Progressive Geographies

Online Seminar ’Digital Archives: Space, Time and Memory’ in association with ICCE, Goldsmiths, University of London

Date/Time: Wednesday October 20, 2021 

09.00 – 11:30 (London time) 

10.00 – 12.30 (Berlin Time) 

17.00 – 19.30 (Tokyo Time) 

Focusing on digital archives, we will explore the impact of artificial intelligence on practices of meaning-making and memory formation. 

David Beer on The Early Foucault at The Fragment

Reading Elden’s most recent installment in the series, The Early Foucault, is to be mesmerised by sheer detail. Focusing on the 1950s, a period before Foucault was established, Elden is deep in the archives. From amongst the dusty files, the book gives glimpses behind the curtain. As well as reading across different editions and versions of published works it also layers-in the type of insights that can only come from opening boxes and handling papers. At one point, for instance, Elden noticed, contrary to what is often thought, that Foucault was actually working on Nietzsche as far back as the mid 1950s – this is a discovery that is made due to some notes scrawled on the back of an early draft version of another piece of writing. This is one amongst many such moments. As a result, most of the book’s content is totally fresh, even to those who have read Foucault. It also means that it could be read by someone with no interest in Foucault but who is interested in writing, theory and the emergence of thinkers. By focusing on the period before Foucault’s well-known works, and during a time when there were few publications to work with, the archive has been allowed more space than in the previous volumes. The consequence is a rich engagement with the inner workings of ideas. The more archival focus of this book gives it even more of a backstage view on proceedings.

A really generous and thoughtful review – thank you!

Peter Merriman, Space – Routledge, Key Ideas in Geography, February 2022

Space is the first accessible text which provides a comprehensive examination of approaches that have crossed between such diverse fields as philosophy, physics, architecture, sociology, anthropology, and geography.

The text examines the influence of geometry, arithmetic, natural philosophy, empiricism and positivism to the development of spatial thinking, as well as focussing on the contributions of phenomenologists, existentialists, psychologists, Marxists and post-structuralists to how we occupy, live, structure, and perform spaces and practices of spacing. The book emphasises the multiple and partial construction of spaces through the embodied practices of diverse subjects, highlighting the contributions of feminists, queer theorists, anthropologists, sociologists and post-colonial scholars to academic debates. In contrast to contemporary studies which draw a clear line between scientific and particularly quantitative approaches to space and spatiality and more ‘lived’ human enactments and performances, this book highlights the continual influence of different mathematical and philosophical understandings of space and spatiality on everyday western spatial imaginations and registers in the twenty-first century.

Space is possibly the key concept underpinning research in geography, as well as being of central importance to scholars and practitioners working across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences. 

1. Introduction  2. Genealogies of Western Spatial Thinking  3. Geometric and Arithmetic Spaces  4. Psy-Spaces and Spatialities  5. Phenomenological and Existential Spatialities  6. Different Spatialities / Spaces of Difference  7. Production, Structuring and the Spatialities of Power  8. Representing, Practising, Spacing  9. Conclusions  Addendum: COVID-19 Spaces and Spatialities in the UK

‘Space is one of the most taken-for-granted, contested, and elusive of geographical concepts. In this engaging and accessible book, Peter Merriman guides us expertly through the twists and folds in the emergence of western conceptions of space and spatiality. Skillfully drawing together and appraising the most influential approaches to this complex topic, Merriman provides a compelling account of how space can be understood as abstract, lively, and intensely political. Merriman’s book will be an important and welcome resource for anyone in the social sciences and humanities seeking to make sense of how and why space matters.’

Derek McCormack, Professor of Cultural Geography, University of Oxford, UK

‘In this comprehensive survey, Peter Merriman provides a valuable map of the different ways in which space has been understood and practiced. An excellent guide for students – and their teachers – in a range of disciplines.’

Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography, Warwick University, UK

‘Space is both the most obvious thing in the world – where would we all be without it? what would we all be without it?  – and an enigma. As we play with it, it plays with us. Peter Merriman does a fine job of outlining all of the ways in which writers from many disciplines have played with and practised space, sensed and been sensed by it. A classic.’

Sir Nigel Thrift, Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford and Tsinghua University and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Bristol, UK

Human Geography special issue – Friedrich Engels and Geography

The Introduction by Camilla Royle is open access, the rest requires subscription

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) was Marx’s closest collaborator. He was influential in promoting Marxism both during Marx’s lifetime and after it. However, he is mentioned less often than Marx in geography. This editorial introduces a special issue of Human Geography on Friedrich Engels and Geography. It gives a brief overview of the key events in his life, discusses some of the geographical themes in Engels’ work – especially his relevance for work in political ecology, urbanism and geopolitics – and outlines the contents of the special issue.

Karla Mallette, Lives of the Great Languages: Arabic and Latin in the Medieval Mediterranean – University of Chicago Press, 2021

The story of how Latin and Arabic spread across the Mediterranean to create a cosmopolitan world of letters.

In this ambitious book, Karla Mallette studies the nature and behaviors of the medieval cosmopolitan languages of learning—classical Arabic and medieval Latin—as they crossed the Mediterranean. Through anecdotes of relationships among writers, compilers, translators, commentators, and copyists, Mallette tells a complex story about the transmission of knowledge in the period before the emergence of a national language system in the late Middle Ages and early modernity.

Mallette shows how the elite languages of learning and culture were only tenuously related to the languages of everyday life. These languages took years of study to master, marking the passage from intellectual childhood to maturity. In a coda to the book, Mallette speculates on the afterlife of cosmopolitan languages in the twenty-first century, the perils of monolingualism, and the ethics of language choice. The book offers insight for anyone interested in rethinking linguistic and literary tradition, the transmission of ideas, and cultural expression in an increasingly multilingual world.