Critical Geographies of Corruption

This CFP may be of interest to members of this group. Apologies for
cross-posting.

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Session Title: Critical Geographies of "Corruption" and "Accountability"
in Millennial Capitalism @ the Association of American Geographers
Annual Meeting, Tampa, FL April 8-12, 2014

Session Organizers: Sapana Doshi, School of Geography and Development,
University of Arizona, Tucson and Malini Ranganathan, School of Int'l
Service, American University, Washington, DC

Corruption is often thought of as "the elephant in the room"; it is both
"everywhere and nowhere" (Haller and Shore, 2005). Narratives of
corruption represent a key idiom of social discontent. For instance, in
the US, the financial crisis has generated a new cultural economy of
discontent indicting predatory bankers as agents of what Cornel West
(2010) has called "gangster capitalism". Meanwhile, anti-corruption
movements in India congeal vastly different interests, from displaced
farmers and slum residents protesting state brokered land grabs, to
urban elite and middle classes claiming new privileged terrains of
citizenship. In the July 2013 protests in Brazilian cities, corruption
talk served to voice both working class discontent and conservative
opposition of more progressive social programs.

Because corruption is constructed as so "endemic", anti-corruption
programs by development agencies have served to justify neoliberal
efforts to cut back public spending around the world via "good
governance" and accountability/transparency reforms. In postcolonial
contexts, in particular, agencies use corruption as a gloss to describe
barriers to effective development and humanitarian aid, thus eliding the
historical constitution and social functions that patronage, bribery,
and other practices serve.

Despite the ethico-political implications and moral sway of corruption
talk, the topic is virtually untouched in political and cultural
geography scholarship. This session starts with the premise that
corruption is not merely a bureaucratic domain, but more fundamentally,
serves as a "diagnostic of citizenship" (Gupta, 2012) with varying
consequences. We seek creative papers that theorize corruption and
accountability from a critical perspective.

We welcome papers addressing a variety of regional contexts. Examples of
topics include:

1)    Elite, middle class and subaltern social movements for
accountability and transparency

2)    Discursive mappings of "corruption" and "morality" on to
particularly classed, gendered, and racialized bodies

3)    New and old geographical imaginaries of corrupt spaces ("third
world", cities, bureaucracies)

4)    The politics of anti-corruption and accountability reforms in
urban governance/governmentality

5)    The affective dimensions of corruption and accountability

Please send abstracts to either Sapana Doshi (sdoshi@email.arizona.edu
<mailto:sdoshi@email.arizona.edu>) or Malini Ranganathan
(malini@american.edu <mailto:malini@american.edu>) by November 15th 2013.

--
Malini Ranganathan
Assistant Professor
Global Environmental Politics Program
School of International Service, Rm 301
4400 Massachusetts Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20016

202.885.6901
http://www.american.edu/sis/faculty/malini.cfm
http://maliniranga.com