Progressive Geographies

Derek P. McCormack, Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment – OUP, July 2018

Introduction available here

In Atmospheric Things Derek P. McCormack explores how atmospheres are imagined, understood, and experienced through experiments with a deceptively simple object: the balloon. Since the invention of balloon flight in the late eighteenth century, balloons have drawn crowds at fairs and expositions, inspired the visions of artists and writers, and driven technological development from meteorology to military surveillance. By foregrounding the distinctive properties of the balloon, McCormack reveals its remarkable capacity to disclose the affective and meteorological dimensions of atmospheres. Drawing together different senses of the object, the elements, and experience, McCormack uses the balloon to show how practices and technologies of envelopment allow atmospheres to be generated, made meaningful, and modified. He traces the alluring entanglement of envelopment in artistic, political, and technological projects, from the 2009 Pixar movie Up and Andy Warhol’s 1966 installation Silver Clouds to the use of propaganda balloons during the Cold War and Google’s experiments with delivering internet access with stratospheric balloons. In so doing, McCormack offers new ways to conceive of, sense, and value the atmospheres in which life is immersed.

New Perspectives Issue 1/2018

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Editorial

1. The World Is (Not) Heated

Benjamin Tallis

• Full PDF article (free)

Special Section

2. The Prague Agenda

Michal Smetana, Anastasia Kazteridis, Matthew Kroenig, Sadia Tasleem, Richard Price, Jeffrey Fields, Jason Enia, Angela Kane, Dieter Fleck

• Full PDF Article (free)

Research articles

3. Writing Kafka’s Soul: Disciplinary Power, Resistance & the Authorship of the Subject

Nicholas Dungey

• Full PDF Article (free)

4. History, Nationalism, and Democracy: Myth and Narrative in Viktor Orbán’s ‘Illiberal Hungary’

Michael Toomey

• Full PDF Article (free)

5. The Fourth Generation: From Anti-Establishment to Anti-Systém Parties in Slovakia

Oľga Gyárfášová

• Full PDF Article (free)

Cultural Cut

6. HHhH & The 7th Function of Language

Laurent Binet

• Full PDF Text (free)

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.