Progressive Geographies

Julie Zook and Kerstin Sailer (eds.), The Covert Life of Hospital Architecture, UCL Press, March 2022 (print and open access)

The Covert Life of Hospital Architecture addresses hospital architecture as a set of interlocked, overlapping spatial and social conditions. It identifies ways that planned-for and latent functions of hospital spaces work jointly to produce desired outcomes such as greater patient safety, increased scope for care provider communication and more intelligible corridors.

By advancing space syntax theory and methods, the volume brings together emerging research on hospital environments. Opening with a description of hospital architecture that emphasizes everyday relations, the sequence of chapters takes an unusually comprehensive view that pairs spaces and occupants in hospitals: the patient room and its intervisibility with adjacent spaces, care teams and on-ward support for their work and the intelligibility of public circulation spaces for visitors. The final chapter moves outside the hospital to describe the current healthcare crisis of the global pandemic as it reveals how healthcare institutions must evolve to be adaptable in entirely new ways. Reflective essays by practicing designers follow each chapter, bringing perspectives from professional practice into the discussion.

The Covert Life of Hospital Architecture makes the case that latent dimensions of space as experienced have a surprisingly strong link to measurable outcomes, providing new insights into how to better design hospitals through principles that have been tested empirically. It will become a reference for healthcare planners, designers, architects and administrators, as well as for readers from sociology, psychology and other areas of the social sciences.

Jo van Every – Spotlight on: Burnout

I published my first post with “burnout” in the title, “Burnout is real”,  in 2022. We were just coming out of the most intense phase of the COVID pandemic disruptions. The term was familiar to people, but the idea that it might be a real diagnosable medical condition was less well known. It might still be.

In March 2024, I interviewed a client of mine who had taken sick leave for burnout about her experience with clinically significant burnout. I learned a lot from that conversation. It gave me a different perspective on the situations other clients were facing, and a new perspective on some of the topics I’ve been writing about for years.

Burnout is characterised by severe fatigue. Physical fatigue may even result in collapsing at work. That physical fatigue will be accompanied by cognitive fatigue, symptoms of which include inability to concentrate, memory problems, and so on. Fatigue also contributes to emotional dysregulation.

Another major sign of burnout is starting to hate what you used to love. This may also present as a kind of malaise in which things seem meaningless.

Burnout is caused by exceeding your capacity for an extended period of time. Your physical capacity. Your cognitive capacity. Your emotional capacity. Your body will use adrenaline and cortisol to help you do this, but at some point, even your adrenal glands will give up. I hope you don’t get there.

If you get to that extreme stage, it is going to take time to recover. It is crucial to address fatigue earlier.

continues here

Serene Richards, Biopolitics as a System of Thought – Bloomsbury, May 2024

Our contemporary mode of life is characterised by what Serene Richards in Biopolitics as a System of Thought calls: Smart Being. Smart Being believes in the solutions of techno-capital where living is always at stake and directed to survival. Armed with this concept, this book examines how we arrived at this mode of being and asks how it could be that, while the material conditions of our lives have increasingly worsened, our capacities for effective political action, understood as the capacity for transforming our existing social relations, appear to be diminishing.

Drawing from jurists and philosophers such as Pierre Legendre, Yan Thomas, Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, Richards argues that biopolitics intervenes at the most minute level of our everyday lives. She argues that there are conceptual truths presupposed in the mode of biopolitics’ functioning, for instance that life can be assigned a value for the purpose of intervention, abandonment, or death, which have implications for our politics. In exciting engagements with political movements such as the post-May 1968 Mouvement des travailleurs Arabes (MTA), Richards shows how demands to transform our system of social relations are undermined by institutional models that proffer to offer rights protection while simultaneously annihilating the living altogether. Through a reappraisal of law, governance and capital, Richards seeks to reconceptualise our collectivity of thought, arguing for a politics of destitution that could form the basis of a communism to come.

Acid Horizon podcast – thanks to dmf for the link

The cover of the book has a 1983 photograph of men and children standing in front of a wall in the Gutenberg transit quarters with graffiti reading in Arabic “You live in the shit” and in French “React!” Translation and information taken from The Funambulist.

Colin Flint – interview at E-International Relations

Colin Flint, a geographer by training, is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Political Science at Utah State University. His research interests include geopolitics and peacebuilding. He is the author of Near and Far Waters: The Geopolitics of Seapower (Stanford University Press, 2024), Introduction to Geopolitics (Routledge, 4^th ed. 2022), Geopolitical Constructs: The Mulberry Harbours, World War Two, and the Making of a Militarized Transatlantic (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), and co-author, with Peter Taylor of Political Geography: World-Economy, Nation-State and Locality Routledge, 7^th edition, 2018). He is editor emeritus of the journal Geopolitics. His books have been translated into Spanish, Polish, Korean, Mandarin, Japanese and Farsi.

Georgios Varouxakis, The West: The History of an Idea, Princeton University Press, July 2025

A long time off, but this looks very interesting.

How did “the West” come to be used as a collective self-designation signaling political and cultural commonality? When did “Westerners” begin to refer to themselves in this way? Was the idea handed down from the ancient Greeks, or coined by nineteenth-century imperialists? Neither, writes Georgios Varouxakis in The West, his ambitious and fascinating genealogy of the idea. “The West” was not used by Plato, Cicero, Locke, Mill, or other canonized figures of what we today call the Western tradition. It was not first wielded by empire-builders. It was, Varouxakis shows, decisively promoted in the 1840s by the French philosopher Auguste Comte (whose political project, incidentally, was passionately anti-imperialist). The need for the use of the term“the West” emerged to avoid the confusing or unwanted consequences of the use of “Europe.” The two overlapped, but were not identical, with the West used to exclude certain “others” within Europe as well as to include the Americas.

After examining the origins, Varouxakis traces the many and often surprising changes in the ways in which the West has been understood, and the different intentions and repercussions related to a series of these contested definitions. While other theories of the West consider only particular aspects of the concept and its history (if only in order to take aim at its reputation), Varouxakis’s analysis offers a comprehensive, multilayered account that reaches to the present day, exploring the multiplicity of current and prospective meanings. He concludes with an examination of how, since 2022, definitions and membership in the West are being reworked to include Ukraine, as the evolution and redefinition continue.

Charlotte Lydia Riley and Suzanne Nossel, Is Free Speech Under Threat? – Penguin, October 2024

Two leading thinkers present alternative answers to one of the most difficult and divisive questions of our times: Is free speech under threat?

Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, the leading free expression organisation, argues that alongside the necessary and long-overdue elevation of minority voices in recent years, there has also arisen an uncompromising intolerance – most notably on university campuses and online – that wrongly equates a wide range of offensive speech with violence and seeks to shut it down. This has led to an escalating free speech arms race, from which everyone loses.

Charlotte Lydia Riley, historian of empire and editor of The Free Speech Wars, argues that accusations of cancel culture and defences of free speech are too often disingenuous attempts to fuel a culture war and so inhibit an important realignment in which hateful speech is at last being called out for what it is and the right to free expression is being extended to more people than ever before.

Published in conjunction with Intelligence Squared, the world’s leading curator of debate, this book is part of the THINK AGAIN series: short books that present two expert, contrasting but equally persuasive views in a single volume that can be read from either end.

Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose, Questioning Humanity: Being Human in a Posthuman Age – Edward Elgar, June 2024

This innovative book questions what it means to be human today and in the future. Drawing on the natural, human and life sciences, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose encourage us to reconsider the human condition and the ways in which humans are affected by their animality, technology and the prospect of their annihilation. 

Questioning Humanity builds on and questions established orthodoxies in the social sciences and humanities. Using arguments from the life sciences it introduces readers to debates surrounding posthumanism, human evolution, the uniqueness of the human mind and human consciousness. The book goes further, into novel territory, to examine relations and distinctions between humans and non-human animals, developments in ‘artificial intelligence’ and its limits, the prospect of human extinction by climate change, and the possibilities of alien civilizations. Osborne and Rose argue that despite calls for a new posthuman ethics, we remain all too human, and the social and human sciences should be imbued with a naturalistic humanism if they are to address the real and immediate challenges of local and global inequity and injustice.

Providing an accessible introduction into both the contemporary challenges and future key questions within the social and human sciences, this book will be a vital read for undergraduate and postgraduate students in these areas. Questioning Humanity will also appeal to scholars from social, cultural, anthropological and biological disciplines interested in human distinctiveness.