Progressive Geographies

Mark Pennington, Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom – Oxford University Press, August 2025

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

This highly original and innovative book is the first to comprehensively engage the ideas of the French social theorist and philosopher Michel Foucault from within the tradition of liberal political economy. Divided into two parts the book commences by demonstrating important commonalities between Foucault’s ideas and those of a neglected ‘post-modern’ stream in liberal political and economic thought. These ideas draw on a social theory emphasising a culturally situated individualism; a philosophy of science highly critical of socio-economic ‘scientism’ and ‘expert rule’; and an understanding of freedom as an open-ended process of ‘self-creation’ in the face of cultural power relations—a freedom threatened by alignments between state power and more decentred manifestations of power. 

Part two combines the tools of Foucault’s critical social theory with those of a post-modern liberalism to problematise four separate though overlapping ‘bio-political’ or ‘pastoral’ dispositifs in contemporary liberal societies focused on social justice, public health, ecological sustainability, and law and order. Where the Foucauldian and the post-modern liberal approaches suggest that freedom requires a cultural and economic ‘creative destruction’ that destabilises existing modes of thought and ways of being, the pastoral dispositifs that seek to ‘monitor and correct’ multiple pattern anomalies are shown to stifle the space for that creative freedom. 

Though the book does not engage the question of whether Foucault himself moved towards endorsing liberal political economy, it throws considerable light on how key Foucauldian concerns may be addressed within the liberal tradition, and why Foucauldians may have reason to embrace a reconstituted or post-modern liberalism.

I’ve been away for a while, so there were a few books waiting for me on my return. Several of these relate to a planned ‘Sunday History‘ on the Tel Quel visit to China – Jean Berthier’s recent book Voyage tranquille au pays des horreurs: Sollers, Barthes, Kristeva, Pleynet, Wahl… en Chine and some of the older ones on it. The pile also includes Gilles Deleuze,  Sur la peinture, the first of his courses to be published – I already have the others out so far, and the English translation On Painting. Tim Cresswell’s The Citizen and the Vagabond: A Politics of Mobility was sent by University of Minnesota Press, François Cusset’s older French Theory was recompense for review work for them.

Paul Harrison, Anna J. Secor and Mikko Joronen eds. Cultural Geographies of Love and Catastrophe – Edinburgh University Press, August 2026 (print and open access)

Offers a new cultural geographical theorisation of love

• Suggests new ways to think about love in relation to world-ending catastrophes of various kinds (from the personal to the ecological)
• Showcases an exciting range of theoretical and creative approaches to cultural geographies of love and catastrophe

Across thirteen chapters, this collection examines how love takes place. Ranging from the classical to the contemporary, the artistic to the political, the human to the ecological, the contributors consider how love makes, unmakes, and remakes selves, communities and worlds. Resisting the urge to purify love, alive to love’s turbulence, they address the strange new attachments and alliances love makes possible and those it blights and prohibits. To love, to be loved, to speak of love, is a threat as much as it is a promise: the promise and threat of being undone by love. Love and catastrophe are not opposed but entwined.

At the heart of the collection is a surprising thesis: that love is always an experiment with distances, with intervals, with spacing. An education in love, an education by love, is a geography lesson.

Sixteen Writing Tips from Marcus Rediker – Pittsburgh Review of Books

Lots more writing and publishing posts and links here.

Susanne Vees-Gulani, Icon Dresden: Baroque City, Air War Symbol, Political Token – University of Michigan Press, February 2026 (print and open access)

New Books discussion with Miranda Melcher – thanks to dmf for the link

Icon Dresden explores how memory and politics in Dresden after its 1945 bombing are deeply intertwined with the city’s urban history. It highlights the complex origins of Dresden’s reputation as an exclusively cultural center, focusing on urban planning, marketing, tourism, and the city’s visual archive since the 17th century. Based on this iconic status, a narrative of victimhood arose after its destruction that ignored responsibilities while highlighting the city’s innocence. Despite its origin in Nazi propaganda, this narrative influenced postwar political discourse in socialist and post-reunification Germany. Icon Dresden also provides insight into Dresden’s role under National Socialism and the GDR’s evasive response to this history. It reveals how the strong presence of far-right movements in the city today stems from multiple discourses formed over centuries and communicated from generation to generation. 

Drawing on urban, heritage, and tourism studies, visual and memory studies, and environmental psychology, Icon Dresden examines Dresden’s history, identity, visual representations, and rebuilding decisions. It exposes the narratives that define its place in German and international memory and how, paradoxically, they support both Dresden’s current image as a symbol of peace and reconciliation and its backing of nativist and far-right movements.

Tamara T. Chin, The Silk Road Idea: Ancient Contact in the Modern Human Sciences – University of Chicago Press, November 2026

Traces the rise and fall of a set of modern disciplinary fields devoted to premodern historical contact that drew on intellectual currents across and beyond China and Europe.

In The Silk Road Idea, Tamara T. Chin examines the rise of interest in “the connected past” and its impact on key disciplines, focusing on the period from 1870 to 1970. Against the predominance of national studies, Chin argues that historical contact gradually came to be regarded as an object of inquiry over a century spanning imperialism, decolonization, and the Cold War. Interest in connected histories emerged from all corners: the colonialist and the anticolonial; the capitalist and the communist; the antiquarian and the activist.

During the ascent of academic specialization, Chin contends, geography, history, philology, and linguistics domesticated contact through distinct frameworks and units of analysis, making it into something geographers mapped, historians narrated, philologists read, and linguists heard. But this also brought disruption. To historically connect Afro-Eurasia, disciplinary paradigms were questioned, and, in some cases, transformed. Intellectual debates in East Asia and Europe became entangled with those in South Asia and East Africa. Chin uses the concept of the “Silk Road” to capture the epistemological challenge of including China in a globally connected past, from the pursuit of civilizational origins to that of entangled empires. The Silk Road Idearevisits the stakes of premodern contact for the histories of colonialism, capitalism, and knowledge, showing how the connecting and reconfiguring of the modern world enabled and was enabled by a reimagination of antiquity.