Progressive Geographies

Geographers, sociologists, philosophers, etc. on covid-19

Where to start with reading Henri Lefebvre?

Stuart Hall’s documentary on Marx and Marxism

Georges Bataille – Oeuvres complètes and other French collections; English translations

My favourite academic books of 2019 [other years here]

Foucault audio and video recordings (other Foucault resources here)

Where to start with reading Peter Sloterdijk?

The Deleuze Seminars, Website Launch

Etienne Balibar – Being Communist, Becoming Other (audio)

Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970–1980), edited by Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn, University of Minnesota Press, December 2020

Foucault – uncollected notes, lectures and interviews

The Early Foucault – research updates

Quite a lot of these are pages, rather than posts, and some are quite old. Not many posts this year seemed to get much attention, which is probably due to social media as much as anything else. I’ve been using Twitter more, and Facebook much less. But there are some things which don’t really work on those, so I imagine I’ll keep going with this site for a while longer. Thanks for reading this year.

Adrian J Ivakhiv’s Books of the decade in ecocultural theory

Ten years ago, I posted an article on this blog with the exact same title as this one. It was enjoyable, at the time, to create a list of ten books I found both most personally influential and most significant in the intersectional study of ecology and culture. The list resonated fairly widely, attracting one of the highest number of visits on the blog to that point. (The blog looked different back then; you can see that in a screen shot here.)

Reviewing that list today, I can reaffirm the significance of each of its “top ten,” even if my ordering might be different in retrospect. Arturo Escobar’s Territories of Difference (second on that list) strikes me as the most forward-looking in terms of how it anticipated the most important stream of ecocultural thinking over the past ten years (the decolonial, though that term covers a great deal of complexity, which I will touch on below). Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway (#4) is, of the ten, the book that has appeared on the greatest number of reading lists and graduate theses since then, in the areas that I read and advise in. And while the book I listed in first place, William Connolly’s Neuropolitics, has perhaps not aged as well as some of Connolly’s other books (so much has been written about “neuropolitics” since then), its intervention at the time of its writing was substantial and the author’s ongoing productivity merits great respect.

It’s not as easy to write a similar list today, in part because of the dynamics of the “present moment”: this year, in particular, with its global pandemic, its racial-justice convulsions, and its political insanity (here in the United States) has left me with a certain abyssal feeling of the loss of bearings. Can anyone today feel confident that they know what’s going on and what the future holds? (Other than that things will get much worse before they get any better.) [continues here]

Alexander Orakhelashvili, International Law and International Politics: Foundations of Interdisciplinary Analysis – Edward Elgar, December 2020

This illuminating monograph examines analytical and practical aspects of the relationship between international law and international politics, providing a comprehensive analysis of the foundations on which both the international legal system and international politics rest.

With an interdisciplinary perspective, Alexander Orakhelashvili compares and contrasts the methods of international legal reasoning with international relations as a discipline, focusing on timeless and central issues that connect the past, present and future. The book examines, through the use of both disciplines’ methodology, some more specific areas such as public authority, global space, and peace, with the overall outcome that political contempt towards the international legal system could have unexpected and costly adverse political consequences.

Examining a broad range of theories and literature, International Law and International Politics will be an invigorating read for academics, students and practitioners of international law, international relations, politics, and diplomacy.

Hardback and e-book only at present, but Intro and Chapter 1 are available to read open access.