Progressive Geographies

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.

Alison M. Downham Moore, The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalisation of Women’s Ageing: A History – Oxford University Press, October 2022, now available open access

Doctors writing about menopause in France vastly outnumbered those in other cultures throughout the entire nineteenth century. The concept of menopause was invented by French male medical students in the aftermath of the French Revolution, becoming an important pedagogic topic and a common theme of doctors’ professional identities in postrevolutionary biomedicine. Older women were identified as an important patient cohort for the expanding medicalisation of French society and were advised to entrust themselves to the hygienic care of doctors in managing the whole era of life from around and after the final cessation of menses. However, menopause owed much of its conceptual weft to earlier themes of women as the sicker sex, of vitalist crisis, of the vapours, and of astrological climacteric years. 

This is the first comprehensive study of the origins of the medical concept of menopause, richly contextualising its role in nineteenth-century French medicine and revealing the complex threads of meaning that informed its invention. It tells a complex story of how women’s ageing featured in the demographic revolution in modern science, in the denigration of folk medicine, in the unique French field of hygiène, and in the fixation on women in the emergence of modern psychiatry. It reveals the nineteenth-century French origins of the still-current medical and alternative-health approaches to women’s ageing as something to be managed through gynaecological surgery, hormonal replacement, and lifestyle intervention.

In the final years of his life, Michel Foucault often used the Bibliothèque du Saulchoir, a small Dominican library in Paris, for his work. I’ve never had a reason to visit before, but today I spent the morning there, looking at some correspondence in the Fonds Jean de Menasce.

There is a piece about Foucault’s use of the library here. It used to hold the papers of the Centre Michel Foucault, but they were relocated to IMEC many years ago.

Georg Löfflmann, The Politics of Antagonism: Populist Security Narratives and the Remaking of Political Identity – Routledge, March 2024

Very expensive hardback and e-book only at this time.

This book demonstrates how populist security narratives served as the driving force behind the mobilization of Republican voters and the legitimation of an ‘America First’ policy agenda under the Trump presidency. Going beyond existing research on both populism and security narratives, the author links insights from political psychology on collective narcissism, blame attribution and emotionalization with research in political communication on narrative and framing to explore the political and societal impact of a populist security imaginary. Drawing on a comprehensive range of sources including key interviews, campaign and policy speeches, presidential addresses, and posts on social media, it shows how progressives, political opponents, immigrants, racial justice activists, and key institutions of liberal democracy collectively became an internal Other, delegitimated as ‘enemies of the people’. Developing an innovative conceptual-analytical framework of nationalist populism that expands on established concepts of political identity and ontological security, the book will appeal to students of critical security studies, critical constructivist approaches in International Relations, and US politics.