Progressive Geographies

Bruce O’Neill, Underground: Dreams and Degradations in Bucharest – Penn Press, April 2024

This book gets to the bottom of the twenty-first-century city, literally. Underground moves beneath Romania’s capital, Bucharest, to examine how the demands of global accumulation have extended urban life not just upward into higher skylines, and outward to ever more distant peripheries, but also downward beneath city sidewalks. Underground details how developers and municipal officials have invested tremendous sums of money to gentrify and expand Bucharest’s constellation of subterranean Metro stations and pedestrian pathways, basements and cellars, bunkers and crypts to provide upwardly mobile residents with space to live, work, and play in an overcrowded and increasingly unaffordable city center. In this sense, the repurposed underground facilitates dreams of middle-class ascendancy. This sense of optimism, the book shows, invariably gives way to ambivalence as the middle classes confront the indignities of being incorporated into the city from below.

Bruce O’Neill argues that these loosely coordinated efforts have not only introduced novel forms of social fragmentation but also a new aesthetics of inequality that are fundamentally shaping where and how the middle classes fit in the city. Pushing urban studies beyond a cartographic perspective—with its horizontal focus upon centers and peripheries, walls and gates—O’Neill brings into focus the vertical dynamics of gentrification that place some “on the bottom” and others “on top” of the city. As cities around the world extend further downward in the name of development and sustainability, Underground makes clear that scholars and practitioners of the twenty-first-century city will need to become ever more attuned to the cultural politics of urban verticality, asking not just who is included in the city and who has been pressed outside of it, but also who is on top and who is placed on the bottom.

La Toupie folle – The Pragmatic Genealogy of Concepts

Our research project, The Pragmatic Genealogy of Concepts funded by a Small Grant from the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust, concerns, as its primary object, an issue of the journal Recherches(number 13) from December 1973, which bears the title La Généalogie du capital: les équipments du pouvoir. The issue is the result of a working group of the organisation CERFI (Centre d’études, de recherches et de formation institutionelles), established by French activist, psychiatrist and philosopher Félix Guattari in 1965.

The project is a collaboration between Susana Caló, Patrick ffrench and Daniel Nemenyi. Much more at the project website.

This journal issue was one of the collaborative projects with which Foucault was involved. More on those here.

The geographer Gillian Rose with some Tips for planning research leave

“I’ve learnt from Arendt the necessity – as well as dangers – of speaking your mind.”

Thanks to Dave Beer for the link.

The book being discussed is Lyndsey Stonebridge, We are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience – Penguin, January 2024 (US; UK).

Marta Faustino and Hélder Telo (eds.) Hadot and Foucault on Ancient Philosophy: Critical Assessments – Brill, March 2024

Some interesting looking chapters from a good range of people, but a terrible price, where the e-book is even more expensive than the physical one. Presumably because of VAT, but there are obviously many other costs associated with a physical book.

The affinities between Pierre Hadot’s and Michel Foucault’s interpretations of ancient philosophy, as well as their impact, are well-known. However, these interpretations have been criticized in several crucial points. This book provides the first extensive critical assessment of these interpretations. It brings together specialists in ancient philosophy, as well as Hadot and Foucault scholars, in order both to explore criticisms and clarify Hadot’s and Foucault’s accounts.

In doing so, it not only offers an overview of the main trends in Philosophy as a Way of Life, but also recasts the debate and opens new paths of inquiry in the field.

William K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci – Edward Elgar, January 2024

You can probably guess from ‘companion’ that this is an interesting-looking collection at a crazy price…

Affirming Antonio Gramsci’s continuing influence, this adroitly cultivated Companion offers a comprehensive overview of Gramsci’s contributions to the interdisciplinary fields of critical social science, social and political thought, economics and emancipatory politics. Within the tradition of historical materialism, it explores the continuing impact of Gramscian perspectives in the present day.

Featuring contributions from eminent scholars, the Companion engages with Gramsci’s thought in the broader context of his life, outlining his innovative theoretical and historical analyses of capitalist modernity. Key themes within Gramscian theory are examined such as historical bloc, passive revolution, integral state, and civil society, which elaborate upon the core concept of hegemony. Chapters map out the development of historical materialism and rigorously analyse contemporary issues of urgency including climate breakdown, the rise of far-right populism, and increasing geopolitical tension.

Offering a state-of-the-art review of Gramscian theory, this Companion will prove beneficial to academics, researchers and students from across the social sciences and humanities, and will be essential reading for those interested in political economy and political theory, sociology, philosophy, radical and feminist economics, environmental studies, gender studies, and post-colonial and cultural studies.

Gerd Carling, Linguistic Archaeology: An Introduction and Methodological Guide – Routledge, May 2024

Linguistic Archaeology provides students with an accessible introduction to the field of linguistic archaeology, both as theoretical framework and methodological toolkit, for understanding the conceptual foundations and practical considerations involved in reconstructing the prehistory of language.

The book introduces the field’s expansion out of traditional approaches to focus more on the interplay of related disciplines and the reconstruction of human language beyond the written period. The opening chapter outlines key theories and charts their development from the nineteenth century through to today, drawing on work from computational historical linguistics, phylogenetics, and linguistic anthropology. Subsequent chapters build on theory to take a hands-on approach in mining empirical data in the process of reconstructing language prehistory, including references, links, and instructions to open access resources, and offering a step-by-step guide for employing the rich range of available methods in working with this data. Closing chapters situate theory and method in context against chronological and geographic perspectives and look ahead to future trajectories for continued progress in this emerging area of study.

Offering a holistic entry point into linguistic archaeology, this innovative volume will be a helpful resource for students in historical linguistics, linguistic anthropology, language evolution, and cultural geography.

Learning lessons from the cyber-attack – British Library update and 18 page report, 8 March 2024

Today, we’ve published a paper about the cyber-attack that took place against the British Library last October. Our hope is that doing this will help other organisations to plan and protect themselves against attacks of this kind.

The threat of aggressive and disruptive cyber-attacks is higher than it has ever been, and the organisations behind these attacks are increasingly advanced in their techniques and ruthless in their willingness to destroy whole technical systems.

This is of especial importance for libraries and all those institutions who share our mission to collect and make accessible knowledge and culture in digital form, and preserve it for posterity. Though the motive of the attack on the British Library appears to have been purely monetary, it functioned as, effectively, an attack on access to knowledge.

The paper is informed by our expert advisers and specialists, but is our own account, updated and adapted from our internal investigations into the incident. It gives a description and timeline of the attack, to the best of our current understanding, and its implications for the Library’s operations, future infrastructure and risk assessment. Its goal is to share our understanding of what happened and to help others learn from our experience, with a section (‘Learning lessons from the attack’, pages 17-18) drawing out 16 key lessons. You can download and read it here….

Michael Hughes, Feliks Volkhovskii: A Revolutionary Life – Open Book, forthcoming 2024

(can’t find a precise date, so will update with further details later)

Update October 2024: Now published and available open access as pdf.

Feliks Volkhovskii (1846-1914) was a significant figure in the Russian revolutionary movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He lived through pivotal changes ranging from the rise of ‘nihilism’ in the 1860s and the growth of populism in the 1870s, through to the creation of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in the early 1900s. Imprisoned three times before he turned thirty, he spent ten years in Siberian exile before fleeing abroad to join the fight against tsarist autocracy from western Europe.

Following Volkhovskii’s arrival in Britain in 1890, he played a central role in the campaign to win sympathy for the Russian revolutionary movement, editing newspapers and journals including Free Russia. He also helped to smuggle propaganda into Russia as well as becoming one of the most prominent figures in the émigré leadership of the Socialist Revolutionaries. Throughout his life, Volkhovskii was also a prolific writer of poetry and short stories, and was on good terms with many leading literary figures of the time including Ford Maddox Ford and Edward and Constance Garnett. 

Michael Hughes’s groundbreaking new biography provides a vivid history of this notable but hitherto neglected figure of both the political and literary worlds. Based on ten years of research in archives across the world and drawing on sources in multiple languages, this masterful biography explores how Volkhovskii’s life illuminates broader intellectual and historical questions about the Russian revolutionary movement. It is essential reading for anyone interested in late Imperial Russia and the Russian revolution.