Urban Space, Place, and Architecture in Shaping National Identity and Belonging Session(s) organizer: Joshua Hagen (Northern State University) Session(s) sponsored by the Political Geography Specialty Group This session(s) will focus on the power of urban space, place, and architecture in creating, maintaining, and contesting notions of national identity and belonging, as well as other identities that intersect with national identity. The session(s) approaches the city as a constellation of dense semiotic, performative, and affective spatialities of power mobilized for the making and unmaking of nationalist discourse. As such, the city provides an active forum, medium, and vehicle for demarcating categories and practices – and by extension places and spaces – of inclusion and exclusion, instead of merely symbolic stages or backdrops. The session(s) also highlights how various actors rework urban space and place to buttress particular nationalist agendas, assumptions, and ideologies, but these emergent geographies of power are invariably entangled with extant spatialities inherited from earlier actors. The session(s) welcomes presentations covering a variety of countries/regions, as well as different contexts, such as political/cultural/socioeconomic; democratic/non-democratic; contemporary/historical; developed/developing; governments/nongovernmental actors; etc., to encourage comparative perspectives.

The session(s) is also open to a full range of theoretical and methodological approaches, with particular interest in scholarship employing critical theory. Potential contributors should submit an abstract of approximately 250 words or inquiries regarding the session(s) to Joshua Hagen at [email protected] by October 12, 2018.