Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG)
Washington DC, 14-18 April 2010
Sponsored by the Economic Geography Specialty Group and the Socialist/Critical Geography Specialty Group

Co-organized by Laurel Mei Turbin, Steve McFarland, Francesca Manning, and Jesse Goldstein (CUNY Graduate Center, NYC)

Possibility of Multiple Sessions, Panel and Paper

We have recently lost an important thinker, Giovanni Arrighi, whose legacy lives on in innumerable works that continue to vitally influence the fields of economic, political, and critical geography. This panel seeks to pay tribute to Arrighi through an engagement with those dimensions of radical political economy most indebted to his work. The importance of such work is paramount in this historical moment, where we find ourselves in need of a deep understanding of capital's crises in order to make sense of this juncture and move forward from it.

Capital is at present mired in a militarized financial crisis that threatens the very reproducibility of its long term cycles of creative destruction, and which seems poised to irrevocably transform the uneven geography of the 21st century. We seek papers that attempt a critical analysis of capitalism with emphasis on its long and medium term transformations. Questions of crisis theory will be considered, as well as studies which explore the changing roles of specific elements in capitalist society over the last several or several hundred years of capitalist development (for instance, land, real estate, employment, uprisings, state or government intervention, class struggle).

Papers might focus on issues such as,
• financialization
• productivity and profit rates
• oscillations between "economic freedom" and "economic regulation" and between "intensive" and "extensive" development
• signal crises and terminal crises
• prospects (or lack thereof) for a new systemic cycle of accumulation, e.g., the rise of new hegemons

Session organizers seek to incorporate into our discussion the perspectives of women, people of color, and others addressing issues of crisis from subjugated viewpoints, as well as scholars incorporating feminist and third world geographical frameworks to strengthen a historical understanding and critique of capitalism, in its necessary co-constitution with historical manifestations of race, gender, sexuality. We encourage such scholars to submit their work (though do not intend to limit submissions in this way).

We have left this call for papers intentionally broad, in recognition of the far reaching influence that Arrighi’s work has had in many fields of critical geography. We welcome any and all papers whose ongoing interrogation of capital’s dynamics serve as a tribute to this important thinker.

Please send 250 word abstracts to fmanning (at) gc.cuny.edu by October 20.
Info on submitting to AAG: http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/2010/papers.htm