Progressive Geographies

Melissa Adler, Surveillance in the Empire of Liberty: Why Thomas Jefferson Matters in Our Information Age – Bloomsbury, January 2026

Examines the formation of a surveillance state through a close examination of Thomas Jefferson’s plantation management techniques and political actions. 

With the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on the horizon, Melissa Adler leads readers to reexamine the principles and foundations upon which the United States is based. By analyzing Thomas Jefferson’s surveillance technologies and practices, including his Farm Book, algorithmic formulas, and land management policies, this book provides a new understanding of the limits to aspirations toward good government, liberty, security, and equality in the United States. In addition to being the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, which famously states that “all men are created equal,” many of Jefferson’s writings feature the rationalization of the enslavement, displacement, and killing of Black and Indigenous peoples. Adler argues that information architectures are mechanisms by which cultural and political divisions endure, and that close examination of Jefferson’s surveillance techniques reveals some of the processes by which problems associated with settler colonialism, racism, and heteropatriarchy have become systemic.

Gary Slater, Lisa Landoe Hedrick eds. Ethics Across Borders: Reimagining Religious, Political, and Ecological Divides – Routledge, December 2025

Ethics Across Borders assembles perspectives from geographers, historians, theologians, philosophers, and scientists to explore ethically relevant connections across multiple types of borders.

The contemporary global order is fluid, increasingly unstable, and riven with borders at countless and complex points. Religious, political, and ecological borders hold particular significance, where interactions carry compounding social and environmental consequences. As the first collected volume to look at these three types of borders, both from an interdisciplinary perspective and as distinct forms, it demonstrates the value of thinking across borders as an ethical project. Taking Simone Weil’s perspective that every separation is a link, it posits that separations within sovereignty, species, and religion become links between political, ecological, and theological perspectives, and that boundaries within human life have taken on ecological significance in the age of the Anthropocene. In this framing, religion interacts with the political and the ecological in three ways: as foundational to sovereignty, as an influence on perspectives on contemporary boundaries, and as morally and philosophically implicated in the human/nonhuman interactions that ground environmental ethics.

Ethics Across Borders offers lessons on how to reimagine borders and how to engage more justly with ecological systems and human communities. It will appeal to readers in environmental and religious ethics, philosophy, and border studies.

Katie Donington, Abdul Mohamud, Robin Whitburn and Nicholas Draper, Teaching Slavery: New Approaches to Britain’s Colonial Past – UCL Press, November 2025 (print and open access)

This groundbreaking book brings together the latest academic research on Britain’s involvement in transatlantic slavery, with innovative thinking on the teaching of such challenging histories in the classroom. It provides an essential framework for transforming how slavery is conceptualised and taught in British secondary schools by addressing three specific areas of concern: limits of teacher training on historical content and pedagogical approaches; the scarcity of high-quality, appropriate, research-based resources; and the lack of published material to guide teachers on the principles, knowledge and practice for ethical classroom engagement.

Drawing on insights from a long-term partnership between historians and educators, Teaching Slaverycombines sophisticated historical analysis with practical pedagogical guidance. The early part of the book offers thorough historiographical examination of key themes, including race, the gendering of slavery, resistance and rethinking abolition. These are followed by detailed guidance on overcoming the challenges of teaching these histories, including exemplar enquiries to help establish a classroom where teachers and students can confidently engage in dialogue about key ideas, including the construction of race and racism. Throughout, the authors emphasise the importance of historical specificity and the need to critically engage with Britain’s history of slavery and empire.

Thanks to Neil Stewart for this – Penelope Corfield interviews Christopher Hill

Institute of Historical Research – Interviews with Historians – Christopher Hill

Michael Braddick, Christopher Hill: The life of a Radical Historian – Verso, February 2025

I’ve shared the book before, but there is now a New Books discussion with Lucas Tse – thanks to dmf for this link

A luminous biography of one of the 20th century’s most influential historians

Christopher Hill was one of the leading historians of his generation. His work across more than 15 books and dozens of articles fundamentally rewrote the way we understand the English Revolution and the development of the modern British state. While his career brought many of the trappings of establishment respectability – he was both a Fellow of the British Academy and the Master of Balliol College, Oxford – he was also seen as a threat to that very same establishment. Under surveillance by the security services for decades, in the 1980s Hill was publicly accused of having been a Soviet agent during the war. His was a Cold War life, as well as a scholarly one.

In this brilliant work of biography, Michael Braddick charts Hill’s development from his abandonment of the respectable provincial Methodism of his youth, through his embrace of Marxism, his membership and eventual break with the Communist Party, as well as his celebrated intellectual career. While many of his books – not least the thrilling work of historical resurrection, The World Turned Upside Down, and God’s Englishman, his classic biography of Oliver Cromwell – are still widely read and admired, his intellectual reputation was damaged by sustained academic criticism in the politically-charged atmosphere of the 1980s.

Braddick’s judicious biography not only situates Hill’s life and work in their historical context but seeks to rescue Hill for a new generation of readers.

Michaela Fišerová and Jakub Mácha eds. Metaphysics and Aesthetics of Decoration: Ornamental Thinking – Routledge, January 2026

Just a very expensive hardback listed at the moment.

This volume offers a fresh and timely contribution to current discussions of ornamentation, repetition, and affect in aesthetics and philosophy. It provides new insights into how ornamentation shapes artistic, philosophical, and social practices, positioning it as a dynamic force in contemporary thought.

Through interdisciplinary essays by leading scholars, the volume interrogates ornamentation’s role in structuring metaphysics, aesthetics, and interspecies relations. It challenges the traditional notion that ornament is mere decoration and reframes it as a vital philosophical and cultural concept. Drawing on thinkers like Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault, the contributors explore how ornamentation operates as a parergon, a site of affective repetition, or a marker of epistemological shifts. From critiques of Kantian hierarchies in craft to analyses of Baroque aesthetics and animal territoriality, the chapters reveal ornamentation as both a boundary and a bridge – simultaneously peripheral and essential to meaning-making. This volume offers new and unique perspectives on ornamentation’s universal and culturally specific dimensions.

Metaphysics and Aesthetics of Decoration will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in aesthetics, metaphysics, continental philosophy, and art theory.