Progressive Geographies

Jacques Schuhmacher, Nazi-Era Provenance of Museum Collections: A research guide – UCL Press, May 2024 (print and open access)

When we look at the artworks on display in museums, there is always a real possibility that some of these objects once belonged to victims of the Nazis – a possibility that has remained unacknowledged for far too long. Countless artworks were seized or forcibly sold, with many ending up in museum collections around the world, even in countries which actively fought to defeat Nazi Germany.

Nazi-Era Provenance of Museum Collections equips readers with the knowledge and strategies essential for confronting the shadow of the Nazi past in museum collections. Jacques Schuhmacher provides the vital historical orientation required to understand the Nazis’ complex campaign of systematic dispossession and extermination, and highlights the current environment in which museum-based Nazi-era provenance research takes place.

This book introduces readers to the research methods and resources that can be used to reveal the moving stories behind the objects, highlighting the absorbing work of provenance researchers as it plays out in practice.

Provenance research not only seeks to recover erased names and experiences and to reinsert them into a historical record, but also to ensure that the Nazis’ actions and worldview do not remain unchallenged in the galleries and storerooms of our museums today.

Editors at Philosophy & Public Affairs Resign; Will Launch New OA Journal – Daily Nous

The executive, associate, and advisory editors and all of the editorial board members of one of the most influential journals in moral and political philosophy, Philosophy & Public Affairs, have resigned en masse.

According to their statement (below), crucial aims of scholarly journals are “not well-served by commercial publishing.” Philosophy & Public Affairs is published by Wiley, the sixth largest publishing corporation in the world by revenue (over $2 billion annually).

Not everyone can afford open access monographs | Wonkhe

Adding requirements for open access books and chapters to REF will massively increase costs – and there is no additional funding to cover these. Dawn Hibbert asks for a rethink

Some interesting thoughts about this challenge. You can agree with the overall idea, that research should be made more easily available to anyone interested, and still think the current plans are seriously flawed.

Update 21 May 2024: there is another piece about this question at the LSE blog – The REF consultation shows the need for a more plural perspective on OA Books

Mary Gilmartin, Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin & Sue Roberts (ed.), Key Thinkers on Space and Place, third edition – Sage, June 2024

Space and place are at the heart of how geographers and sociologists think.  This updated edition of the essential undergraduate text will introduce you to the most influential thinkers in the tradition of social theory, with a new focus on the past fifty years.  This book is designed to engage with theoretical debates in human geography through the individuals who have made the most significant contributions to this field.  This will show you how ideas are shaped by contexts, and how those ideas in turn effect change. This book shows how theoretical understandings evolve, shift and change. It also highlights the connections between different thinkers, whose ideas are developed in collaboration with or in reaction to others. Spatial thought is never developed in a vacuum, but is always constructed by individuals and groups of people located in particular institutional and social structures, with their own sets of personal and political beliefs. The biographical approach of this book reveals how individual thinkers draw on a rich legacy of ideas from past and contemporary generations.

With increased coverage of international and female thinkers, as well as those who work against Eurocentric notions of space and place, this book reveals the exciting reorientation of Geography towards new ideas and methods in the last decade.  Each entry contextualises its subject within on-going (inter)disciplinary debates and important political moments, as well as highlighting connections between different thinkers. Together the chapters uncover the rich and diverse evolution of social theory, equipping you with the foundational ideas of geographical thought.  Each entry offers the following components:

i) a short biography
ii) an explanation of ideas
iii) an exploration of how their ideas have been used and critiqued
iv) a selective bibliography of key publications (and key publications which review or critique)

Alexandre Lefebvre, Liberalism as a Way of Life – Princeton University Press, June 2024

Where do you get your values and sensibilities from? If you grew up in a Western democracy, the answer is probably liberalism. Conservatives are right about one thing: liberalism is the ideology of our times, as omnipresent as religion once was. Yet, as Alexandre Lefebvre argues in Liberalism as a Way of Life, many of us are liberal without fully realizing it—or grasping what it means. Misled into thinking that liberalism is confined to politics, we fail to recognize that it’s the water we swim in, saturating every area of public and private life, shaping our psychological and spiritual outlooks, and influencing our moral and aesthetic values—our sense of what is right, wrong, good, bad, funny, worthwhile, and more. This eye-opening book shows how so many of us are liberal to the core, why liberalism provides the basis for a good life, and how we can make our lives better and happier by becoming more aware of, and more committed to, the beliefs we already hold.

A lively, engaging, and uplifting guide to living well, the liberal way, Liberalism as a Way of Life is filled with examples from television, movies, stand-up comedy, and social media—from Parks and Recreationand The Good Place to the Borat movies and Hannah Gadsby. Along the way, you’ll also learn about seventeen benefits of being a liberal—including generosity, humor, cheer, gratitude, tolerance, and peace of mind—and practical exercises to increase these rewards.

You’re probably already waist-deep in the waters of liberalism. Liberalism as a Way of Life invites you to dive in.