Progressive Geographies

What the Foucault? BBC Radio 4 discussion with Shahidha Bari

Last December Liz Truss made a speech. The Minister for Women and Equalities spoke about her memories of being at school in Leeds. She was taught about sexism and racism, she said, but not enough time was spent on being taught how to read and write. “These ideas,” said Truss, “have their roots in post-modernist philosophy – pioneered by Foucault – that put societal power structures and labels ahead of individuals and their endeavours.”

So do Foucault’s ideas pose a real danger to social and cultural life in Britain? Or is he a “bogeyman” deployed by some politicians to divide and distract us from real issues?

In this edition of Analysis, writer and academic Shahidha Bari tries to make sense of Foucault’s influence in the UK – and asks whether his ideas really do have an effect on Britain today.

Producer: Ant Adeane
Editor: Jasper Corbett

Contributors:

Agnes Poirier, journalist and author of Left Bank: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-50

Michael Drolet, Senior Research Fellow in the History of Political Thought, Worcester College, University of Oxford

Lisa Downing, Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality at the University of Birmingham

Richard Whatmore, Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Co-Director of the Institute of Intellectual History 

Matthew Goodwin, Professor of Politics in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent

Clare Chambers, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Cambridge

Charlotte Riley, Lecturer in Twentieth-Century British History at the University of Southampton

Handbook on Space, Place and Law, edited by Robyn Bartel and Jennifer Carter – Edward Elgar, 2021

This innovative Handbook provides an expansive interrogation of the spaces and places of law, exploring how we engage relationally in a material world, within which we are inter-dependent and reliant, and governed by laws in a dynamic process. It advances novel insights into the numerous intersections of space, place and law in our lives.

International contributors offer a range of activity-orientated analyses, focusing on methodology, embodied experience, legal pluralism, conflict and resistance, and non-human and place agency. The Handbook examines a number of cross-cutting themes including social inequality, environmental justice, sustainability, urban development, indigenous legal systems, the effects of colonialism and property law. Representing a diversity of locales from all around the world, the chapters encompass both urban and rural, terrestrial and marine areas, agential and storied spaces, and fictional as well as ‘real’ places.

Taking a multi-disciplinary approach that incorporates law, human and legal geography, planning, sociology, political ecology, anthropology, and beyond, this comprehensive Handbook will be critical reading for scholars and students of these and cognate areas. Its discussion of empirical examples will also be beneficial for practitioners and policymakers interested in these fields. 

Just an expensive e-book and very expensive hardback unfortunately.

Benjamin Bratton, The Revenge of the Real: Post-Pandemic Politics – Verso, June 2021

COVID-19 exposed the pre-existing conditions of the current global crisis. Many Western states failed to protect their populations, while others were able to suppress the virus only with sweeping social restrictions. In contrast, many Asian countries were able to make much more precise interventions. Everywhere, lockdown transformed everyday life, introducing an epidemiological view of society based on sensing, modeling, and filtering. What lessons are to be learned?

The Revenge of the Real envisions a new positive biopolitics that recognizes that governance is literally a matter of life and death. We are grappling with multiple interconnected dilemmas—climate change, pandemics, the tensions between the individual and society—all of which have to be addressed on a planetary scale. Even when separated, we are still enmeshed. Can the world govern itself differently? What models and philosophies are needed? Bratton argues that instead of thinking of biotechnologies as something imposed on society, we must see them as essential to a politics of infrastructure, knowledge, and direct intervention. In this way, we can build a society based on a new rationality of inclusion, care, and prevention.

Toposophia: thinking place/making space – relaunch of book series with Lexington books, edited by Jessica Dubow (Sheffield) and Jeff Malpas (Tasmania).

Originally established by Robert Mugerauer and Brian Treanor, Toposophia is being continued in a new form under the editorial direction of Jessica Dubow and Jeff Malpas. Retaining the original focus on the combination of topos and sophia, and so on the reflective and critical engagement with issues of place and space, the series now has an expanded brief encompassing a wide range of disciplines from geography and environmental studies through to anthropology and politics, architecture and creative arts, history and philosophy. The aim is to make Toposophia the premier series for cutting edge explorations and investigations of the spatial and topological.

Peer-reviewed, and publishing in paper and hardback as well as electronically, the series includes monographs and edited collections. The editors encourage new proposals in keeping with the expanded brief. Proposals and inquiries should be addressed to Jana Hodges-Kluck (jhodges-kluck@rowman.com) or Jeff Malpas (jeff.malpas@utas.edu.au).

The series page is here, which gives the links to previously published volumes.