Progressive Geographies

I was deeply saddened to hear the news of the sudden, tragic death of Dr Stewart Williams, senior lecturer in Geography at University of Tasmania. I got to know Stewart when I spent three happy months at UTas in 2006, and we’d met a few times since – when I’d been back to Tasmania, or at conferences. One of his first post PhD papers, ‘On Islands, Insularity, and Opium Poppies: Australia’s Secret Pharmacy‘ was published in Society and Space when I was its editor. It’s very hard to know what else to say – he was a great scholar and good friend. I’ve been in touch with friends there, and through them, his family, but wanted to mark his passing on this site.

Following those pieces in Cultural Anthropology, Franck Billé has put together another 25 short pieces on Volumetric Sovereignty, the first group of which has appeared in Society and Space.

Ground
Tim Ingold
Lines
Dylan Brady
Interference
Aditi Saraf
Vortex
Jeremy W. Crampton
Eddy
Paul Richardson
Broadcast
Ekaterina Mikhailova

Here’s the opening part of Franck’s Introduction:

The last five years have witnessed a veritable efflorescence of publications on the topic of volume. A seminal intervention that appears to have given the impetus for much of this “volumetric turn” was Stuart Elden’s 2013 paper, Secure the Volume, in which he argued for the necessity to rethink geography in terms of volumes rather than areas. While Elden was not the first scholar to draw attention to volumes—indeed Elden’s article quotes an extensive literature engaging with spaces beyond the surface—he was nonetheless instrumental in identifying commonalities shared by scholars interested in aerial spaces, such as Peter Adey (2010), Derek Gregory (2017),  or Alison Williams (2010), and subterranean realms, like Eyal Weizman (2007) or Bradley Garrett (2013). Elden’s work served to integrate these various strands into a more comprehensive and coherent volumetric framework. Heeding his agenda-setting call, many geographers, and in more recent years an increasing cohort of anthropologists as well, have been actively engaging with the volumetric, both in new research and in revisiting past work. The present collection of essays, involving over fifty scholars in both disciplines across two journals, is in many ways an outcome of this research zeitgeist. [continues here]

Speaking Volumes – series of short pieces in Contemporary Anthropology, edited by Franck Billé.

I’d posted about this before (I had a piece on Terrain), but there are some newer pieces added which I don’t think I linked to previously.

[Editor’s Note: I am pleased to share eleven additional contributions to this series: Barb, Echolocation, Flyways, Gravity, Scaleless, Sensing, Sluice, Spongiform, Volatility, Views, and Watershed. Stay tuned for news about the forthcoming book, which will include extended versions of seventeen of these interventions as well contributions by Arjun Appadurai and Debbora Battaglia. A follow-up collection of twenty-five short essays will also be published at Society and Space in early 2019.]

The full list of pieces in Cultural Anthropology is available here; The Society and Space forum begins here.

After a short break following Gary Gutting’s sad death, NDPR is back with reviews. The most recent reviews are listed here.

David Beer, Writings about old ideas: A year with Georg Simmel at Medium

An interesting piece on the process of writing his forthcoming book Georg Simmel’s Concluding Thoughts: Worlds, Lives, Fragments (Palgrave, 2019)

For several years I’d been trying to write a book on Georg Simmel’s social thought. Simmel is a tricky thinker to work with, he moves between topics, styles and disciplines, plus his writings are dense with ideas theories and speculations. Initially, around early 2014, I did some background work, secured a book contract and did a little bit of writing. I quickly realised that I couldn’t get my original plan to work. I wanted to look at a variety of ways in which Simmel’s theories were relevant today, but it got out of hand. I couldn’t work out how to make Simmel’s lively ideas containable in a single project. The bits of writing were shelved and I worked on some other projects for a while. [continues here]

Stuart Schrader, Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing – University of California Press, November 2019

From the Cold War through today, the U.S. has quietly assisted dozens of regimes around the world in suppressing civil unrest and securing the conditions for the smooth operation of capitalism. Casting a new light on American empire, Badges Without Borders shows, for the first time,  that the very same people charged with global counterinsurgency also militarized American policing at home.

In this groundbreaking exposé, Stuart Schrader shows how the United States projected imperial power overseas through police training and technical assistance—and how this effort reverberated to shape the policing of city streets at home. Examining diverse records, from recently declassified national security and intelligence materials to police textbooks and professional magazines, Schrader reveals how U.S. police leaders envisioned the beat to be as wide as the globe and worked to put everyday policing at the core of the Cold War project of counterinsurgency. A “smoking gun” book, Badges without Borders offers a new account of the War on Crime, “law and order” politics, and global counterinsurgency, revealing the connections between foreign and domestic racial control.

Alexandre Kojève, Atheism, translated by Jeff Love, Columbia UP 2018

One of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and unconventional thinkers, Alexandre Kojève was a Russian émigré to France whose lectures on Hegel in the 1930s galvanized a generation of French intellectuals. Although Kojève wrote a great deal, he published very little in his lifetime, and so the ongoing rediscovery of his work continues to present new challenges to philosophy and political theory. Written in 1931 but left unfinished, Atheism is an erudite and open-ended exploration of profound questions of estrangement, death, suicide, and the infinite that demonstrates the range and the provocative power of Kojève’s thought.

Ranging across Heidegger, Buddhism, Christianity, German idealism, Russian literature, and mathematics, Kojève advances a novel argument about freedom and authority. He investigates the possibility that there is not any vantage point or source of authority—including philosophy, science, or God—that is outside or beyond politics and the world as we experience it. The question becomes whether atheism—or theism—is even a meaningful position since both affirmation and denial of God’s existence imply a knowledge that seems clearly outside our capacities. Masterfully translated by Jeff Love, this book offers a striking new perspective on Kojève’s work and its implications for theism, atheism, politics, and freedom.

The book is discussed by Jeff Love and Carrie Lynn Evans at the New Books Network. Thanks to dmf for the link.