Each year different tribes of academic laborers have their trade shows. This laborer is attending two virtually back to back, the Association of American Geographers meeting in Los Angeles and then the Association for the Study of Nationalities conference in New York the following week. I’m involved in three events at each. At the AAG I am on two book panels. The first is on Alex Jeffrey’s The Improvised State: Sovereignty, Performance and Agency in Dayton Bosnia (Wiley Blackwell, 2012), the second Thomas Medvetz’s Think Tanks in America (University of Chicago Press, 2012). I am also presenting a paper, a gathering of thoughts on the August War of 2008, on the notion of ‘affective geopolitics’ in one session in a series on ‘Violence and Space’ organized by Simon Springer and Philip Le Billon at the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia.

Like last year at the ASN, I am involved in the presentation of two papers. The first is “Land for Peace in Nagorny Karabakh? Political Geographies and Public Attitudes in a De Facto State” which is the latest in a series of papers from the De Facto State Research Project with Dr John O’Loughlin. The second is “Where is Serbia? Self-Positioning Traditions in Serbian Geopolitical Culture” which will be presented by and was mostly written by a visiting post-doc at Virginia Tech NCR, Dr Bojan Savic. Drafts of both papers are written and will be in the ASN conference CD. I am also a discussant at a book panel on Steven Seegel’s Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2012). Lots of laboring ahead.