Progressive Geographies

Neil Brenner, New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question – OUP, June 2019

The urban condition is today being radically transformed. Urban restructuring is accelerating, new urban spaces are being consolidated, and new forms of urbanization are crystallizing. In New Urban Spaces, Neil Brenner argues that understanding these mutations of urban life requires not only concrete research, but new theories of urbanization. To this end, Brenner proposes an approach that breaks with inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded settlement unit-the city or the metropolis-and explores the multiscalar constitution and periodic rescaling of the capitalist urban fabric. Drawing on critical geopolitical economy and spatialized approaches to state theory, Brenner offers a paradigmatic account of how rescaling processes are transforming inherited formations of urban space and their variegated consequences for emergent patterns and pathways of urbanization. The book also advances an understanding of critical urban theory as…

One of the things that’s kept me from my blog in the past year or so – apart from moving jobs and cities and leading an eight-person research team – is that I’ve sat on half-a-dozen interview panels. The last one involved reading through a pdf of all the applications that was 1,100 pages long – just under 60 applications (I have heard of posts attracting nearly 100 applications). That’s an awful lot of blog posts.

Indeed, it’s an awful lot of anything. If you’re an applicant, it might almost make you pity the interview panellists. If you’re a panellist, it might also give you a lot of opinions on how to write – and how NOT to write – standout cvs and covering letters.

So, here is a blog post with some advice for you if you are writing up your cv and your covering letter for an academic…

This guest post is a collective statement, written by Philip Conway in consultation with several other current and former PhD candidates at the Aberystwyth University Department of International Politics. It is co-signed by a number of current and former Aber PhD candidates, not all of whom were directly involved in the drafting process. It does not, therefore, necessarily present a consensus. However, it does, we hope, present a constructive and forceful contribution to an important debate.

At Aberystwyth University, the year 2019 marks the Centenary of the Department of International Politics. A century, that is, since the philanthropists David, Gwendoline, and Margaret Davies donated a sum of £20,000—more than £1m in today’s money—in order to establish a Chair of International Politics (the first of its kind in the world). The Chair was established “in memory of the fallen students of our University.”[1] It was to be…

Catherine M. Soussloff discusses her book Foucault on Painting, This Is Not A Pipe Podcast, April 25, 2019

Catherine M. Soussloff discusses her book Foucault on Painting with Chris Richardson. Soussloff, Professor of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, University of British Columbia and Professor Emeritus, University of California, Santa Cruz is the author of Foucault on Painting (University of Minnesota Press) and editor of Foucault on the Arts and Letters: Perspectives for the Twenty-First Century (Rowman and Littlefield). In 2015, she was Visiting Lecturer at the Collège de France. She has published articles and books on Jewish identity and visual culture (Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, California), the historiography of art history, early modern art theory, and contemporary issues in art, art history, and performance. Soussloff has held fellowships from the Institut d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA), Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, the National Endowment for the…