Progressive Geographies

Derek Gregory on the end of his teaching career at his blog Geographical Imaginations.

I gave my last UBC lecture on 2 December (below), but I shall – of course! – continue my research and writing. So this isn’t retirement yet – and my tenure as Peter Wall Distinguished Professorship isn’t up yet either – but it does bring me to the end of a long teaching career.

It’s well worth a read. At the end of the post, he talks of the current writing plans:

As I write this, it’s neither a Monday nor the 1st of the month. I may be turning a page on my teaching career, but – as I said at the outset – the research and the writing will continue apace. I have two books in prospect.  Reach from the Sky will bring together my work on genealogies and geographies of aerial violence, and Purple Testament – a title I’ve taken (if you’ve read this far, you will know how doubly appropriate this is) from Shakespeare’s Richard II: ‘the purple testament of bleeding war’ – which extends my work on trauma geographies and woundscapes from the First World War to Afghanistan and Syria.

New Left Review has a new blog – Sidecar

Rob Kitchin, Writing Fiction as Scholarly Work at LSE Impact of Social Sciences

Writing for academic publication is highly stylised and formalised. In this post Rob Kitchin describes how writing fiction has shaped his own academic praxis and can provide scholars with an expanded range of conceptual tools for communicating their research.

Interview with Sara Fregonese on War and the City: Urban Geopolitics in Lebanon at New Texts Out Now

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Sara Fregonese (SF): This book is the result of my doctoral research (2004-2008), to which I then added a layer of historical detail about the administrative changes in 1840s Mount Lebanon and their impact on today’s sectarian politics. I also integrated a chapter on more recent sustained urban clashes in 2008 that partly encompasses my postdoctoral research around sovereignty and non-state armed groups (2009-2012) and their relation with the idea and practice of the State.

What made me write the book was, firstly, a disciplinary frustration with the lack of attention (in western scholarship at least) given to the representations and narrations of non-state actors and sub-national spaces of the civil war in Lebanon. We see a lot of grand scale geopolitical analysis around the 1975-1990 events, but less enquiry linking the kind of geopolitical reasoning from international relations and political science, with spatial accounts of what was actually happening at the urban level during the conflict.