CFP AAG Exhaustion, endurance and living on...

CFP: Exhaustion, endurance and living on…
 
Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, Washington DC, 03-07 April 2019
 
Session Organisers: Leila Dawney (University of Brighton) and Thomas Jellis (University of Oxford)
 
Recent critical literature focuses on the way in which we are ground down by barbarisms: by the biopolitical modes of abandonment that confound us and block us at every turn; by the snares of cruel optimism. These forms of late capitalist violence are described as slow and attritional (Nixon 2011; Baraitser 2017), wearing us down until we no longer have the capacity to imagine life otherwise. Or they debase us in addictive circuits that render us incapable of living on, where the human as it is currently formed has no capacity to thrive in a broken world  (Gumbs 2018). The experiential modes through which this kind of violence occurs has been predominantly theorised in terms of exhaustion. Indeed, exhaustion is something that is increasingly attracting attention within the humanities and social sciences (Berlant 2011; Povinelli 2011; Fisher 2014; Pelbart 2015; Schaffner 2016; Chabot 2018), as well as within geography (Brigstocke 2016; Wilkinson and Ortega-Alcazar, forthcoming).
 
All too often, the response to exhaustion is simply to endure. This mode of response weighs down on us heavily: endurance as ‘living on’, as world-making in the context of structural and slow violences, or as simply being resilient in the face of it all. While geographies of endurance and exhaustion make visible enervating forms of contemporary power, we posit that more needs to be done to articulate precisely what is meant by such categories and to shed critical light on the concepts themselves.
 
This session addresses these concerns through the following questions: What does it mean to posit endurance as the means through which to live on? What are the temporalities that inform spaces of exhaustion and endurance? And what moral subtexts are at work in their demands to tolerate, withstand or make the best of? In addition, what forms of critique refuse these totalising narratives, and what figures or forms can be put to work to counter them?
 
As such, we invite papers on questions around:

• Waiting, suspending or enduring time
• Historical geographies of  exhaustion and endurance
• Fatigue and atrophy
• Burnout, anxiety and late liberal life
• ‘Flat’ affects
• Theorising and/or resisting endurance (and resilience)
• On giving in, and letting die
• Neuroses, paranoias and critique in an age of exhaustion
• Exhausting postapocalyptic temporalities

Please send abstracts (250 words) and expressions of interest to L.Dawney@brighton.ac.uk and thomas.jellis@ouce.ox.ac.uk by 22nd October 2018.