Spatial Machinations
This powerful video, shared by Kevin Ward on Crit-Geog-Forum, is incredibly affecting. Very much worth watching and sharing.
The Asylum Market from Brass Moustache Films on Vimeo.
This relates to the research project, led by Jonathan Darling, Producing Urban Asylum.
Via Stuart Elden.
This is an interesting development, not least in terms of the gradual realignment of EPD in the last five or so years…
Society and Space is part of the Environment and Planning family of journals, now published by Sage. Environment and Planning C – formerly ‘Government and Policy’ is being relaunched as ‘Politics and Space’.
New editors Patrica Daley, Eugene McCann, Alison Mountz and Joe Painter have a piece describing this new purpose as ‘Reimaging Politics & Space: Why here, why now?‘ Here’s one key paragraph:
Our starting point in the project of re-visioning this journal is that no one owns the political in political geography and, therefore, while we are editors, we hope you will join us in building the future of Politics & Space. Send us your papers! Send us something new, different, something that you need to see in these pages.
Only just seen this. Issue 1 of volume 44 (2017) of boundary 2 is entitled Amateur Philosophy and concerns the work of Bernard Stiegler.
Within the issue are published the three lectures Stiegler gave in California in 2011 (one of which was published in Lana Turner). alongside this are pieces by a stellar cast of contemporary theorists, including: Claire Colebrook, Mark Hansen, Daniel Ross and Gerald Moore. Both of the two translators who have translated the majority of Stiegler’s work into English have pieces: Stephen Barker and Daniel Ross.
This seems like a fairly important contribution to anglophone engagements with Stiegler’s work…
Here’s the full table of contents.
You need a subscription to access the papers, let me know if you have any trouble…
On his blog, Alexander Galloway addresses some recent discussion he has had as part of a public seminar series on the nonhuman in relation to various ways in which we might reason-ably determine what counts as ‘nonhuman’. Here he uses two forms or categories of reason: the ‘apophatic’ and the ‘cataphatic’:
The cataphatic “tries to obtain the nonhuman through a method of affirmation, that is, affirmation of already knowable traits of whatever kind, human or otherwise. This is a method of affirmative or inflationary reason… Cataphatic nonhumanism does something similar: we are sentient, thus forests are probably sentient too. People form parliaments, so it makes sense to assemble a parliament of things. Humans have rights, so why not chimps as well? This approach to nonhumanism claims, in essence, that “humans seem to operate in such and such a way, thus we affirm the same quality in other worldly entities.””
The apophatic stems from “theological rationalism is a conception of the nonhuman obtained via negation or subtraction (of already knowable worldly traits of whatever kind). This is a method of negative or deflationary reason… Here the nonhuman is no longer a form of superlative nature as it was with cataphaticism — the nonhuman as “the All“ — but instead the nonhuman is the absence of nature; the nonhuman, literally, is not. (In other words, it is “the Not.”)”
I’m not up on contemporary debates about the nonhuman in geography (or anywhere, frankly) but this seems like an interesting critical device to consider in relation to some of the arguments about ‘nonhuman’ and ‘more-than-human’ geographies…
Merrifield reflects on The Right to the City fifty years on in a thoughtful essay on his website. Worth reading the whole thing…
In response to a crisis of political legitimation, the “spectre” of urban solidarity looms; minorities in cities recognise that national and international rights are “out of joint.” In a way, we now need to read Derrida’s idea of “villes-refuges“ in conjunction not only with Lefebvre’s right to the city, but also with the former’s earlier Spectres of Marx, where he spoke of a “New International”; “a profound transformation,” Derrida called it, “projected over the long term, of international law, of its concepts and field of intervention.” This New International is “a link,” Derrida said, an affinity, a suffering and hope, still discreet, almost secret, without status or title, contract or coordination, party or country, national community or common belonging to a class.
We’re not yet sure what this International really is; we can’t name it anything positive. But it’s there nonetheless, we know it’s there, hope it’s there, out on the horizon, if we can look that far. We know it’s more needed than ever before, needed everywhere. It’s a ghostly dream-thought of a new status for the city, a right to and of the city, a will to belong to a democratic urban webbing, a solidarity of confederated assemblies interrogating the essence of politics and the role of the nation-state: just what is a citizen of the urban, a citadin(e) of the twenty-first century? Progressives will have their work cut out in this challenging year ahead. Meantime, à la tienne, Henri!”¦
Worth a read I think… There’s a free PDF, follow the link to Open Humanities Press website.
edited by Michael Marder and Patricia Vieira
Through the interpretative lens of today’s leading thinkers, The Philosophical Salon illuminates the persistent intellectual queries and the most disquieting concerns of our actuality. Across its three main divisions–Speculations, Reflections, and Interventions–the volume constructs a complex mirror, in which our age might be able to recognize itself with all its imperfections, shadowy spots, even threatening abysses and latent promises. On the cutting edge of philosophy, political and literary theory, and aesthetics, this book courageously tackles a wide array of topics, including climate change, the role of technology, reproductive rights, the problem of refugees, the task of the university, political extremism, embodiment, utopia, food ethics, and sexual identity. It is an enduring record of an ongoing conversation, as well as a building block for any attempt to make sense of our world’s multifaceted realities.
Contributors: Robert Albritton, Linda MartÃn Alcoff, Claudia Baracchi, Geoffrey Bennington, Jay M. Bernstein, Costica Bradatan, Jill Casid, David Castillo, Antonio Cerella, Anna Charlton, Claire Colebrook, Sarah Conly, Nikita Dhawan, William Egginton, Roberto Esposito, Mihail Evans, Gary Francione, Luis Garagalza, Michael Gillespie, Michael Hauskeller, Ãgnes Heller, Daniel Innerarity, Jacob Kiernan, Julia Kristeva, Daniel Kunitz, Susanna Lindberg, Jeff Love, Michael Marder, Todd May, Michael Meng, John Milbank, Warren Montag, T. M. Murray, Jean-Luc Nancy, Kelly Oliver, Adrian Pabst, Martha Patterson, Richard Polt, Gabriel Rockhill, Hasana Sharp, Doris Sommer, Gayatri Spivak, Kara Thompson, PatrÃcia Vieira, Slavoj Žižek.
Nice piece by Sara Koopman:
via dmf.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Science, Technology, and the Politics of Knowledge in Global Affairs
An Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at the Buffett Institute for Global Studies
Northwestern University, Evanston IL
March 30-31, 2017
Keynote: Sheila Jasanoff, Harvard Kennedy School
Organizing Committee: Kevin Baker, Savina Balasubramanian, and Omri Tubi
Scientists, state actors, international institutions, and lay activists vie for credibility and legitimacy to both frame and control global issues. Science and technology are routinely cast into a supporting role to bolster their claims. From nuclear energy in the battle against climate change to the politicization of “big data;” from new information technologies in emerging regimes of global surveillance to the use of randomized controlled trials in international development research – scientific and technological expertise operate as instruments of power and authority, which can serve to legitimate or contest new forms of global governance and intervention.
The Buffett Institute’s second annual graduate student conference will investigate expert knowledge in contemporary global affairs, looking at the ways this knowledge is created, invoked, circulated, and contested in the international political arena. We invite graduate students to present work that explores questions such as: How do various international actors attempt to position themselves as credible participants in global politics? Under what conditions does expert knowledge come to be seen as legitimate on the global stage? How and why do global issues become understood as primarily technical, rather than political? In what ways do international actors frame these issues and what must be done about them? How is scientific and technological expertise marshaled or ignored in processes of claims making and action to structure interventions into global “problems?” And, finally, how do these practices organize, sustain, or challenge structures of global inequality and power?
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
We invite graduate students across the humanities and social sciences to submit abstracts of no more than 250 words by December 15, 2016using the submission link on the conference webpage: http://buffett.northwestern.edu/programs/grad-conference/. There will be no deadline extensions. Accepted presenters will be notified by January 5 and papers are due to faculty discussants by March 7. The Buffett Institute will provide hotel accommodations and will subsidize travel costs (fully for US-based graduate students and partially for international students). Please direct all queries to the Graduate Organizing Committee at: buffettgradconference@northwestern.edu.
Via Deterritorial Investigations Unit.
David Harvey talking to Evgeny Morozov, in the first few minutes he addresses the issue of the claims being made about the end of globalisation/neoliberalism. The conversation then quickly ranges over the gig economy and what Guy Standing calls the ‘precariat’ (it’d be interesting to stage that conversation!) and then a brief statement question about ‘smart’ cities (Harvey is dismissive). Worth watching.
[T]here are abundant signs that localism and nationalism have become stronger precisely because of quest for security that place always offers in the midst of all the shifting that [globalisation] implies – The Condition of Postmodernity (adapted), David Harvey, p. 306.
Globalisation as ‘…a hegemonic ideology supporting the necessity and inevitability of the free movement of capital and goods, helped to create the institutional conditions which then contributed to making the free movement of capital and goods a reality’ – Paul Hirst “The global economy – myths and realities.” (1999), p. 424.
Actually existing globalisation is not the globalisation of neoliberal visions, the Utopia of friction-free global markets or Internet-driven virtual worlds, but the contingent and unsteady symbiosis of imperfectly transnational networks, institutions and firms, and the ‘ramshackle diversity’ of international bureaucracies, states, police, mafias and other sources of power struggling for shifting territorial authority in the post-cold war world. – Gerard Ó Tuathail “Political geography III: dealing with deterritorialization.” (1998) p. 87.
An all-to-brief and idle thought: Whatever happened to critique of ‘globalisation’? There was a time not long ago when commentators would’ve been on the side of those they seek to blame for voting for Brexit and Trump… the apparent ‘losers’ in the last thirty-odd years of ‘globalisation’ (or, perhaps, more specifically what Peter Dicken called a new international division of labour in his “Global Production Networks” framework in Global Shift).
When critical discussion of globalisation was a thing in geography people like David Harvey and Doreen Massey had something to say about this… indeed, this used to be a staple of a geography sylabus. I can’t help wondering what Massey would say about the last six months… Nevertheless, I haven’t seen any kind of comment by Harvey (if there has been, please point to what I’ve missed in the comments below).
Critical reflections on the rise of economic globalisation, the rise of TNCs, global commodity chains, off-shoring and so on brought about a critical discourse of globalisation that seems to be missing from the current commentary. Instead, we seem to see a conflation of a generalised (to the point of being unclear) idea of ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘globalisation’ and, depending on your standpoint, the recent popular vote for Brexit in the UK and the narrow victory of Trump are meant to signify a backlash to this. Perhaps because of the toxic racist and misogynistic undertones of the ‘Leave’ and Trump campaigns, some commentators seem to be implying that actually the status quo of economic globalisation and ‘neoliberalism’ should’ve been retained (i.e. vote of ‘remain’ & Clinton, resulting in TTIP etc ). Maybe (I hope) I’m misreading the arguments (I’m not getting much sleep due to baby/child sleeplessness!), maybe this is a plea for global solidarity, but maybe, also, the rush to get into print is leading to forms of scapegoating too…
Either way, it seems to me that it might be prudent for more of us to revisit ‘globalisation’ in our research and teaching (I have no doubt that there is some great work going on that I don’t know about here).