subconference

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Thanks to everyone who participated in the subconference this year - and thanks to the AAG resistance table! Below are some of the ways people are resisting...

[subconference]

Come out for the subconference workshop on Saturday, April 8th from 12-4pm in room Beacon A in the Sheraton in Boston. Please register online, or just drop by. Below is a brief description of what we've proposed to discuss and work on.

Subconference Workshop (W4_2): Studying, sharing, and cultivating tactics and strategies for collective thought and action (Beacon A, Sheraton)

This workshop will pursue what Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, and others have simply named “study”—a mode of thinking together and embedding ourselves with and for others, huddled against the atomizing forces of institution and profession. Participants will share and create methods for collective thought and action “in but not of” the spaces we often find ourselves in—classrooms, meetings, professional conferences, etc.—precisely in the interests of making the activities that go on in those spaces a critical resource for the kinds of research, scholarly praxis, and transformative collective action that seem urgently necessary at the present historical moment.

Specifically, we would like to frame this in terms of a series of overlapping questions. All of us in attendance presumably made a choice--though perhaps not under conditions of our own choosing--to come to the AAG meeting this year despite wide calls for a boycott due to the Trump administration’s travel ban. We might begin thinking seriously about our own collective potential and our limitations by addressing this fact directly. What actions can we imagine taking together in the present historical and political moment now that we are coming together at the AAG conference under these conditions? In the face of mounting overlapping economic, institutional, ecological, and humanitarian crises unfolding at many scales--including of course in the often fraught spaces between our own personal and political commitments and our professional lives--what can we imagine doing at and through our different locations in and beyond the academy? What strategies and tactics have we already tried or thought about, and what broader forms of collective action and organizing can we imagine together? What kinds of overarching agendas or platforms might we imagine developing or plugging into to achieve something greater than the sum of our fragmented parts?    

The workshop will involve two parts. The first (12-2pm) will focus on addressing these questions and reflecting on the responses to the survey about tactics (described below) in a process of collective study. The second half (approximately 2-4pm) will involve a strategy session - thinking together about how we might engage in collective action, build communities of support, and share resources. If you cannot attend the entire workshop, consider joining us for at least one part. In order to start the conversation and build a set of tactics/strategies, we are asking participants - and those that cannot attend the workshop - to fill out the following survey about recent tactics of reworking, resilience, refusal, and/or resistance you have utilized/taken part in within, against, and/or beyond the university in the context of the current historical-political moment. You can access the brief survey at: https://goo.gl/forms/yKs7UVJXIF5jHDK53.

Even if you're unable to attend the workshop or are not going to the AAG at all, we'd encourage you to fill out the following brief survey. 

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AAG 2017 Subconference Guide

This year's subconference guide to radical and social justice oriented AAG sessions and related events is now available at https://tinyurl.com/aag2017. If you have items to add, please leave a comment on our Facebook page.

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FYI: Dear Colleagues.

We're pleased to announce the 1st Annual AAG ACME Protest - 'Geographers Against Trump' - April, 7th, 4:00pm, Copley Square, Boston.

Had enough of Donald Trump? In the early days since his inauguration, the 45th President of the United States has dealt a series of major blows to our collective wellbeing and the future of the planet. The movement to fight against the renewed spirit of racism, sexism, and Islamophobia that has arisen under Trump has already begun. The challenges we are facing are decidedly geographical in nature from travel bans to health care cuts, pipelines to deportations, nuclear weapons proliferation to tax breaks for the rich, and border walls to climate change denial. Geographers are accordingly well positioned to push back, offer our support to targeted groups, and stand in solidarity against Trump's disastrous worldview.

On April 7th, at 4:00pm we will gather at Copley Square in Boston to protest (https://goo.gl/maps/ot4Pi1ZVjYw). We invite you to come out with us and take a stand against Trump. Come with a placard and bring a friend... in fact, bring all of them! Members of the ACME Collective will be there to chat and chant, rabble and rouse, but we will NOT be there to lead. Why ACME then? Well, the point at which we can be most successful and reach our zenith is when all of our voices come together. That IS the ACME and so we are ALL the ACME!

ACME will further seek to offer a published outlet for our collective voices afterwards in the pages of our journal (http://acme-journal.org). We are asking that whoever shows up and feels inclined to protest to write a brief 150 to 250 words about why they participated. This document will stand as a record of our disgust for Trump's policies and actions, but also crucially as a testament of our commitment to each other. All of us. In all our beautiful plurality. The compiled responses will thus serve as a collective musing against Trump and about why we as geographers should be concerned, and perhaps what we can or should do in these difficult times. Statements will not be attributed to individuals, but rather anonymously to 'The ACME Resistance' as a whole.

Please join us. Share this announcement. Show up. Through the act of protest ACME becomes more than a journal. We leap off of the page, out of the screen, and into the world as an expression of both outrage for the present moment of struggle and hope for better times ahead.

Sarah de Leeuw, PhD | Associate Professor, Northern Medical Program Career Investigator Scholar | Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Co-Editor | ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies Research Associate | National Collaborating Centre for Aboriginal Health