Richard J. King, Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby Dick – University of Chicago Press, November 2019

Missed this when it came out, but looks a very interesting study of a great novel.

Although Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is beloved as one of the most profound and enduring works of American fiction, we rarely consider it a work of nature writing—or even a novel of the sea. Yet Pulitzer Prize–winning author Annie Dillard avers Moby-Dick is the “best book ever written about nature,” and nearly the entirety of the story is set on the waves, with scarcely a whiff of land. In fact, Ishmael’s sea yarn is in conversation with the nature writing of Emerson and Thoreau, and Melville himself did much more than live for a year in a cabin beside a pond. He set sail: to the far remote Pacific Ocean, spending more than three years at sea before writing his masterpiece in 1851.

A revelation for Moby-Dick devotees and neophytes alike, Ahab’s Rolling Sea is a chronological journey through the natural history of Melville’s novel. From white whales to whale intelligence, giant squids, barnacles, albatross, and sharks, Richard J. King examines what Melville knew from his own experiences and the sources available to a reader in the mid-1800s, exploring how and why Melville might have twisted what was known to serve his fiction. King then climbs to the crow’s nest, setting Melville in the context of the American perception of the ocean in 1851—at the very start of the Industrial Revolution and just before the publication of On the Origin of Species. King compares Ahab’s and Ishmael’s worldviews to how we see the ocean today: an expanse still immortal and sublime, but also in crisis. And although the concept of stewardship of the sea would have been entirely foreign, if not absurd, to Melville, King argues that Melville’s narrator Ishmael reveals his own tendencies toward what we would now call environmentalism.

Featuring a coffer of illustrations and an array of interviews with contemporary scientists, fishers, and whale watch operators, Ahab’s Rolling Sea offers new insight not only into a cherished masterwork and its author but also into our evolving relationship with the briny deep—from whale hunters to climate refugees.

Forensic Architecture reconstruction of 2011 Mark Duggan shooting

Their own webpage is here; see also the report in The Guardian. 

As the report says, “FA’s work on the case will feature in an exhibition on police violence in London curated by activist group Tottenham Rights, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in autumn 2020”.

David Lambert and Peter Merriman (eds.), Empire and mobility in the long nineteenth century – Manchester University Press, June 2020

Mobility was central to imperialism, from the human movements entailed in exploration, travel and migration to the information, communications and commodity flows vital to trade, science, governance and military power. While historians have written on exploration, commerce, imperial transport and communications networks, and the movements of slaves, soldiers and scientists, few have reflected upon the social, cultural, economic and political significance of mobile practices, subjects and infrastructures that underpin imperial networks, or examined the qualities of movement valued by imperial powers and agents at different times. This collection explores the intersection of debates on imperial relations, colonialism and empire with emerging work on mobility. In doing this, it traces how the movements of people, representations and commodities helped to constitute the British empire from the late-eighteenth century through to the Second World War.

Currently only available as an expensive hardback, unfortunately.

Juan Francisco Salazar, Céline Granjou, Matthew Kearnes, Anna Krzywoszynska, Manuel Tironi (eds.), Thinking with Soils: Material Politics and Social Theory – Bloomsbury, June 2020

This book presents a novel and systematic social theory of soil, and is representative of the rising interest in ‘the material’ in social sciences. Bringing together new modes of ‘critical description’ with speculative practices and methods of inquiry, it contributes to the exploration of current transformations in socioecologies, as well as in political and artistic practices, in order to address global ecological change.

The chapters in this edited volume challenge scholars to attend more carefully to the ways in which they think about soil, both materially and theoretically. Contributors address a range of topics, including new ways of thinking about the politics of caring for soils; the ecological and symbiotic relations between soils; how the productive capacities and contested governance of soils are deployed as matters of political concern; and indigenous ways of knowing and being with soil.

This is another expensive hardback unfortunately. Some of the same contributors are part of a theme section of Environmental Humanities on ‘Conceiving Soils and Humans in the Anthropocene’, edited by Anna Krzywoszynska and Greta Marchesi.

Those papers seem to be open access, including the introduction “Towards a Relational Materiality of Soils“.

Geographers, sociologists, philosophers etc. on covid-19 – this list continues to be updated, though more sporadically. Particularly recent updates include some pieces on the future of universities.

I was very sorry to hear of the death of Ron Johnston, whose impact in geography and political science was extensive. I didn’t know him at all really – just a few meetings at conferences or elsewhere, but he was always kind and generous. He will be known to many more people for his daunting list of publications, from the very specialised and technical to his comprehensive surveys for students.

Derek Gregory has a tribute at Geographical Imaginations; Clive Barnett at Pop Theory.