CALL FOR PAPERS: Law, Culture, and Place

Association of American Geographers Conference

Tampa Florida April 8-12, 2014

Law, Culture, and Place

Organizer: John Carr, University of New Mexico (carrj@unm.edu)

While traditional approaches to understanding the law often draw stark divisions between the legal sphere and matters of culture and place, theorists informed by Critical Legal Studies and other forms of critical theory have long treated these borders as permeable. Given the powerful ways that the law informs cultural understandings of place, and in-turn is undergirded by often latent understandings of place, work investigating these imbricated influences continues to be essential.

Accordingly, we invite papers for this session that explore such topics as:

- The ways the law codifies and/or challenges cultural understandings of place

- The geographic imaginations that animate the juridicial realm.

- The potential for work bridging legal, cultural and/or geographic research

- The spatio-cultural work that the legal system does

- The mutually constitutive roles of place as a social construction and the law as an institution of meaning and power

In doing so, we hope to shed light on both what legal geography has to offer cultural geography, and what cultural geography has to offer legal geography. We invite research originating from any theoretical and methodological perspective.

Interested contributors should contact carrj@unm.edu and submit abstracts by November 15, 2013.