Progressive Geographies

Alejandra Mancilla, From Sovereignty to Guardianship: Governing Antarctica, Governing the World – Oxford University Press, June 2026 (print and open access)

ABC News discussion with David Rutledge

Antarctica is the coldest, windiest, driest, and highest continent in the world, so it is no wonder that it has been painted as exceptional in geographic and climatic terms. But not only that: Antarctica is also seen as exceptional politically. Since the Antarctic Treaty came into force in 1961, it has been under the Joint Guardianship of a group of states that have kept peace and privileged science as the main activity on the continent, with a focus on the protection rather than the exploitation of nature.

For natural scientists, Antarctica is seen as the largest open-air laboratory in the world. In From Sovereignty to Guardianship, Alejandra Mancilla proposes that Antarctica should also be seen as a laboratory for territorial governance, providing inspiration in places where both the regime of Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources of individual states and the international regime of Common Heritage of Mankind have proven insufficient and inadequate. At the same time, she shows that Antarctic governance has important limits that can be surmounted to be made less state-centric and less anthropocentric, embracing the fact that protecting Antarctica requires acting beyond Antarctica, and vice versa. Given the global environmental challenges that we face, and the growing challenges to international law and cooperation, this book argues that environmental governance around the world can—and should—benefit from the creative and often unexpectedly fruitful political imagination of Antarctica.

Mélanie Lamotte, By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire – Harvard University Press, January 2026

New Books discussion with Edward Blum

From the beginning of the seventeenth century, French colonies and trading posts sprawled across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the first pan-imperial history of the early French Empire in the English language, Mélanie Lamotte shows how an increasingly cohesive legal culture came to govern the lives of enslaved and free people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent. She also illuminates the important role played by these populations in the development of the empire, from Louisiana to Guadeloupe, Senegambia, Madagascar, Isle Bourbon, and India.

The early French Empire has often been portrayed as a fragmented conglomerate of isolated colonies or regions. Yet Lamotte shows that racial policies issued by the metropole, as well as by officials in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, significantly influenced one another. Rather than focusing on the actions of administrators, however, Lamotte also reveals the extensive influence of people on the ground—especially those of non-European descent. Through their sexuality and their labor, along with their socio-economic and political endeavors, they played a critical role in building the empire and setting its limits. As they sought justice for themselves, strove to protect their kin, and aimed to improve their social conditions, these individuals also pushed against the advancement of white dominion in unexpected ways.

Archivally rich and rigorously documented, By Flesh and Toil illuminates the transoceanic connections that united the French colonial world—and recasts people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent as key actors in the story of empire-building.

Leonhard Emmerling, The Idiots: The History of the Homo Nullius – trans. Parnal Chirmuley, Seagull, 2026

New Books discussion with Morteza Hajizadeh – thanks to dmf for the link

In a world obsessed with expertise and control, the figure of the idiot illuminates deeper truths about society.

Dostoevsky and Nietzsche wrote about him; Dadaists and punks idolized him; artists like Warhol and Beuys made him their icon. From holy fool to punk rebel, the idiot—a figure that traces its roots back to the Greek idiotes, a person who was alienated from public life—has always challenged society’s norms from the margins. Far from a simple madman, the idiot is a powerful subversive, a person who disregards norms and finds profound insight in a state of unmediated inspiration. Using a cross-disciplinary approach bridging literature, religion, art, and philosophy, this volume traces a rich journey up to the present, where the idiot reemerges in a dramatic twist: a public figure who inverts social norms, confounds the boundary between private and public, and declares a new, paradoxical view of the world.

Mark Carrigan, The AI Crisis in Higher Education: A Strategic Proposal – University of Manchester, September 2026 (open access)

Language models have become ubiquitous in universities without being normalised. Mark Carrigan argues this has produced a multidimensional crisis of trust, and a dilemma in which adapting to AI and integrating AI undercut each other. He proposes strategic under-integration: building the relational capacity universities need to cope with ongoing change.