I’m pleased to announce that along with Adam David Morton (Political Economy, University of Sydney) I have been awarded a small grant from the Independent Social Research Foundation for the project ‘Henri Lefebvre’s writings on Rural Sociology, Ground Rent and the Politics of Land’. The grant is to support the translation of essays by Lefebvre on the political economy of ground rent and rural sociology. The plan is that we edit these essays and present them as a book with substantial notes and introduction, on the model of a previous book of Lefebvre’s essays that I co-edited with Neil Brenner – State, Space, World, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

The first essay from the project, ‘The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology” was recently publishing in the journal Antipode, translated by Warwick Philosophy PhD student Matthew Dennis, and edited and with an introduction by Adam and me (both open access). Several more such essays will appear in the edited book – many will come from the first half of Du rural à l’urbain, but there are uncollected texts we intend to include.

When we were first beginning the project we wrote a short piece for the Politics Reconsidered blog answering a key question about this project: Why read a long dead French Marxist to think about land struggles today?