Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Stefan Norgaard, Columbia University

; Miranda Meyer, CUNY Graduate Center

Description:

CFP AAG 2022: Virtual Paper Session

TERRITORIALIZING MEMORY (2)

Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), New York, New York, February 25 – March 1, 2022

Session organizers:
Miranda Meyer, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY (mmeyer@gradcenter.cuny.edu)
Stefan Norgaard, Columbia University, New York, NY (spn2121@columbia.edu)

Sponsored by the Development Geographies, Political Geography, Socialist and Critical Geography, and Urban Geography Specialty Groups.

Description:
How does territory function as a memory practice? Though relational understandings of territory have advanced our understanding of its economic, military, sovereign, technical, and cartographic workings (Brighenti, 2006; Elden, 2013a, 2013b; Sack, 1986; Winichakul, 1997), its mnemonic dimensions have been “somewhat neglected” (Paasi, 2020: 79). We aim to bring together political geography’s relational perspective on territory and cultural geography’s literature on geographies of memory and memorialized landscapes (Alderman and Inwood, 2013; Barron, 2017; Duncan and Duncan, 2010; Foote, 2003). Territory supports a wide range of practices with clear memorial significance: it hosts imagined communities (including but not limited to the nation), undergirds sovereignty and identity narratives, enables or disables ecological relationships and affinities; it encompasses places and landscapes of mnemonic significance, and its acquisition or loss is commemorated. Constituting places as a given territory affects which pasts can be remembered, represented, and practiced by whom, and to what effect. The topic bears on the AAG Annual Meeting themes of climate justice, geographies of access and inclusion, ethnonationalism and exclusion around the world, and the changing North American continent. The proposed analytic of territory as a memory practice allows us to discuss modes of exclusion and differentiation alongside alternate solidarities, sovereignties, and territorializations, or more socially and ecologically just territorial memory practices.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda