Progressive Geographies

Call for Papers: Warwick Graduate Conference in Security Studies ‘Post-Truth Politics and the Age of Insecurity’

18 October – 19 October 2018; Venue: Scarman

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Ruth Wodak, Lancaster University/University of Vienna, Author of: The Politics of Fear: What Right-wing Populist Discourses Mean

The ‘West’ is experiencing a period of profound insecurity. Disruptions caused by digitisation, mass migration and globalisation have put pressure on democratic institutions and liberal societies to adapt, while the global financial crisis and its aftermath have eroded the public’s trust in the economic competence and political accountability of national governments. In Europe, the project of ‘ever-closer union’ has come under strain from the impact of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, the UK’s Brexit decision, and a rise of right-wing populism among its member states. In the United States, President Donald Trump is advocating a political agenda of economic nationalism and nativist populism that seems to mark the end of a US-led liberal world order.

Most disturbingly maybe for academic research, the age of insecurity has given rise to a new form of post-truth politics that supplants evidence-based reasoning with ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’. In the light of these developments, the 2018 Warwick Graduate Conference in Security Studies seeks to critically explore the interconnections and implications of political, economic and cultural insecurity, and the relationship between knowledge, identity and (in)security in a global context.

Papers are welcome especially (but not exclusively) from PhD students and early career researchers that address one or more of the following questions:

• How can we define, locate, and analyse (in)security in an age of post-truth politics?
• What is the relationship between identity, knowledge, and (in)security?
• What are the challenges of studying post-truth politics from a critical security studies perspective?
• Is insecurity primarily driven by internal or external factors?
• Is the rise of contemporary populism in the West an anti-elite revolt or the project of illiberal elites?
• How can we study the political impact of alternative means of knowledge production and competing identity claims, and resistance against post-truth politics from different viewpoints (race, gender, non-Western perspectives)?

If you are interested in chairing a panel, acting as discussant, or participating with a paper, please send your details, and for a paper contribution an abstract of not more than 250 words to Georg Löfflmann:

g.lofflmann@warwick.ac.uk

Deadline for abstracts: 31 August 2018

Alexander B. Murphy, Geography: Why It Matters forthcoming from Polity

Ever since humans sketched primitive maps in the dirt, the quest to understand our surroundings has been fundamental to our survival. Studying geography revealed that the earth was round, showed our ancestors where to plant crops, and helped them appreciate the diversity of the planet.

Today, the physical and social composition of the world is changing at an unprecedented pace, as a result of rising sea levels, deforestation, species extinction, rapid urbanization and mass migration. Modern technologies have brought people from across the globe into contact with each other, with enormous political and cultural consequences. As a subject concerned with how people, environments, and places are organized and interconnected, geography provides a critical window into where things happen, why they happen where they do, and how geographic context influences environmental processes and human affairs. These perspectives make the study of geography more relevant than ever, yet it remains little understood.

In this engrossing book, Alec Murphy explains why geography is so important to the current moment. He invites readers to ‘think geographically’, casting a new light on familiar problems.?

Introducing Polity’s Why It Matters series: In these short and lively books, world-leading thinkers make the case for the importance of their subjects and aim to inspire a new generation of students.

Details of the whole Why It Matters series are here – Tim Ingold wrote one on Anthropology, and there are others on Linguistics, History and Classics.

THE BODY PRODUCTIVE
a one-day conference about capitalism, work and the body

Birkbeck, University of London // 8th December 2018

www.thebodyproductive.com // twitter: @productivebody

How are bodies produced under capitalism?

How, in turn, does capitalism make bodies productive?

How is the body (and knowledge of the body) shaped by demands of production, consumption and exchange, and how can these logics be resisted, challenged and overcome?

These are the questions at the heart of François Guéry and Didier Deleule’s Productive Body. First published in French in 1972, The Productive Body asks how the human body and its labour have been expropriated and re-engineered through successive stages of capitalism. The Productive Body challenges us to rethink the relationships between the biological and the social; the body and the mind; power and knowledge; discipline and control. Finally, it invites us to think about the body as a site of resistance and revolutionary potential.

At this one-day, interdisciplinary conference, we invite scholars and activists to assess the contribution of The Productive Body, and to address its relevance as a theoretical tool for understanding and challenging contemporary ideologies of bodily health, efficiency and productivity.

We invite submissions from scholars, activists and artists for 20-minute papers, or 10-minute provocations on the relationships – past and present – between capitalism, work and the body. Collaborative papers are welcome, and proposals for longer workshops and panel discussions will also be considered. Please contact the organisers if you are unsure. Proposals that explore or are inspired by any of the following areas are welcome:

• Critical responses to Guéry and Deleule – the biological, the social, and the productive
• Materialist vs. discursive approaches to the history of the body
• Conceptualising discipline in Marx and Foucault
• The body as an object of discipline vs. the body as a site of dissent
• The psychology and corporeality of activism, organising and resistance
• Hierarchies of gender and race in the division of labour
• (Re)productive bodies; intimate and emotional labour, sex work, body work
• How are ideas of health and disability shaped by the demands of wage labour?
• How do queer bodies disrupt or challenge logics of productivity? How are queer bodies in turn, commodified or appropriated by capital?
• How do the demands of productivity complicate/interact with the body as a site of intimacy?
• Biopolitics and neoliberalism
• Body-machines – technology and automation; robotics, cybernetics and transhumanism; digital surveillance, ‘lifelogging’ and the ‘quantified self’
• Counterproductive bodies: pre-capitalist, non-capitalist, and post-capitalist bodies

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to thebodyproductive@gmail.com by 24th August 2018. Submissions are especially encouraged from graduate students, early-career researchers, and groups typically underrepresented in the academy.

2018 London Critical Theory Summer School debate recording

The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities’ annual London Critical Theory Summer School is taking place over two weeks from 25th June – 6th July 2018.

At the end of each week the internationally renowned critical thinkers who are teaching on the Summer School join together for a public panel discussion.

The second public debate will take place on Friday 6th July and will include the following speakers:

David Harvey, CUNY Graduate Center, NYC

Esther Leslie, Birkbeck, University of London

Jacqueline Rose, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities

Lynne Segal, Birkbeck, University of London

Thanks to dmf for the link to this.

Interview with Dylan Trigg at Figure/Ground Here’s the first question and answer:

How did you decide to become a university professor? Was it a conscious choice?

Like many people working in academia, accidents and errors have become more valuable than conscious choices. My introduction to philosophy came via psychotherapy, which itself came via criminal psychology. Before philosophy, I was studying existential psychoanalysis in London. This style of therapy is rooted in phenomenology, and the grand themes of death, freedom, anxiety, and meaning inspired an interest in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Sartre, Heidegger, Levinas and so forth. I was introduced to this through Irvin Yalom’s textbook, “Existential Psychotherapy,” which I read as a teenager and still hold in great regard, though perhaps with some uncritical nostalgia now. Later on, works by R.D. Laing, Karl Jaspers, and Ludwig Binswanger drew me closer to the phenomenological tradition more broadly.  Because of this background, the Wittgensteinian idea of philosophy as therapy retains a relevance for me both academically and personally, as Wittgenstein would have it: “The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.”  So, academia for me is not a conscious choice, as such. I did not harbour childhood fantasies of becoming a professor. It was instead an expression of something that began in the context of studying psychotherapy, which I then became seduced by.