Progressive Geographies

François Cusset, Thomas Daquin, French Theory, itinéraires d’une pensée rebelle – La Découverte/Delcourt 2025

Thanks to Foucault News for the link.

On connaissait la French Pop , mais connaissez-vous la French Theory ? Comment Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida… sont devenus des stars aux USA et comment leurs théories, sur la déconstruction, le genre, les inégalités ont façonné le débat contemporain.
Entre wokistes et réacs, le débat fait rage. La promesse de ce livre : nous ouvrir grand les yeux, de façon ludique, sur Foucault, Derrida ou Baudrillard et l’aventure de leur singulière théorie, aux USA et au-delà… Les penseurs de la déconstruction, du genre ou du racisme, sont devenus des stars américaines et ont révolutionné nos façons de voir le monde.

Lise Vogel, The Contested Domain: Selected Writings on Marxism and Feminism, ed. Kirstin Munro, Pluto, November 2025

‘A compelling critique of bourgeois society and women’s oppression – a critique that not only advances theory, but also engages deeply with the historical and political conditions of social transformation’ – Melda Yaman, İstanbul University

Lise Vogel is a unique voice in feminist theory. This book collects her best essays, opening a window into the last half-century of US socialist feminism.

A trailblazer in the 1970s, Vogel planted the seeds for contemporary Social Reproduction Theory with her ‘unitary theory’ of capitalist exploitation and the oppression of women. Along with others, she challenged established views within the academy and movement by insisting that Marxist theory can accommodate not only class, but also race and gender. Today, her work is more popular than ever, inspiring socialist feminists to develop inclusive liberatory ideas for the next generation.

Selected from five decades of Vogel’s work, including long out-of-print material, this volume is a crucial resource for readers interested in the intellectual history of Marxist feminism and twentieth-century activism.

States of precarity in UK Higher Education geography – summary at the RGS-IBG website, with links to the report, plans, posters etc.

Precarious working conditions are increasingly common throughout academia – from the proliferation of fixed term contracts (FTCs) to widespread restructuring and redundancies. The States of Precarity Report provides a snapshot of the immediate and long-term effects of precarity within UK HE Geography across career stages.

Importantly, as well as engaging with key and pressing issues, the report provides a series of recommendations and best practice resources to support more equitable and caring departmental working cultures.

The States of Precarity in UK Higher Education Geography report was funded by the Antipode Foundation and the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). The team included Rachael Squire, James Esson, Johanne Bruun, Rachel Colls, Peter Forman, Anna Jackman, Jasmine Joanes.

Maia Kotrosits, After Transformation: A Lyrical History of Christian Late Antiquity – Duke University Press, November 2025

Introduction open access at this link

In After Transformation, Maia Kotrosits offers a lyrical history of Christian late antiquity as it lives on in and with the present. Recasting the monumental changes that occurred between the second and fourth centuries, when Rome transitioned from pagan to Christian worship, Kotrosits presents a condensed and evocative meditation on the profound effects of Christian imperialism across time and geography. She employs a collection of forms ranging from micro-essay and vignette to poem and fragment to capture human struggles with time and change, showing how the mundane and intimate details of our lives can themselves be conduits of historical knowing. Arguing for lyricism as a method, Kotrosits reclaims vulnerability, urgency, and storytelling in historical work to model new ways of writing the past and experiencing ourselves more fully in time. Above all, After Transformation is about the ironies of the ways that history is written against the reality of the ways that history is lived.

Julia Welland, Pleasure and Depletion in Contemporary Militarism – Edinburgh University Press, March 2026

Why do so many US service members, veterans and military families continue to affectively invest in militarism when the physical and emotional costs are so high?

• Conceptualises militarism as felt, drawing on insights from feminist International Relations, feminist cultural studies and critical military studies
• Draws on, and adapts, the feminist political economy concept of ‘depletion’, locating it in the overarching structure of militarism as opposed to capitalism
• Explores how militarism is experienced both as sustaining (felt as love/support/comfort/solidarity) and depleting (as physical injury/emotional trauma/affective harms)
• Theorises both a structural and parasitic relationship between the pleasures and joys of militarism and its harms and depletions
• Uses three empirical sites (the Invictus Games, Warrior Games and Ms Veteran America) and draws on ethnographic reflections, non-participant observation, and in-depth qualitative interviews with military communities to build its theoretical and conceptual contributions

This book asks why US service members, veterans and military families continue to affectively invest in militarism – both as a structure of global politics and in their everyday lives – when they have experienced first-hand, its physical and emotional costs?

Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with military communities and ethnographic insights from a range of military sites, the book examines how those service members, veterans and military families who have been physically and emotionally depleted through their intimate relations to US militarism are the same individuals who have simultaneously experienced its concomitant pleasures, joys, and have built lives and worlds through their attachment to it.

Ultimately, the book argues these dual and contradictory experiences are central to militarism’s endurance in global politics; both through individuals continued affective investment in a militarised pathway and through the incremental and incomplete ways that militarism is reproduced in their everyday lives.

J.D. Sargan, Trans Histories of the Medieval Book: An Experiment in Bibliography – ARC Humanities Press, October 2025 (print and open access)

Archival collections are political spaces: the decisions that govern whose histories are preserved, when, and by whom are not neutral. They reflect the communities that make them. For most of western history queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people were excluded from such communities. Premodern trans experiences went largely unreported and reconstructing such histories relies on the piecing together of ephemeral glimpses. Literary scholars developed tactics and tools to read through the traces, with hugely generative results that highlight the richness of non-normative premodern genders. But how do we move beyond the limits of the trace to uncover a more expansive history of premodern gender non-conformity?

This book takes a methodological approach to the question. An experiment in applying trans approaches to the study of the premodern book offers alternatives both for trans histories and for book historical methods.