Progressive Geographies

At his relatively new Half Thoughts blog, Dave Beer has assembled a number of pieces into a virtual book, some of which are open access.

Over several years I’ve been working on a little background project that I’ve called ‘Reading Critical Data Studies’. The idea was quite simple. I tried to read and write about books in the field that I thought would be useful for teaching or that might help with research. It wasn’t possible to write about every book I encountered, there’s never enough time, so I picked out things that seemed important in some way or that covered a range of issues. In the pieces I wrote, I tried to respond to the ideas and perspectives in the books, offering thoughts and questions too. Together these pieces would hopefully add something to the debates.

I thought about it as a kind of book that would never actually be a book. So, instead, I’ve created a contents page below with links to the pieces. I’ve not included all the reviews I’ve done over the last few years, instead I’ve picked out eleven pieces that capture different issues in critical data studies (broadly conceived) and that might work alongside one another. Each chapter aims to find a way into the field through a focus on one book.

The full contents and links to all the pieces are here.

Andreas Malm on Palestine, Climate Activism and over-shooting 1.5 °C – interview on video with Sebastian Budgen

Andreas Malm is a Swedish climate activist, associate professor of human ecology at Lund University, and author of the best-selling How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire. Naomi Klein describes him as “one of the most original thinkers on the subject” of climate change.

In this interview with his Verso editor, Sebastian Budgen, he discusses the origins of his climate activism, strategic failures of the climate movement, his pro-Palestinian politics, and eco-socialism.

You can find all his work, including How to Blow Up a Pipeline, here: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blog…

Jean-Numa Ducange  and Anthony Burlaud (eds.), Marx, A French Passion: The Reception of Marx and Marxisms in France’s Political-Intellectual Life – trans. David Broder, Brill, 2023

Paperback after 12 months with Haymarket

Despite the collapse of Soviet-style socialism, the spectre of Marx still haunts the French imagination. This is no accident, in a country whose intellectual life and political history have long been marked by his multiple presences.
This volume offers a historical and sociological insight into the way his thought has been received in the French context, from his own lifetime to the present. Analysing Marx’s place and influence in the French intellectual, political and artistic debate – across the political spectrum and even in the French-speaking colonial world – it helps us understand the uses and misuses of an œuvre of paramount importance.

Call for Papers 2023: Global Histories of International Thought and Geopolitical Concepts

RUG-NUPI Research Workshop in the History and Theory of International Relations

Keynote speaker: Prof. Lucian Ashworth 

Location: University of Groningen, 9712 CP Netherlands

Date: Thursday 23th – Friday 24th, May 2024

full details in pdf below

Mathias Albert, Dina Brode-Roger, Lisbeth Iversen, Svalbard Imaginaries: The Making of an Arctic Archipelago – Palgrave Macmillan, November 2023

Hardback and e-book at present; paperback due in December 2024

By drawing on a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds, this book illustrates the immense complexities of Svalbard as a place, point of reference, or social concept. It portrays the multiple, situated perspectives that characterize understandings and imaginings of Svalbard, and brings together contributions from academic fields that rarely interact with each other.

Svalbard Imaginaries contributes to a number of research contexts, ranging from a broadly conceived, multi-disciplinary field of ‘Arctic Studies’ to more disciplinary specific debates on how places are reworked at the interstices of various global flows and vice versa. It assembles contributions on imaginaries that cover a wide array of issues, including—but not limited to—Svalbard as a geopolitical site, a landscape, an image, a (mining) heritage assemblage, a tourist destination, a wilderness, a built environment, a site of knowledge production, a site of artistic engagement, and projections of the future. It deliberately assembles analyses that refer to a variety of timescales and covers representations of the past, the present, and possible futures of Svalbard.

Robert Zaretsky, The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas – University of Chicago Press, 2021, paperback 2023

Known as the “patron saint of all outsiders,” Simone Weil (1909–43) was one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable thinkers, a philosopher who truly lived by her political and ethical ideals. In a short life framed by the two world wars, Weil taught philosophy to lycée students and organized union workers, fought alongside anarchists during the Spanish Civil War and labored alongside workers on assembly lines, joined the Free French movement in London and died in despair because she was not sent to France to help the Resistance.

Though Weil published little during her life, after her death, thanks largely to the efforts of Albert Camus, hundreds of pages of her manuscripts were published to critical and popular acclaim. While many seekers have been attracted to Weil’s religious thought, Robert Zaretsky gives us a different Weil, exploring her insights into politics and ethics, and showing us a new side of Weil that balances her contradictions—the rigorous rationalist who also had her own brand of Catholic mysticism; the revolutionary with a soft spot for anarchism yet who believed in the hierarchy of labor; and the humanitarian who emphasized human needs and obligations over human rights. Reflecting on the relationship between thought and action in Weil’s life, The Subversive Simone Weil honors the complexity of Weil’s thought and speaks to why it matters and continues to fascinate readers today.