Progressive Geographies

Camps Revisited: Multifaceted Spatialities of a Modern Political Technology, edited by Irit Katz, Diana Martin, and Claudio Minca – Rowman International, December 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.

Marx & the City

Friday, 2 November 2018
A one-day symposium at Arcadia University, The College of Global Studies,
London Center, 16-17 Southampton Place, London, W1A 2AJ

Confirmed speakers: Professor Ursula Huws; Professor Donald Sassoon; Dr
Lindsey German

Deadline for abstracts: 3 September 2018

There are three interlocking aims behind Marx and the City, the first
symposium to be held at Arcadia University’s London study abroad centre in
Holborn. The first point is to mark the life and work of Karl Marx: we do so
both in the two hundredth year since his birth and in a building a mere
ten-minute walk from his first proper London home. Second, we wish to stress
‘the city’ as an object of study that makes a mock of and does away with
rigid disciplinary boundaries. As such, we encourage abstracts from anyone
and everyone, most certainly including those outside the academy. Finally,
this symposium will seek to involve Arcadia students at all levels of
decision-making. All too rarely do students get to see their teachers’ ideas
challenged publicly: by contrast, Marx and the City will invite some of
Arcadia’s fall 2018 intake to actively participate through chairing and
attending panels, reviewing abstract submissions, and so on.
Karl Marx found in the industrialising cities of the nineteenth century both
the epitome of modern capitalist exploitation and the revolutionary agents of
capitalism’s demise.  Marx himself has extensive contact with the city; he
spent most of his life living as a revolutionary exile in London, the city at
the heart of the British Empire.  This symposium examines Marx’s approach to
the city, how he envisaged its revolutionary transformation as well as the
relevance and resonances of his approach.

We welcome abstracts for papers or contributions in other media. A
non-proscriptive list of potential subjects follows:
– Marx’s cities (Paris, London, Berlin, Brussels etc.)
– Marxist approaches to the city
– Utopia and reimaginings of the city
– Engels’ ‘great towns’
– ‘Beneath the pavement . . .’: the city and revolution
– Marxist feminist approaches to the city
– The revolutionary exile in the foreign city
– Marx and urban culture
– Marx and the urban underworld
– Marx and the city in film
– Marx, sex, and sexuality in the city
– Marxist conceptions of suburbia
– Social class and revolution in the city
– The neoliberal city

Please send proposals for 20-minute contributions to connellyk@arcadia..edu & danielsm@arcadia.edu.  Abstracts should be no more than 250
words.

The Virtual Mappa Project and Digita Mappa: Online editions of Medieval Maps from the British Library and elsewhere – full update from Cat Crossley here.

After a long journey and much hard work from a lot of very dedicated people, it is time to get excited about medieval maps again! The Virtual Mappa Project has been officially released as an open access publication, with an incredible collection of digitised medieval world maps from the British Library and beyond, all online, annotated and waiting to be explored.

Back in 2013 I was hard at work in the BL Maps department, tasked with marking up some marvellous medieval mappaemundi. At that time I documented my work and the project’s progress in a few blogs posts, including this overview available here. To recap, the British Library has lent its medieval manuscripts, imaging studios and hive-mind of expertise to the DM project, to help create a corpus of digital editions of medieval world maps in a visually navigable, text-searchable, translated format, that makes their intricacies much more accessible to modern minds. A full history of DM and everyone involved can be found here and it is fair to say there have been some technical hiccups along the way (hence the slight delay in publication), but we are now ready to unveil the finished product and I must admit I’m very excited.

Laura Vaughan, Mapping Society: The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography – UCL Press, September 2018 (open access)

From a rare map of yellow fever in eighteenth-century New York, to Charles Booth’s famous maps of poverty in nineteenth-century London, an Italian racial zoning map of early twentieth century Asmara, to a map of wealth disparities in the banlieues of twenty-first-century Paris, Mapping Society traces the evolution of social cartography over the past two centuries. In this richly illustrated book, Laura Vaughan examines maps of ethnic or religious difference, poverty, and health inequalities, demonstrating how they not only serve as historical records of social enquiry, but also constitute inscriptions of social patterns that have been etched deeply on the surface of cities.

The book covers themes such as the use of visual rhetoric to change public opinion, the evolution of sociology as an academic practice, changing attitudes to physical disorder, and the complexity of segregation as an urban phenomenon. While the focus is on historical maps, the narrative carries the discussion of the spatial dimensions of social cartography forward to the present day, showing how disciplines such as public health, crime science, and urban planning chart spatial data in their current practice. Containing examples of space syntax analysis alongside historical maps and photographs, this volume will appeal to all those interested in the long-term forces that shape how people live in cities.