Deadline to contact session chair with abstract: October 9, 2008
Conference registration and abstract deadline: October 16, 2008

Papers are invited for an AAG session on the interwoven politics and political ecologies of Indigenous rights and protected area-based conservation.  This is the sixth consecutive year that the Indigenous Specialty Group has sponsored and organized such sessions at the AAG annual meetings. These sessions provide a continuing venue at the AAG for discussion of conservation, difference, and social justice and for analyses of the diverse political ecologies created by the establishment of protected areas by Indigenous peoples, states, and NGOs in Indigenous peoples' territories. Participants in this year's session are invited to join previous participants in contributing theoretical and case study chapters to an edited book. Both theoretical and case study contributions are welcome.

The organizer is particularly interested in papers on the following topics:

I. New Paradigm Protected Areas. Establishment, operation, and effectiveness of inclusive, participatory, new paradigm protected areas. These may include diverse types of protected areas in which Indigenous peoples' land use and participation in management is recognized.

II. Critiques of Old Paradigm Protected Areas. Analyses of coercively imposed exclusionary "wilderness" or Yellowstone-model protected areas and "fortress conservation" from the standpoints of violations of human/indigenous rights; displacement; loss of access to and/or management of natural resources, cultural resources, and cultural sites; accompanying changes in land/water use and management; and consequent ecological change.

III. "Hand-backs," "Hand overs," and other Reconciliation and Restitution. Case studies of redress, compensation, or restitution for past injustices against Indigenous peoples caused by the creation or management of protected areas.

IV. False Representations of "Progressive" Protected Areas. Analyses of protected areas which have inappropriately represented as participatory and community-based by states, intergovernmental agencies, or NGOs .

V. Rights-Based Conservation. Analyses of protected area governance and management in cases where this is explicitly based on recognition of constitutional, human, and/or Indigenous Rights.
 

We have created Participatory Avenues' Notice Board for you to post announcements about forthcoming workshops, conferences, seminars and training in community mapping, Public Participation GIS (PPGIS), Participatory 3-D Modelling (P3DM), Mobile-Interactive GIS (MiGIS), Participatory GIS (PGIS), Community-based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) and Community-based Coastal Resource Management (CBNRM). If you know of any relevant event which should be shared among practitioners kindly mail a succinct summary to the webmaster.