*Session: EMOTIONAL GEOGRAPHIES OF CONFINEMENT*
Movement and mobility have long been at the forefront of an 'ableist' geographical tradition. However, with the recent proliferation of geographies of difference, new attention is being directed toward human experiences of immobility and confinement, in which 'normal' rhythms of movement have been disrupted or disabled. The aim of this session will be to explore how emotion is constituted in the spaces and subjects of confinement across a broad range of contexts. This session seeks to accommodate papers exploring the emotional subjectivities of confinement as well as the spaces, flows, and networks of affect in situations of confinement. By conceptualizing confinement in its most abstract sense, as a condition of being constrained by boundaries and limits (/con fines/), this interdisciplinary session seeks to induce unifying threads of affect and emotion from diverse experiences of confinement. These experiences could include imprisonment, institutionalization, mental illness, physical disability, impairment, and similar forms of spatial isolation or social difference.
Questions that could be considered in this session include:
· How does confinement reflect upon the relationships of (dis)unity in such dialectics as inside/outside, mind/body, known/knowable, and thoughts/things?
· How are emotional experiences of confinement expressed and communicated? To what extent are they representable?
· What role do borders, boundaries, limits and frontiers play in the emotional worlds of confinement? How might those in confinement cope with, rearrange, or transcend these constraints?
· What is the significance of spaces and times 'beyond' confinement? How do memory, imagination, and affect mediate containment and allow for extension of the self into these 'beyonds'?
Please submit an abstract conforming to AAG guidelines *by **Wednesday,
**October 14, 2009*, to Mason McWatters: masonmcwatters@mail.utexas.edu
