Jeremy Crampton discusses Joel Wainwright’s new book Geopiracy. It sounds an interesting and important book, published in the new Palgrave Pivot series. Palgrave Pivot are books of 20-25,000 words in length – which is about a quarter of the length of most academic texts. But they are extraordinarily expensive – £30 for the book in hardback, and £17.17 for the Kindle edition. Really? I thought that these briefer projects, part way between a book and an article were an experiment in publishing. Seemingly not with these kinds of prices – okay print-on-demand might be expensive, but surely not an e-copy.
Geopiracy: Oaxaca, Militant Empiricism, and Geographical Thought. 2013. By Joel Wainwright. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Joel Wainwright’s new book is an indispensable contribution to the Bowman Expeditions controversy.
Geopiracy is an intervention in the “Bowman Expeditions” and the controversy that has arisen around them since 2009. It appears in a new imprint from Palgrave Macmillan designed to provide an outlet for pieces that are longer than an article but shorter than a monograph–according to the publisher targeting texts of about 20-25,000 words. Geopiracy is fewer than 100 pages of text, but it acts like a glove to the face of geography, issuing a challenge.
Wainwright divides his book into 6 short chapters. He begins by discussing the initial objections to the Expeditions and reproducing selections of the letters from Oaxaca and the Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca (UNOSJO) that were issued in January 2009. Although these letters…
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