Dear colleagues,
I am planning on submitting a session proposal for AAG 2018, and wanted to ask you for suggestions and feedback to determine how broad or narrow the focus the call for papers should be to solicit the best level of productive participation.
As the centenary years of the "War to End All Wars" draw to a close, now is the ideal time not only to take advantage of the popular and academic surge of interest in the First World War but also to stress the distant and lasting impacts of this and other conflicts beyond the battlefield and after the official cessation of hostilities. Geographical concerns have been at the heart of cutting-edge Great War historiography from Wilson's (2012) discussion of the co-constitution of battlefield landscapes and soldiers' identities on the Western Front, to Johnson's (2003) work on the routes of memorial parades as political statements in Ireland, to Ziino's (2007) exploration of the way physical distance structured postwar grief in Australia. These and other works echo arguments made by Woodward (2005) and others for the need to engage with a critically informed "geographies of militarism," stressing that the implications of military practices and ideologies are more broad, intimate and persistent than can be understood through a myopic, objectivist focus on terrain or wartime.
World War I in particular offers a rich source for scholarly work in military, cultural, historical and population geography, as well as spatial analysis. The pieces cited above suggest the potential for further study of the First World War through investigations of human-environment interactions, scale, mobilities, embodiment and corporeality, and the material and discursive construction of space. However, Great War studies and other critical conflict studies have much to gain from being put into conversation with each other. Therefore, I ask for your input to choose the right focus for a formal call for papers. Should the session be framed specifically on the Great War? Should it be cast as a session occasioned by the centenary and the questions that this particular conflict highlights about the totalizing nature of modern warfare? Or would there be enough interest to run a pair of sessions, allowing one to focus on WWI and the other to focus on resonances?
Thank you for your time and insights.
Works cited:
Johnson, N. C. (2003). Ireland, the Great War and the geography of remembrance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, R. J. (2012). Landscapes of the Western Front: materiality during the Great War. New York: Routledge.
Woodward, R. (2005). From military geography to militarism's geographies: disciplinary engagements with geographies of militarism and military activities. Progress in Human Geography, 29(6), 718–40.
Ziino, B. (2007). A distant grief: Australians, war graves and the Great War. Crawley, W.A: University of Western Australia Press.
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Angela R Cunningham
University of Colorado
angela.cunningham@colorado.edu------------------------------