Pic: Eryn Roston
***This year at AAG, YOU ARE INVITED***
to an exciting new mini-conference series Activist Geographers Grouping presents "Living Beyond the Warfare-Welfare Nexus"
Thirty-eight years ago this week, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous ‘A Time to Break the Silence’ speech in which he explained how the road from Montgomery had led him to speak out against the Vietnam War. Making clear the connections between the civil rights movement and anti-war movement that so many denounced him for making, King explained that he saw a continuity between the black freedom struggle in the States and liberation struggles abroad. He also saw that the domestic War on Poverty had been eviscerated by military spending and that the poor paid the additional price of what we now call the poverty draft, “So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.” Finally, as the struggle of the black freedom movement expanded to the Northern cities, “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.”
King was one important leader who talked through the connections and contradictions between warfare and welfare. Many academics know of James O’Connor’s work that detailed a strategy for delinking the welfare state from the warfare state, but over at least the past 40 years, the contradiction between warfare and welfare has become central to feminist, anti-racist, anti-prison, anti-war and occupation, and anti-neoliberal globalization movements all of whose struggles for living run up against military budgets, corporations that profit from destruction and reconstruction, polluted lands and waters, bombs and bullets.
The AGG has taken the opportunity of this conference to organize this series of interrelated sessions. Bringing our individual work, which extends through a series of scales and places in the world, into this extended conversation will enable us to explore the many interrelated empirical, theoretical and political issues, which converge around the project of Living Beyond the Warfare-Welfare Nexus. We see this series as a working group that collaborates our independent works, illuminating the life and death connections between militarism, racism, sexism, [the economy or capitalism], the state, and politics. In so doing, we aim to create activist research that honors struggles for survival and dignity and helps create a better world.
Schedule of Sessions
All sessions are in the Gold Room unless otherwise noted.
Living Beyond I: Geographies of Hope and Social Change, Tues 4-5:40, *Tower Court B*
Living Beyond II: A ‘Politics of Place’: Exploring settler-state landscapes for evidence of self-determination, Wed 8-9:40
Living Beyond III: The Experimental Geographers I, Wed 10-11:40
Living Beyond IV: The Experimental Geographer II, Wed 1-2:40
Living Beyond V: Militarism, Human Health and Environmental Destruction, Wed 3-4:40
Living Beyond VI: Geographies of Popular Conservatism / Geographies of the Right, Th 8-9:40
Living Beyond VII: Geography in Popular Education and Popular Education in Geography, Th 10-11:40
Living Beyond VIII: A Presentation and Discussion on the Beehive Design Collective and its Graphics Campaigns, Th 1-2:40
Living Beyond IX: Living Beyond the Warfare-Welfare Nexus: Concluding Discussion Session, Th 3-4:40
AFFINITY SESSIONS:
The Economic Turn in Cultural Geography, Wed 1-2:40, *Governor’s Square 10*
Governing Citizens, Territory, War, Th 8-9:40, *Spruce Room*
Governing Citizens, Territory, War (II), Th 10-11:40, *Spruce Room*
***Party!***
Thursday 8pm, Wazee Supper Club in LoDo
15th & Wazee (303-623-9518)
Jack Kerouac hung out here and you will want to join us for pizza, soda and beer, too. The party is co-hosted by the Socialist and Critical Geography Specialty Group (SCGSG), and all are invited.
Directions: From the Adam’s Mark, you can walk/cab up 15th to Wazee, ~1.1 miles or 13 blocks. From the Executive Tower, walk up Curtis to 15th, turn left on 15th and amble to Wazee, ~ 7 blocks. There is also a free shuttle that runs down 16th Street from the conference to LoDo.
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