Progressive Geographies

After Capital by Couze Venn – book discussion, Goldsmiths, 25 March 2019, 6pm

Update 12 March 2019: I’ve just been told the event has been cancelled.

Panel discussion on this ground-break new work and its political implications with presentations form Jeremy Gilbert, Shela Sheikh and Paul Gilroy; and quick responses from Mike Featherstone, Will Davis, Lisa Blackman and Tiziana Terranova (on video).

6 to 7.30 pm, Monday 25th March with drinks reception afterwards LG01, Professor Stuart Hall Building, Goldsmiths

The present crisis of capitalism has a history. A history of the private accumulation of wealth through property regimes that allows increasing commodification and the privatisation of resources: from land to knowledge and even to life itself. Understanding that history may allow us to imagine alternatives after Capital that are no longer private but common. After Capital explores this history, showing how the economy is linked to environmental damage, climate change, resource depletion, and to massive inequality. It takes the reader from liberalism to neoliberalism, from climate change to the Anthropocene, and shows how this history is inextricably the history of colonialism. It is a rich and detailed narrative of capitalism over the last 200 years, that explains its texture and its neoliberal endgame.

Couze Venn is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths and Associate Research Fellow at the University of Johannesburg. He is also a managing editor of Theory, Culture & Society, and one of the editors of Body & Society. His current research concerns the search for postcapitalist alternatives to neoliberal capitalism in the context of converging crises affecting economies, climate, essential resources, the quality of the environment, and growing inequalities. In the 1970s he was a founding member of the journal Ideology & Consciousness, whose project was the critique of positivist psychological sciences and to disseminate the work of Michel Foucault and ‘French Theory’ generally as part of establishing alternative approaches for theorising subjectivity and for analysing power.

AAG Announces 2018 Book Awards

The John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize

This award encourages and rewards American geographers who write books about the United States which convey the insights of professional geography in language that is both interesting and attractive to lay readers.

David G. Havlick, Bombs Away: Militarization, Conservation, and Ecological Restoration (University of Chicago Press, 2018)

David Havlick’s Bombs Away takes us on a rich journey to some of the world’s best examples of former military lands undergoing ecological restoration. He probes the cultural and environmental consequences of this process and explores what happens to localities that were once bombed, fortified, and militarized spaces. The result is a beautifully-written and theoretically-informed narrative that exemplifies a new area of nature-society research, asks relevant questions about ecological restoration on former military lands, and illuminates an important, previously underappreciated type of cultural landscape, both in the United States and beyond.

The AAG Globe Book Award for Public Understanding of Geography

This award is given for a book written or co-authored by a geographer that conveys most powerfully the nature and importance of geography to the non-academic world.

Tara Patricia Cookson, Unjust Conditions: Women’s Work and the Hidden Cost of Cash Transfer Programs (University of California Press, 2018)

Tara Patricia Cookson’s outstanding book Unjust Conditions: Women’s Work and the Hidden Cost of Cash Transfer Programs is an elegantly written and accessible portrait of how rural women in Peru experience and cope with the often hidden and detrimental socioeconomic demands of a much-heralded development program. Through careful, self-aware ethnographic methods, Cookson (currently a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia) presents a powerful counter-argument to the fashionable yet problematic practice of “data-driven development”. Unjust Conditions should be required reading for students, scholars, the general public, and—most importantly—practitioners of development searching for innovative and socially just alternatives to conventional development thinking.

The 2018 AAG Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography

This award is given for a book written by a geographer that makes an unusually important contribution to advancing the science and art of geography.

Martin Doyle, Duke University, The Source: How Rivers Made America and America Remade its Rivers (W.W. Norton, 2018)

Martin Doyle’s The Source is one of those rare books that advances both the science and art of geography. The Source is at once an environmental and political history of the United States. Doyle simultaneously provides an invaluable story of how rivers are intimately entangled with both the construction of the physical landscape, and an empirical study of how power has been etched onto that same landscape. Doyle adeptly picks apart some of the most intriguing connections among the various levels of governing bodies that are charged with dealing with water in the United States. The analysis shows how rivers not only contribute to the organization of a household via running water and indoor plumbing but also link to shaping cities beyond mere settlement, into the building of the nation itself. Well-researched and accessibly written, Doyle’s The Source embodies the spirit of the AAG Meridian Award.

I was deeply saddened to hear the news of the sudden, tragic death of Dr Stewart Williams, senior lecturer in Geography at University of Tasmania. I got to know Stewart when I spent three happy months at UTas in 2006, and we’d met a few times since – when I’d been back to Tasmania, or at conferences. One of his first post PhD papers, ‘On Islands, Insularity, and Opium Poppies: Australia’s Secret Pharmacy‘ was published in Society and Space when I was its editor. It’s very hard to know what else to say – he was a great scholar and good friend. I’ve been in touch with friends there, and through them, his family, but wanted to mark his passing on this site.

Following those pieces in Cultural Anthropology, Franck Billé has put together another 25 short pieces on Volumetric Sovereignty, the first group of which has appeared in Society and Space.

Ground
Tim Ingold
Lines
Dylan Brady
Interference
Aditi Saraf
Vortex
Jeremy W. Crampton
Eddy
Paul Richardson
Broadcast
Ekaterina Mikhailova

Here’s the opening part of Franck’s Introduction:

The last five years have witnessed a veritable efflorescence of publications on the topic of volume. A seminal intervention that appears to have given the impetus for much of this “volumetric turn” was Stuart Elden’s 2013 paper, Secure the Volume, in which he argued for the necessity to rethink geography in terms of volumes rather than areas. While Elden was not the first scholar to draw attention to volumes—indeed Elden’s article quotes an extensive literature engaging with spaces beyond the surface—he was nonetheless instrumental in identifying commonalities shared by scholars interested in aerial spaces, such as Peter Adey (2010), Derek Gregory (2017),  or Alison Williams (2010), and subterranean realms, like Eyal Weizman (2007) or Bradley Garrett (2013). Elden’s work served to integrate these various strands into a more comprehensive and coherent volumetric framework. Heeding his agenda-setting call, many geographers, and in more recent years an increasing cohort of anthropologists as well, have been actively engaging with the volumetric, both in new research and in revisiting past work. The present collection of essays, involving over fifty scholars in both disciplines across two journals, is in many ways an outcome of this research zeitgeist. [continues here]