Progressive Geographies

Robert J. Mayhew (ed.), Debating Malthus: A Documentary Reader on Population, Resources and the Environment – University of Washington Press, May 2022

For centuries, thinking about the earth’s increasing human population has been tied to environmental ideas and political action. This highly teachable collection of contextualized primary sources allows students to follow European and North American discussions about intertwined and evolving concepts of population, resources, and the natural environment from early contexts in the sixteenth century right through to the present day.

Edited and introduced by Robert J. Mayhew, a noted biographer of Thomas Robert Malthus—whose Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), excerpted here, is an influential and controversial take on the topic—this volume explores themes including evolution, eugenics, war, social justice, birth control, environmental Armageddon, and climate change. Other responses to the idea of new “population bombs” are represented here by radical feminist work, by Indigenous views of the population-environment nexus, and by intersectional race-gender approaches. By learning the patterns of this discourse, students will be better able to critically evaluate historical conversations as well as contemporary debates.

Teologia politica 2022? Political Theology 2022? – University of Rome La Sapienza, 22-24 June 

Organised by Arthur Bradley and Elettra Stimilli, with speakers including Carlo Galli, Maurizio Lazzarato, Paolo Napoli and Mario Tronti. It will also be live-streamed.  The pdf of the programme is available here

In the tumultuous early years of the Weimar Republic, Carl Schmitt published his Political Theology: Four Essays on Sovereignty (1922). This international symposium revisits the old question of “political theology,” exactly 100 years after Schmitt’s seminal text, in a new time of political crisis. To what extent is political theology still capable of speaking to the world of 1922?

To be sure, our political context uncannily resembles the period in which Schmitt wrote Political Theology – political crises of legitimacy, financial crashes, right-wing nationalisms, anti-liberal populisms and even a global pandemic. However, we are also facing a set of entirely new and singular political challenges that Schmitt could not have anticipated and which may lie beyond the reach of any “political theology.” In returning to the political theological archive, this symposium will seek to extend it to consider such critical contemporary issues as: Europe, Covid-19, climate change, immigration and refugee crises, neoliberal capitalism and globalization, big tech and data, religious fundamentalisms, new processes of racialization and gender issues. 

In this symposium, we bring together world-leading figures in different disciplines (philosophy, theology and religious studies, politics and international relations, comparative literature) to re-pose the question of political theology in the present. What, if anything, does political theology still have to say to the world of 2022 and beyond? Is it worth trying to construct new political theologies of institutions, economy, climate change, immigration, racialization, and gender or do we need to imagine different approaches? Finally, what is left of political theology 100 years after Schmitt — or is it now time to write its obituary?