• Paper Session of the CPG at the IGU Regional Conference
15 Gennaio 2014
The Political Geographies of Camps
Convenors: Irit Katz and James D Sidaway
Discussant Claudio Minca
IGU-CPG, Krakow, 18-22 August 2014
Camps have proliferated. Formal and informal camps constructed for/by refugees, undocumented migrants, asylum seekers and Roma/Travellers, appear in Europe. Tens of thousands live in camps in Africa and Asia. Elsewhere; in Oceania and the Caribbean migrants and detainees of the ‘war on terror’ are held in camps.
Camps create multifaceted geographies of displacement and movement, asylum and refuge. Although camps are frequently created as emergency spaces for the control and management of people, they often become sites of suspended temporariness, a continuing state of exception.
Following the reflections opened by the Political Geography lecture at IGU2014 by Claudio Minca and the interventions of Franco Farinelli and Vladimir Kolossov in the special session “Camps. Geographies of the Sovereign Exception” (co-organized by the IGU-Commission on Political Geography and the journal Political Geography), this session will explore the varied aspects of camps and examine them from different angles; their global political roles, their spatial vocabulary and materiality, the ways they are created, governed and function as spaces of everyday life, and the new forms of politics and political subjects that emerge in them. Case studies and other papers that develop perspectives for comparative research and critical thinking on these varied political geographies of camps will be welcome in this session.
Please send abstracts (max. 250 characters in the title incl. spaces and max. 500 words in the abstract text) through the on-line registration system by ***27th January 2014***
The session will follow special session “Camps. Geographies of the Sovereign Exception” – Claudio Minca and interventions of Franco Farinelli and Vladimir Kolossov (co-organized by the IGU Commission on Political Geography and the journal Political Geography).
