Progressive Geographies

Call for Abstracts: Warwick Graduate Conference in Political and Legal Theory  

Please join the Department of Politics and International Studies (PAIS), the Department of Philosophy and the Centre for Ethics, Law and Public Affairs (CELPA) at the University of Warwick for their annual conference for postgraduate students working in political and legal theory.

Conference Date: 10 February 2024 

Location: The University of Warwick 

Plenary sessions:  

Cécile Laborde (Oxford): ‘Being Free, Feeling Free. Race, Gender and Republican Domination’.

Sarah Fine (Cambridge): ‘All of Me: The Personal is Philosophical’.

The aim of the conference is to provide an opportunity for graduate students to receive useful feedback on work in progress. Papers may deal with any area of contemporary political theory, political philosophy, legal theory, applied ethics, or the history of political thought, and should take no more than twenty minutes to present.

Graduate students interested in presenting papers should send abstracts (no more than 500 words) to PLTGradConf@warwick.ac.uk by no later than 8 January 2024.

To help students needing our response to secure travel funding from their home departments, we shall reply promptly to early submissions with our decisions.

Those wanting to attend the conference should register by no later than 30 January 2024 via email. Attendance is free of charge. Lunch and refreshments will be provided.

For any enquiries, please feel free to contact the conference organisers using the email address: PLTGradConf@warwick.ac.uk.

The British Library has a new temporary site up, with much more information available since I last checked. But in their FAQ they are anticipating ‘several months’ to assess and repair, and indicate similar organisations have taken over 12 months to get back up and running: www.bl.uk/cyber-incident

Edited above – the site says ‘over 12 months’, rather than ’12 months’. This expectation management is fair enough, but ‘over 12 months’ and ‘several months’ are obviously very vague. It’s over 12 months since the Battle of Waterloo, so this really doesn’t say anything. We are probably at a stage where PhDs, post-docs, research projects etc. which are dependent on BL collections are going to need reassessment and institutional support.

Tobias Keiling and Ian Alexander Moore, Spoiling the Party? Heidegger’s Lectures on Trakl at Spa Bühlerhöhe – b2o (boundary 2 online)

It all began with plans for a birthday party. Gerhard Stroomann, chief physician and charismatic leader of the posh spa resort and sanitarium Bühlerhöhe (imagine Thomas Mann’s character Hofrat Behrens, transplanted to a postwar “magic mountain” in the Black Forest) would be turning sixty-five in 1952, and he wanted to celebrate it with a weekend of events devoted to his beloved poet Georg Trakl. Even more, he wanted to hear the philosopher Martin Heidegger speak about the poet. Heidegger had already given a few lectures at the spa while he was still prohibited from teaching at the university, including one on language under the guise of a commentary on Trakl’s poem “A Winter Evening.” Although irritated by the overeager, elite milieu of the luxury retreat—“it was,” as one eyewitness reported about the event, “very highbrow, […] teeming with counts and princesses, a bit snobbish”—Heidegger accepted Stroomann’s invitation.

Johan Östling and David Larsson Heidenblad, The History of Knowledge – trans. Lena Olsson, Cambridge University Press, January 2024 (print and open access)

Despite the date, the e-book is available now.

This Element provides a pedagogical overview of the history of knowledge, including its main currents, distinguishing ideas, and key concepts. However, it is not primarily a state-of-the-art overview but rather an argumentative contribution that seeks to push the field in a certain direction – towards studying knowledge in society and knowledge in people’s lives. Hence, the history of knowledge envisioned by the authors is not a rebranding of the history of science and intellectual history, but rather a reinvigoration of social and cultural history. This implies that many different forms of knowledge should be objects of study. By drawing on ongoing research from all across the world dealing with different time periods and problems, the authors demonstrate that the history of knowledge can enrich our understanding of past societies. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Foucault: Art, Histories, and Visuality in the 21st Century OCAD (Ontario College of Art and Design) University, Toronto/Tkaronto, Canada, May 29-30, 2024

The French philosopher Michel Foucault’s (1926–84) work has had a major effect on scholars of art and visuality since Les Mots et les choses (1966) appeared in English in 1970 as The Order of Things. His radical ideas galvanized artists and art writers into many different directions: to insert ruptures and incoherence into history; to reimagine the subject, subjectivity, and identity; to politicize the realms of vision, visuality, and visibility; to formulate critical approaches to technology and media; and to scrutinize the inner workings of art institutions, including museums, schools, and archives. The versatility of Foucault’s thought greatly contributed to major shifts across disciplines, including the interventions of the “new art history” in the 1970s, multiculturalism and identity politics in the 1980s, visual and cultural studies in the 1990s, the questions of contemporaneity and globalization in this century. Owing to the posthumous publications of his lectures and the papers deposited at archives internationally, Foucault’s oeuvre continues to shape current discussions on methodological, political, and ethical assumptions regarding visualities and art histories forty years after his death.

Proposals can be sent to foucault2024@gmail.com by Jan 22, 2024

Full details here.

Carolyn Dever, How to Lose a Library at Public Books – the best thing I’ve read on the ongoing and very serious British Library problems (via @nescio13 on X/Twitter)

What’s business as usual at the Victoria and Albert Museum is far from the case fewer than four miles away, at the United Kingdom’s national public repository, the British Library. At the British Library, hopeful would-be readers of the library’s prodigious catalogue of unique, rare, and contemporary materials are out of luck.

On Halloween, 2023, the British Library suffered a massive cyberattack, which rendered its web presence nonexistent, its collections access disabled, and even its wifi fried. Moreover, the cyberattack also swept the personal data of the British Library’s humans—its users, but, far more extensively, its staff—into the hands of an outside party. During the final week of November, images of the stolen data were presented for auction on the dark web, for sale to whoever’s willing to pay 20 bitcoin, or about £600,000. By making the library’s digital infrastructure into a commodity (in an open, albeit dark, market), a “ransomware gang” calling itself Rhysida hopes to pressure the British Library to pay up first.

Update 16 Dec 11am: after weeks of limited information, the British Library blog has been updated with a much more detailed statement from the chief executive. A phased return of some more services is due in the New Year.

Update 19 Dec: some good questions at The Edithorial

Update 22 Dec: there is a piece in The New Yorker