CALL FOR PAPERS: 2015 Association of American Geographers - Chicago Meeting

Call for Papers:  Association of American Geographers 2015 

Session(s) Title: Governing From Below: The Power of Social Movements in Altering Urban Governance

Organizers: Pierson Nettling, Concordia University & Akira Drake Rodriguez, Virginia Commonwealth University

Urban and social moments have long influenced, challenged and altered the urban politics and policies of the city and state, problematizing the dominant heterodox understanding of urban governance within urban entrepreneurialism (see Harvey, 1989) and its critique of the elite-driven city politics of urban regimes (see Stone, 1989; Molotch, 1976; Logan & Molotch, 1987). In contrastto these top-down conceptions, urban historical accounts demonstrate how people at the everyday are shown to have agency and power in altering urban policy or contesting and transforming urban governance from below at the local, national and global scales in confronting the politics of race, class, or gender (Sugrue, 1996; Lang, 2009;Williams, 2004). How these movements are formed and expressed in relation to world-historical processes and urban governance must be addressed.

This panel will examine the many processes and outcomes of how organizing from below has sought to challenge oralter urban policy and governance structures within the past through historical research and within the present through current labor, environmental, or housing struggles at the city, national and global scales. In particular, this panel will focus on the internal politics of organizing marginalized ethnic and racial groups in challenging urban governance. In connecting with the current times and these particulargeographies of resistance, we seek to understand how governing from below is possible within neoliberal urban governance structures that increasingly exclude people and discourages engagement.

We are interested in papers from all disciplines, both historical and contemporary accounts, which examinebottom-up movements to alter urban governance and policy.  We are particularly interested in papers that examine both the outcomes of these movements, as well asthe internal politics and power relations within these movements.    

Additional topics of interest may include:

-Responses to and from public sector unions

-Responses to wage inequality and increasing costs of living

-Responses to police brutality

-Social media and citizen participation

-Charter schools and education disparities

-Urban development and “affordable” housing

Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words to Pierce Nettling (pcnettling@gmail.com) and Akira Drake Rodriguez (akira.drake@gmail.com) by Friday, October 17.  If submission is accepted, finalized abstracts with registration PINS are due by Monday, November 10.  

References

Harvey, David (1989) From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the transformation in urban governance in late capitalism. Geografiska Annaler. Series B. Human Geography, 71(1), 3-17.

Lang, Clarence (2009) Grassroots at the Gateway: class politics and Black Freedom struggle in St. Louis, 1936-75. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Logan, John & Molotch, Harvey (1987) Urban fortunes: the political economy of place. Berkeley and Los Angeles:University of California Press.

Molotch, Harvey (1976) The city as a growth machine: toward a political economy of place. American Journal of Sociology, 82(2), 309-332.

Sugrue, Thomas J. (1996) The origins of the urban crisis: race and inequality in postwar Detroit. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Stone, Clarence N. (1989) Regime politics: governing Atlanta, 1946-1988. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Williams, Rhonda Y. (2004) The politics of public housing: black women’s struggles against urban inequality. New York: Oxford University Press.