicate
the subtle but important ways in which those that occupy these sites
exercise agency and political will.

 This panel aims to analyze the spaces of containment themselves. We seek
papers that attempt to unsettle some of the commonly held ideas about these
“spaces of exception” through a careful investigation of their built
environments. Among the questions that could be raised are: how, for
example, do people build and live in such spaces and what impact does that
have on their subjectivity? How do the construction, destruction, and
appropriation of emergency shelter/internment housing and structures of
confinement affect the subjectivity of those who are confined to these
spaces and those who confine them? How does an analysis of the materiality
and spatiality of these sites unsettle our ideas of agency and resistance?
How could such spaces possibly provide new insights into the processes of
urbanization?

To present a paper please submit an abstract following the AAG guidelines *by
October 10, 2009* and send it to Romola Sanyal: romi_s at berkeley.edu or
Lynne Horiuchi: horiuchi at berkeley.edu