Upcoming Events & Conferences You Won't Want to Miss

If you're in the DC-area, join me at the Race, Place, and Ethnicity conference coming up in October. Plus, the first annual legal geography conference is planned for Italy in February 2024.

Raise your hand if you love a good conference!

🙋‍♂️🙋🙋‍♀️

That’s what I figured. And why shouldn’t we love conferences and workshops? They are great opportunities to share what we’re working on, meet new people, and learn new things.

Today’s post features upcoming conferences and workshops that I’m really excited about. If you’re an academic, consider putting these on your calendar. Even if you’re not an academic, you may find this information valuable.

Do you have an upcoming conference or workshop you would like me to share here? Leave a comment below or contact me directly and I’ll put it into the queue.

Race, Ethnicity, and Place (REP) Conference

The Race, Ethnicity, and Place (REP) conference is a unique interdisciplinary conference that brings together geographers and other scholars to focus on questions of race and space, broadly construed. REP is one of my favorite conferences because it is smaller and more focused than the big discipline-wide conferences that draw thousands of people and can feel overwhelming.

This conference is also more critical than ever for us to support as a community, since states like Florida are openly attacking any and all scholarly discussions of the role of race in society. Spaces for us to share academic work on this topic are dwindling.

If you aren’t presenting but are interested in joining the conversation, please come. It’s a very friendly and welcoming group with lots of opportunities for socializing.

DC folks: don’t miss out! You are welcome to join us even if you are not presenting. I have no doubt there will be plenty of discussions about immigration.

What you need to know:

• When: October 11-14, 2023

• Where: George Washington University (Washington, D.C.)

• Deadline: The submission deadline is coming up on July 31, so get your paper, panel, or poster in ASAP.

• Registration + more information: https://repconference.org/.

Critical Legal Geography Conference

I couldn’t be more excited about this upcoming conference on legal geographies happening early next year in Italy. The conference represents one example of the resurgent energy surrounding legal geographies, both in the United States and around the world.

As you may know, late last year some collaborators and I created a new “un-journal” for legal geography that provides a home for short, public-facing posts on contemporary projects within this subdiscipline. The Law & Space UnJournal has been developing quite well, and in fact, we just published another article this morning by Julia Sizek called “Subterranean Legal Geographies: Regulating Groundwater in California.” The Legal Geography Specialty Group of the AAG has also been growing. And now with the Critical Legal Geography conference is taking off.

These are good times to be interested in legal geography. Besides, who wouldn’t want to attend a conference in Italy?

What you need to know:

• When: February 21-23, 2024

• Where: Torino, Italy

• Deadline: The submission deadline for the general conference and the graduate workshop is October 15, 2023.

• Registration + more information: see the full conference description and registration information on Law & Space or on the temporary site set up for Critical Legal Geographies.

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

In addition to these conferences, I am also excited to be a part of some really interesting conversations this fall. I maintain a list of upcoming and recent events on my website (austinkocher.com), so feel free to check that out in the unlikely event that you’re curious about where I’ve been recently or where I’m going next.

• Later this month (July), I will be participating in an international workshop on migration data in Canada with my esteemed colleagues Alison Mountz and Kira Williams, as well as a cohort of scholars from around the world who are coming together to discuss the crucial question of how to understand and integrate multiple sources of data about human migration.

• In September I will be speaking at the Moritz College of Law at my alma mater, the (THE) Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. My talk will focus on a draft of a forthcoming paper that attempts to reconceptualize notions of government transparency and FOIA within a framework of critical epistemologies of bureaucratic power and state theory.

• In October I will be participating in the Emerging Immigration Scholars Conference at UCLA hosted by Roger Waldinger who continues to be an enormous inspiration and support for me and for other scholars in the field.

• In November, I will also be presenting at the 6th Annual International Conference on Border Studies Transborderism: Reimagining Social Space in the Brownsville-Matamoros region of South Texas. My talk at that conference will focus on the role of technology and policy in regulating access to asylum along the southern border. The link to this conference appears to be broken or unavailable. If you are in the region, I’d love to connect. I’ll be spending a few extra days on either side of the conference, which runs from the 8th through the 10th, to meet up and learn more about changes along the border that I’ve missed since my last visit.

Corrections and Additions Welcome

Did I miss something? Did I get something wrong? Please feel free to add to the conversation below, issue corrections, or fill in gaps in this post.

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Thank you for reading. If you would like to support public scholarship and receive this newsletter in your inbox, click below to subscribe for free. And if you find this information useful, consider sharing it online or with friends and colleagues. I maintain a barebones site at austinkocher.com and I share immigration data, news, and research on Mastodon (@austinkocher), Twitter (@ackocher), and Instagram (@austinkocher). You can see my scholarly work on Google Scholar.