CfP/CfA event

Terrorism and the City (PAMLA 2020)


Event date:

12.11.2020-15.11.2020

Abstract submission deadline:

15.07.2020

This panel invites papers that address how terrorism, whether historically or contemporarily, engages with and within the city. Sociologist Saskia Sassen argued in “When the City Itself Becomes a Technology of War” that asymmetrical military strategy has turned the space of the city itself into a technology of warfare. She writes that asymmetric warfare, the military strategy that defines U.S. engagement with terrorist cells across the world, are “partial, intermittent and lack clear endings…They are one indication of how the center no longer holds – whatever the center’s format: the imperial power of a period of the national state of our modernity” (36).

In Terrorism, Risk and the City: Towards Urban Resilience, Coaffee points to the ways in which logistical imperialism undergirds the paramilitary tactics used in asymmetrical warfare in domestic cities. To do so, Coaffee uses Ulrich Beck’s concept of the “Risk Society,” loosely defined as a response to an increasingly globalized world and its seemingly boundaryless, uncontrollable calamities. Risk is economically, socially, and politically articulated by the media and government in terms of “Other” outside countries, groups, corporations, or individuals. This dynamic serves the transition into new modernity, fueled by “the logic of industrial production and distribution [that] is increasingly tied to the social production of risk” (68). In essence, the speed of innovation outpaces our institutions’ ability to protect the West. This sense of vulnerability is experienced most acutely in cities, where the State and local government converge to secure an increasingly-surveilled city life.

This panel seeks to explore these questions: How does contemporary literature or other forms of storytelling engage with Sassen’s claim that terrorism reveals a kind of void within the State or colonial power? What is being revealed, how is the city portrayed, and how do storytellers respond?

Fields of research

Additional fields of research

Terrorismus,  Stadt

Venue

Las Vegas, United States of America

Organization

Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA)

This ressource is linked to other avldigital.de resources

Institutions
Created by: Redaktion avldigital.de
Published on: 26.06.2020
Last change: 07.06.2025, 19:25

Proposed citation:
"Terrorism and the City (PAMLA 2020)" (CfP/CfA event), avldigital.de, veröffentlicht am: 26.06.2020. /en/networking/information/call-for-papers/terrorism-and-the-city-pamla-2020