Progressive Geographies

Working Knowledge: A Simon Schaffer Reader, eds. Charlotte Bigg, John Tresch, and Simon Werrett – University of Chicago Press, April 2026

Collects key articles by Simon Schaffer, one of the most important historians of science working today.

Working Knowledge is the first English-language collection of essays by Simon Schaffer, coauthor of Leviathan and the Air-Pump, a landmark text in the history of science. Though the latter may be his most famous book, Schaffer is also renowned for seminal articles on Isaac Newton and the cultures of popular spectacle, nineteenth-century physics and its practices of labor discipline and standardization, the history of anthropology and collecting, and the globe-spanning cultural interactions that have shaped modern science. Working Knowledge compiles these well-known pieces alongside newer selections, making them accessible in a single place and representing the huge scope and impact of Schaffer’s oeuvre.

The Reader divides sixteen of Schaffer’s articles across five thematic sections, which take up timely issues like the turn toward global histories of science; the intersection of science and capitalism; the interaction between bodies and machines; and the connection between science, politics, and the environment. Eight new essays by notable historians such as Adrian Johns, Lissa Roberts, and Steven Shapin bring Schaffer’s pieces into discussion with current scholarship. Illustrations and brief commentaries by Schaffer and the artist Adam Lowe, a longtime collaborator, are included throughout the volume.

Bringing together essential articles that were previously scattered across several publications, Working Knowledge is an insightful introduction to Schaffer and his ever-relevant writing.

Dror Yinon, Deleuze and the Problem of Experience: Transcendental Empiricism – Bloomsbury, July 2025

NDPR review by George Webster

This comprehensive reframing of Gilles Deleuze as a transcendental empiricist delves into his seminal Difference and Repetition to unearth a system that inverts the Kantian worldview. By focusing on Deleuze’s theory of the faculties, we can see how he builds a transcendental system of thought that defies the predictability of empirical experience.

The place of experience in the way we understand our relation to the world, to others and to ourselves, is a central theme of modern philosophy. Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism points to an unexplored direction in this major philosophical preoccupation. It is a road not taken that, against the tide of his times, rejected the possibility of an immediate contact with being and embraced the possibility of reaching a ‘real’ that lay beneath many layers of mediation. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Deleuze neither subscribed to a specific philosophical school nor did he try to establish one. This new understanding of him as a transcendental empiricist not only helps to situate his work in the constellation of twentieth century French philosophers but also helps us to understand a philosopher for whom difference and heterogeneity were central to his own philosophical corpus.

Teresa M. Bejan, First Among Equals: Visions of Equality before Egalitarianism — Harvard University Press, October 2026

An incisive account of how equality transformed from an abstract ideal into a concrete social and political vision, thanks to seventeenth-century English dissidents like the Levellers and the political philosophers they inspired.

Today, political theorists and philosophers treat as axiomatic the claim that all persons are equal. Dig deeper, however, and what we mean by equality—and what it demands from us, politically and otherwise—is far from obvious. Does it mean that we are all the same, and so the same standards should apply indifferently to everyone? Or does it mean that we are all different in ways similarly deserving of respect? These questions, and many more, reflect the profound ambiguities and contradictions that have riddled the history of the idea of equality.

First Among Equals examines a radical turning point in that history. Since antiquity, influential legal and philosophical traditions have held that all humans are fundamentally equal. Yet these claims proved surprisingly at home in a world defined by social hierarchy, political exclusion, and enslavement. In seventeenth-century England, the meaning—and practical circumstances—of equality began to change. Political philosopher Teresa Bejan traces this transformation, revealing how equality finally became a concrete and actionable political ideal.

Crucially, Bejan shows that influential early modern theorists of equality—chief among them Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and the early feminist Mary Astell—were responding to the increasingly radical visions proffered by contemporary social movements like the Levellers, Diggers, and Quakers. Inspired by the Leveller leader John Lilburne, these movements insisted that equality must be a basis on which ordinary men and women could demand to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with elites. These early modern activists and philosophers can still enchant us today, Bejan argues, while also helping us to restore the power of equality as a political ideal.

Joseph Tonda, Postcolonial Imperialism: Critique of the Society of Dazzlements – trans. Cheryl Smeall, Duke University Press, April 2026

Introduction available open access

Postcolonial Imperialism considers the inability to distinguish between reality and fiction as a key condition of contemporary life. If postcolonial theory has highlighted how white colonizers created images of racialized Others which project their own self-hatred or disavowal, Joseph Tonda here shows how these images have in turn colonized Western imaginaries. He argues that the Global North’s obsession with its own phantoms takes a newly powerful form in the dazzling images of postcolonial screens. With examples ranging from Nicki Minaj to Osama Bin Laden and child soldier Johnny Mad Dog, Tonda reflects on power by analyzing the dazzlements of both Central Africa and the West, showing how African life prefigures Western experiences. Translated from its original French, Postcolonial Imperialism is a prescient critique of authoritarian attempts to enforce alternate realities, and of the many ways screens can distort our vision.

Joseph Acquisto, Baudelaire’s Objects – Bloomsbury, May 2026

Examines Baudelaire’s multifaceted use of natural, domestic, urban, and esthetic objects in his verse and prose poetry, as well as the ways his poems reshape our understanding of objects and how those objects destabilize, yet preserve, the subject-object relation.

Charles Baudelaire’s representation of objects in the natural world establishes a relation that is neither one of identity between human subject and nature nor a relation of domination; he reveals both the natural world and the human subject to be characterized by an irreducible doubleness and nonidentity to itself. Likewise, everyday domestic objects in his poems overflow their boundaries as simple metaphors; their often uncanny aspect highlights their quasi-agency as they define and shape the subject who interacts with them.

Baudelaire’s poems-as-objects also take on this kind of agency, acting upon readers in ways that both require and surpass attempts to grasp the poems conceptually as art objects for analysis. This reshaping of subjectivity and objectivity acquires increased intensity in his urban poetry, where city objects are at the intersection of the mythic, the historical, the esthetic, and the commercial.

Baudelaire’s Objects shows how paying attention to objects differently, as Baudelaire’s poems impel readers to do, is to reorient ourselves in the world by giving objects their due, recognizing the mediating qualities both of objects and of the language with which we represent or create them. We can thus reinvent our understanding of the limits and potential of human subjectivity as it is inextricably intertwined with the world around us.

Neil Gray, Take Over the City: Spatial Composition in Italian Autonomy – Common Notions, August 2026

Take Over the City provides the first comprehensive spatial analysis of Italian operaismo and the extraordinary urban struggles of 1970s Italy.

Take Over the City is the first systemic spatial account of Italian operaismo. Drawing on the Marxist urban theory of Henri Lefebvre and others, the book situates the struggles of operaismo, especially in the 1970s, within an incipient-yet-tendential phase of global urbanization. In doing so, the book draws attention to previously neglected urban struggles in the wider social factory, recognizing these as immanent to the new spatial composition of capital in Italy.

The book argues that these innovative urban struggles carry important lessons for contemporary forms of organization and social conflict in the sphere of social reproduction. They drew attention to, and acted within, a tendency that has only become more entrenched since the 1970s: the centrality of urbanization and real estate to national political economies. If urbanization has become increasingly central for capital accumulation processes, it follows that urban struggle must become increasingly central to anti capitalist struggle. The struggles to ‘Take Over the City’ in 1970s Italy provide an important marker of how this might be done in the current era.

By excavating the urban struggles of 1970s Italy with a spatialized understanding of operaismo’s signature theoretical contribution—class composition—the book provides both an important contribution to radical urban history and a window into how current urban struggles might be theorized. It seeks to both spatialize readings of operaismo through the concept of spatial composition and to radicalize urban theory with Italian autonomist Marxist thought and practice. This should be of interest to those interested in autonomist praxis more generally, and those interested in radical urban history, contemporary urban struggles and social reproduction.

William Carruthers, Flooded Pasts: UNESCO, Nubia and the Recolonization of Archaeology – Cornell University Press, December 2022; paperback March 2026

Flooded Pasts examines a world famous yet critically underexamined event—UNESCO’s International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia (1960–80)—to show how the project, its genealogy, and its aftermath not only propelled archaeology into the postwar world but also helped to “recolonize” it. In this book, William Carruthers asks how postwar decolonization took shape and what role a colonial discipline like archaeology—forged in the crucible of imperialism—played as the “new nations” asserted themselves in the face of the global Cold War.

As the Aswan High Dam became the centerpiece of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egyptian revolution, the Nubian campaign sought to salvage and preserve ancient temples and archaeological sites from the new barrage’s floodwaters. Conducted in the neighboring regions of Egyptian and Sudanese Nubia, the project built on years of Nubian archaeological work conducted under British occupation and influence. During that process, the campaign drew on the scientific racism that guided those earlier surveys, helping to consign Nubians themselves to state-led resettlement and modernization programs, even as UNESCO created a picturesque archaeological landscape fit for global media and tourist consumption. 

Flooded Pasts describes how colonial archaeological and anthropological practices—and particularly their archival and documentary manifestations—created an ancient Nubia severed from the region’s population. As a result, the Nubian campaign not only became fundamental to the creation of UNESCO’s 1972 World Heritage Convention but also exposed questions about the goals of archaeology and heritage and whether the colonial origins of these fields will ever be overcome.

Catherine Boland Erkkila, Spaces of Immigration: American Ports, Railways, and Settlements – University of Pittsburgh Press, April 2025

New Books discussion with Matt Wells – thanks to dmf for the link

By transporting waves of newly arrived immigrants along rail lines from both coasts, railway companies played an active role in repopulating the interior of the country. Spaces of Immigration follows the travel routes of immigrants during a foundational period of American infrastructure—from ports of arrival to train cars and depots to settlements—showing how the built environment of the railways fostered segregation through physical isolation and reinforced hierarchies according to race, ethnicity, and class. Catherine Boland Erkkila highlights the magnitude of this forced separation: how spatial design and the experiences within it reflected prejudices of contemporary middle-class Americans who viewed immigrants as poor, diseased, and dangerous. Spaces of Immigration draws attention to the control wielded by railroad companies and government officials, who dispatched European immigrants to ethnic enclaves across the Midwest, some of which still exist. These colonization efforts, Boland Erkkila argues, were motivated by profit through exploitation: the promise of cheap labor and the purchase of land along designated routes. At the same time, Asian immigrants were detained like prisoners on the West Coast. This book ultimately offers a greater understanding of the immigrant experience in America through the lens of spatial history, revealing deeply embedded conflicts still pervasive in our society today.