Call for Papers, AAG 2011, Seattle, USA
April 12-16, 2011

Organisers: Jeremy Crampton (Georgia State University) and Trevor Barnes
(University of British Columbia).

Session jointly sponsored by the Political Geography Specialty Group and
the Historical Geography Specialty Group.

Call for Papers: Geographies of Intelligence.

News headlines this year were much dominated by two stories: WikiLeaks,
a stateless organization dedicated to publishing governmental secrets
relating to corruption and coverups. As such, it publishes sensitive
state intelligence, and much of the attention it received this year
focused on the "War Diary" which were published simultaneously in three
different newspapers. These War Diaries provided one of the few glimpses
into US intelligence and its part in the prosecution of war. They were
also extremely controversial, raising issues of free speech, state
secrets, endangerment of troops and the nature of intelligence in a
democracy.

The same month the Diaries were published, the Washington Post published
the results of a two-year analysis of what it called "top-secret
America" revealing that it is spread across at least 10,000 different US
locations and that it employs some 854,000 people with top-secret
security clearances.

Geography, and geographers, are heavily involved in the production of
geographical intelligence, known as GEOINT. What does this involve? What
technologies are deployed (GIS, mapping and remote sensing) for what
purposes? What are the networks of intelligence, resources and sources
of information? How is information shared between countries? In Trevor
Paglen's words, what is going on in the "blank spots on the map?"
Perhaps not surprisingly, remarkably little is known about geographies
of intelligence, but as both WikiLeaks and the Post story illustrate,
this need not be the case. Intelligence can be related to, but is not
the same as, war, and geographers such as Derek Gregory, Colin Flint and
Michael Heffernan have contributed to our knowledge. Additionally, as
records are declassified (eg for the OSS and CIA) the nature of
intelligence can be traced for events that played defining roles in
history, such as the Second World War or Vietnam. In these cases,
geographers often staffed the intelligence desks.

This session invites contributions on the broad issue of intelligence
and its geographies. We are interested in papers that trace both
contemporary and historical aspects of this question. Topics may include
but are not limited to:

 · Intelligence and terrorism
 · Networks of intelligence/intelligent networks
 · Geographers and GEOINT
 · Geographers and foreign policy/area studies
 · Covert landscapes/sites--where is intelligence produced?
 · Intelligence "in the field"
 · The role of state geographical secrets in a democracy
 · WikiLeaks: a danger or the next generation of journalism?
 · The historical emergence of centralized intelligence gathering in
different countries
 · Intelligence, the military, and the state
 · In what ways does intelligence characterize territory, terrain or
populations?
 · Human Terrain Systems (HTS) and embedded geographers/geographies
 · Critical historical moments in the production of geographic
intelligence
 · How has involvement in intelligence been reflected back in the
disciplines of geography and cartography?
 · The role of geospatial technologies (GIS, cartography, remote
sensing) in intelligence
 · Geographic intelligence, declassification and FOIA
 · Cryptanalysis

In addition to registering your abstract for the conference on the AAG
website, please submit an abstract and Presenter Identification Number
(PIN) to either Jeremy Crampton ([log in to unmask]) or Trevor Barnes
([log in to unmask]) no later than 12th October 2010.


--
Jeremy W. Crampton
Editor, Cartographica
Associate Professor & Graduate Director, Geography
Dept. of Geosciences
Georgia State University
(404) 413-5771
[log in to unmask]

My new book: Mapping, A February 2010 (Wiley-Blackwell)
http://tr.im/JYoS