Progressive Geographies

Sara B. Pritchard, Transforming Night: The History and Science of Light Pollution – University of Washington Press, July 2026

Darkness has become legible—and contested. Blending archival narrative with on-the-ground ethnography, Sara B. Pritchard traces how four fields—astronomy, remote sensing, conservation science, and ecology—have investigated artificial light at night, turning a ubiquitous convenience into a category of harm. From observatories chasing ever-receding darkness to the satellite images that first rendered a nocturnal planet from space and recent “Black Marble” maps, Pritchard shows how methods, instruments, and field sites shape what scientists can know about night and light—and what remains unseen.

Across these encounters, night emerges not as a backdrop but as an environment in its own right—one transformed by rapidly expanding, brightening illumination in the Anthropocene. The book chronicles the ascent of “light pollution,” as well as the new challenge of space-based brightness from satellite constellations, even as dark-sky advocates fight to preserve the starry firmament. Attentive to politics as much as photons, Pritchard brings environmental justice to the fore—highlighting tensions among light poverty, forced illumination, and surveillance and calls for “beneficial darkness.” She takes seriously Indigenous astronomers’ critiques of dispossession and “astro-colonialism,” asking what it means to site world-class telescopes on sacred land.

Sweeping from local parks to planetary vistas, Transforming Night reframes a familiar story of modern light as a history of changing nights—past, present, and possible. It will engage readers in environmental history and humanities, science and technology studies, and the sciences themselves, along with dark-sky activists and anyone drawn to the beauty and politics of the world after nightfall.

Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History – 24 June 2026

Download the Call for Papers (PDF)

When in danger, humans search for places of refuge — whether in states, homes, or religions. Political communities have their origins in our desire for shelter. Throughout history, what have we thought of as places of refuge? We have many reasons to seek refuge. Sometimes, we leave our homes in search of greater economic or educational opportunities. Other times, the places we knew as home no longer exist. How have people justified the need to leave, and what legitimises appeals for refuge in the eyes of receiving states and communities? And what happens when a place of refuge turns out to be just as unsafe as the place we have left behind? 

This year’s conference will focus on these questions through the lens of political theory and the history of political thought. It will showcase papers addressing such topics as the relation between refuge and territorial sovereignty, statehood, religious and civil conflict, trade and the market, the family, sexual politics, racial politics, and the environment. It will also take account of these questions in order to address some of the basic themes in political theory, such as the purpose of civil association, the relation between protection and obedience, and the boundaries of legitimate force. 

Roger Luckhurst, Graveyards: A History of Living with the Dead – Princeton University Press, October 2025

Why, how, and where do we inter our dead? How have people throughout history responded to the problem of laying their dead to rest? Roger Luckhurst sets out in search of answers in this arresting book. Taking readers on an unforgettable tour of the rich and unusual visual culture of the grave, he visits locales such as the pyramids of Giza, the catacombs and columbaria of Rome, and the cenotaphs erected to the world’s war dead. Along the way, he examines the diverse role of graveyards in literature, art, film, and television.

In engaging chapters that look at all aspects of the treatment of the dead, Luckhurst covers topics ranging from early burials and the emergence of necropolises and catacombs to grave robbing, garden cemeteries, the perilous overcrowding of the urban dead, and the emergence of modern funerary culture. Exploring the cultural afterlives of burial and memorial sites in the popular imagination, he shows how graves have served as guides to the underworld, poignant dedications to those we have lost, as reminders of our own mortality, and settings in gothic horror.

Blending lively storytelling with a wealth of stunning illustrations, Graveyards is a lyrical, frequently unexpected account of the grave as a signpost to the afterlife, a site of remembrance and self-reflection, and an object of enduring fascination.

Peter Garnsey, Rethinking Capital Punishment: The Pre-History of the Abolition of the Death Penalty – Cambridge University Press, April 2026

The death penalty was accepted almost universally until the eighteenth century, when Giuseppe Pelli of Florence and Cesare Beccaria of Milan produced works calling for its abolition. Why was this form of punishment so integrated into laws and customary practices? And what is the pre-history of the arguments in favour of its abolition? This book is the first to trace the origins of these ideas, beginning with the Lex Talionis in the Code of Hammurabi and moving across the Bible, Plato, to the Renaissance, and the emergence of utilitarianism in the 18th century. It also explores how the advance of the abolition of the death penalty was held up for a time in Britain, and stalled, apparently permanently, in America. Peter Garnsey ranges across philosophy, theology, law, and politics to provide a balanced and accessible overview of the beliefs about crime and punishment that underlay the arguments of the first abolitionists. This study is a compelling and original contribution to the history of ideas about capital punishment.

Paul Langley and Andrew Leyshon, Fintech Capital: The Digital Transformation of Everyday Money and Finance – Zone, July 2026

How people pay, make savings and investments, buy insurance, and take on debt is undergoing digital transformation across the globe. This book argues that FinTech is a distinct form of intermediary and rentier capital that is radically reorganizing the routine social relations of money and finance. People are being configured by FinTech capital as users and data rather than as consumers, a phenomenon we increasingly take for granted in our everyday lives.

Langley and Leyshon analyze the rise of FinTech capital through the intersecting processes of digital and financial capitalism that underpin it: platformization, datafication, monopolization, colonization, and capitalization. Platformization and datafication provide novel technologies and business models that reset the competitive coordinates and informational imperatives of monetary and financial intermediation. Monopolization and colonization dynamics reaffirm and renew institutional and geographical hierarchies and relations of plunder. And, all the while, FinTech has been sustained by huge volumes of investment from capitalization processes that are core to financial capitalism.

Illustrated by case studies of the FinTech operations of specialist startups, banks, telcos, and BigTechs based in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the United States, FinTech Capital will be of interest to social scientists of money, finance, and digital capitalism and all who want to understand this major transformation of contemporary economic life.

Stephen Legg, Spaces of Anticolonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities – University of Georgia Press, March 2025

I’ve shared news of the book before. There is now a New Books discussion with Saumya Dadoo – thanks to dmf for the link

Spaces of Anticolonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities provides a spatial analysis of the anticolonial governmentalities that emerged in the colonial capital of British India. Reading across imperial and nationalist archives, newspapers, memoirs, oral histories, and interviews it exposes the subaltern geographies and struggles which have traditionally been overshadowed by the presence of national leaders in Delhi. It reads the new capital and the old city as one interconnected political landscape and tracks the efforts of the Indian National Congress to mobilise and marshal support for the mass movements of Civil Disobedience (1930-34), Quit India (1942-43), and beyond. This bottom-up analysis, focused on the streets, bazars, neighbourhoods, homes, and undergrounds of the two cities, emphasises the significance of the articulation of physical and political space; it highlights the pioneering role of women in crafting these spaces; and it exposes the micro-techniques that Congress used to encourage Gandhi’s nonviolence. Michel Foucault’s final lectures on parrhesia (courageous speech and actions) are used to analyse these spaces of anticolonialism as coherent governmentalities which were themselves rejected by those who turned to violence in the years before independence in 1947. This volume provides an innovative study of anticolonial geography and a restive history of the capital of contemporary India’s 1.4 billion people.

István Hont, Political Economy from Pufendorf to Marx: Culture, Needs and Property Rights – eds. Lasse S. Andersen, Béla Kapossy, Richard Whatmore, Cambridge University Press, January 2026

Thanks to Duncan Bell for the link

István Hont (1947–2013) defected from Communist Hungary in the 1970s and became renowned globally as a scholarly visionary in European political ideas. Following his death, a wealth of unpublished material from an early project rewriting the history of liberty, politics and political economy from Samuel Pufendorf to Karl Marx was discovered. This book brings together seven of Hont’s previously unpublished papers, providing a revolutionary intellectual history of the Marxian notion of communism and revealing its origin in seventeenth-century natural jurisprudence. Hont aspired to integrate the history and theory of politics and economics, to infuse present-day concerns with a knowledge of past events and theoretical responses. The essays selected for this volume realise Hont’s historical imagination, range and intellectual ambition, exploring his belief that Marxism ought to be abandoned and explaining how to do it.

• Gives a new perspective on the work of István Hont, one of the greatest intellectual historians
• Provides a new interpretation of the history of Marx and Marxism
• Brings clarity to Hont’s vision of past and present, and to the significance of the history of political thought as a discipline

Roy Scranton, Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress – Stanford University Press, August 2025

We need a new realism in the face of global climate catastrophe.

Extreme heat, fires, floods, and storms are transforming our planet. Yet instead of serious responses from world leaders, we get increasing emissions, divisive politics, and ersatz solutions that offer more of the same: more capitalism, more complexity, more “progress.” 

The impasse we face is not only political and institutional, but cognitive, existential, and narrative. We’re incapable of grasping the scale, speed, and impact of global warming. Our brains can’t make sense of how radically our world is changing. And we optimistically cling to a civilizational narrative that promises a better tomorrow if we just keep doing what we’re doing. 

It’s well past time, Roy Scranton argues, to free ourselves from our dangerous and dogmatic faith in progress. Such unwarranted optimism will only accelerate our collective disintegration. If we want to have any hope at all for the future, it must be grounded in a recognition of human limits—a view Scranton calls ethical pessimism. 

Drawing from psychology, philosophy, history, and politics, as well as film, literature, and personal experience, Scranton describes the challenges we face in making sense of our predicament, from problems in communication to questions of justice, from the inherent biases in human perception to the difficulties of empirical knowledge. What emerges is a challenging but ultimately hopeful proposition: if we have the courage to accept our limits, we may find a way to embrace our unknowable future.

NDPR review by Arthur Obst