Progressive Geographies

Jenny Bauer and Robert Fischer (eds.) Perspectives on Henri Lefebvre Theory, Practices and (Re)Readings, De Gruyter, 2018

Irit Katz, Diana Martin and Claudio Minca (eds.) Camps Revisited: Multifaceted Spatialities of a Modern Political Technology – Rowman 2018

Facing the current growing global archipelago of encampments, this book project intends to develop a geographical reflection on ‘the camp’, as a modern institution and as a spatial bio-political technology.

This book focuses on past and present camp geographies and on the dispositifs that make them an ever-present spatial formation in the management of unwanted populations characterizing many authoritarian regimes as well as many contemporary democracies. It also offers and investigates possible ways to resist the present-day proliferating manifestations of camps and ‘camp thinking’, by calling for the incorporation of ‘camp studies’ into the broader field of political geography and to consider the geographies of the camp as constitutive of much broader modern geo-political economies.

By linking spatial theory to the geopolitical and biopolitical workings and practices of contemporary camps, the contributions in this collection argue that the camps seem to be here-to-stay, like a permanent/temporary presence giving shape to improvised, semi-structured and hyper-orderly structured spatialities in our cities and our countryside. Camps are also a specific response, for example, to the changing conditions of European borders due to the ‘refugee crisis’ and the rise of nationalism in many countries affected by such crisis.

Antonis Vradis, Evie Papada, Joe Painter, Anna Papoutsi, New Borders: Hotspots and the European Migration Regime – Pluto 2018

To many, a border is a geographical fact. But what happens when a border is subject to an emergency? Today, as millions are forced to migrate due to war, famine and political unrest, it is important to analyse how states use new bordering techniques to control populations.

New Borders focuses on the Greek island of Lesbos. Since 2015, the island has come under intense scrutiny as more than one million people have disembarked on its shores.

During this time, the authors spent two years studying the changing meanings and functions of the EU’s border. They observed how the reception of the refugees slid into detention and refuge became duress. Examining how and why this happened, they tackle questions on European policy, the securitisation of national and EU borders and the real impacts this has had on everyday life, determining who ‘belongs’ where and when.

Workshop on the Sea in IR, Krakow 26-29 June 2019 – flyer here

Elizabeth Grosz, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics and the Limits of Materialism – Columbia University Press, 2018

Philosophy has inherited a powerful impulse to embrace either dualism or a reductive monism—either a radical separation of mind and body or the reduction of mind to body. But from its origins in the writings of the Stoics, the first thoroughgoing materialists, another view has acknowledged that no forms of materialism can be completely self-inclusive—space, time, the void, and sense are the incorporeal conditions of all that is corporeal or material. In The Incorporeal Elizabeth Grosz argues that the ideal is inherent in the material and the material in the ideal, and, by tracing its development over time, she makes the case that this same idea reasserts itself in different intellectual contexts.

Grosz shows that not only are idealism and materialism inextricably linked but that this “belonging together” of the entirety of ideality and the entirety of materiality is not mediated or created by human consciousness. Instead, it is an ontological condition for the development of human consciousness. Grosz draws from Spinoza’s material and ideal concept of substance, Nietzsche’s amor fati, Deleuze and Guattari’s plane of immanence, Simondon’s preindividual, and Raymond Ruyer’s self-survey or autoaffection to show that the world preexists the evolution of the human and that its material and incorporeal forces are the conditions for all forms of life, human and nonhuman alike. A masterwork by an eminent theoretician, The Incorporeal offers profound new insight into the mind-body problem.