Progressive Geographies

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.

Katherine Ibbett, Compassion’s Edge: Fellow-Feeling and Its Limits in Early Modern France – U Penn Press, 2017. Late coming to this one, which won the 2018 Society for Renaissance Studies Book Prize.

“This is in every respect a brilliant and path-breaking book. Katherine Ibbett is ferociously smart, wonderfully humane, a gloriously playful and lucid writer, and a genuinely gifted close reader. Compassion’s Edge will provoke a great deal of discussion and debate, opening new avenues of reflection and research.”—Christopher Braider, University of Colorado at Boulder

“Compassion’s Edge is an intellectually invigorating and original study. Its finely shaded and relentlessly probing investigation never ceases to interest. Katherine Ibbett is astonishing in her ability to synthesize, in a nuanced yet dynamic fashion, a broad spectrum of critical approaches and theoretical angles on the one hand and, on the other, to draw together an impressive range of historical documents and primary literary sources.”—Larry Norman, author of The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France

Compassion’s Edge examines the language of fellow-feeling—pity, compassion, and charitable care—that flourished in France in the period from the Edict of Nantes in 1598, which established some degree of religious toleration, to the official breakdown of that toleration with the Revocation of the Edict in 1685. This is not, however, a story about compassion overcoming difference but one of compassion reinforcing division: the seventeenth-century texts of fellow-feeling led not to communal concerns but to paralysis, misreading, and isolation. Early modern fellow-feeling drew distinctions, policed its borders, and far from reaching out to others, kept the other at arm’s length. It became a central feature in the debates about the place of religious minorities after the Wars of Religion, and according to Katherine Ibbett, continues to shape the way we think about difference today.

Compassion’s Edge ranges widely over genres, contexts, and geographies. Ibbett reads epic poetry, novels, moral treatises, dramatic theory, and theological disputes. She takes up major figures such as D’Aubigné, Montaigne, Lafayette, Corneille, and Racine, as well as less familiar Jesuit theologians, Huguenot ministers, and nuns from a Montreal hospital. Although firmly rooted in early modern studies, she reflects on the ways in which the language of compassion figures in contemporary conversations about national and religious communities. Investigating the affective undertow of religious toleration, Compassion’s Edge provides a robust corrective to today’s hope that fellow-feeling draws us inexorably and usefully together.

Mark Polizzotti, Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto – MIT Press, April 2018

Handbook on the Geographies of Power – edited by John Agnew and Mat Coleman, Edward Elgar, 2018. A very expensive but interesting looking collection.

The so-called spatial turn in the social sciences means that many researchers have become much more interested in what can be called the spatialities of power, or the ways in which power as a medium for achieving goals is related to where it takes place. Most famous authors on the subject, such as Machiavelli and Hobbes, saw power as entirely equivalent to domination exercised by some over others. Though this meaning is hardly redundant, understandings of power have become more multidimensional and nuanced as a result of the spatial turn. Much recent writing in human geography, for example, has rigorously extended use of the term power beyond its typical understanding as a resource that pools up in some hands and some places to a medium of agency that has different effects depending on how it is deployed across space and how actors cooperate, or not, to give it effect. To address this objective, the book is organized thematically into four sections that cover the main areas in which much of the contemporary work on geographies of power is concentrated: bodies, economy, environment and energy, and war.

Contents:
Part I Introduction

1. Introduction to the Handbook on the Geographies of Power
Mat Coleman and John Agnew

Part II Bodies
Mat Coleman

2. When Ethnography Meets Space
Ishan Ashutosh

3. Sex and Sexuality: Exploring the Geographies of Prostitution
Phil Hubbard

4. Spatial Technologies of Racialized Knowing: On Visuality, Measurement, and the Law
Robin Wright, Eric Goldfischer, Aaron Mallory and Kate Derickson

5. “This Wack(Yhut) Idea!!!”: The Plantation Bloc and Political Economy of Prison Expansion in Louisiana
Jenna M. Loyd

6. Human, All too Human, Geographies
Claire Rasmussen and Michael Brown

Part III Economy
John Agnew

7. Reflections on the Power in and the Power of Financial Markets
Adam D. Dixon

8. Corporate–state relations in the age of Trumpism: analytical problems with the neoliberal synthesis and some potential ways forward
Joshua Barkan

9. Reproduction, Justice and Spatialities of Power
Kendra Strauss

10. Abstract and Concrete Labor in the Age of Informality
Vinay Gidwani

11. The Circulation of Financial Elites
John Allen

Part IV Energy And Environment
Mat Coleman

12. The Anthropocene and Geographies of Geopower
Kathryn Yusoff

13. The Power of Water
Philip Steinberg

14. Animated Place: Invisible Industrial Technologies and the Shaping of Eating Bodies
Nicholas Bauch

15. Microontologies and the Politics of Emergent Life
Nigel Clark and Myra Hird

16. Destituent Power and Common Use: Reading Agamben in the Anthropocene
Bruce Braun and Stephanie Wakefield

Part V Warfare
John Agnew

17. Human Shields and the Political Geography of International Humanitarian Law
Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini

18. Matrix Governance and Imperialism
Pádraig Carmody

19. Governing Banishment: Settler Colonialism, Territory, and Life in an Economy of Death
Lisa Bhungalia

20. Military Contracting and the Labor of Force Projection
Adam Moore

21. Autonomy, Human Vulnerability and the Volumetric Composition of US Border Policing
Geoff Boyce

22. Maps, Complexity, and the Uncertainty of Power
Luca Muscarà

23. To Help or Not to Help? Humanitarian Spaces, Power, and Government
Jennifer Hyndman

24. Power’s Outsides
Mat Coleman and John Agnew

Index

Global Politics: A New Introduction, 3rd edition, edited by Jenny Edkins and Maja Zehfuss – forthcoming in December 2018.

The 3^rd edition of Global Politics: A New Introduction continues to provide a completely original way of teaching and learning about world politics. The book engages directly with the issues in global politics that students are most interested in, helping them to understand the key questions and theories and also to develop a critical and inquiring perspective.

Completely revised and updated throughout, the 3rd edition includes a host of new illustrative examples which focus on the most pressing issues in in global politics, offering new material on topics such as Migration, Brexit, the rise and impact of ISIS, Race and Racism and Drone warfare.

Global Politics:

• Examines the most significant issues in global politics – from war, peacebuilding, terrorism, security, violence, nationalism, political violence, human rights and authority to poverty, development, postcolonialism, gender, inequality, ethnicity, environmental politics, nationalism, the internet, democratization, colonialism and the financial crisis.
• Offers chapters written to a common structure which is ideal for teaching and learning and features a key question, an illustrative example, general responses and broader issues
• Integrates theory and practice throughout the text, by presenting theoretical ideas and concepts in conjunction with a global range of historical and contemporary case studies

Drawing on theoretical perspectives from a broad range of disciplines including international relations, political theory, postcolonial studies, sociology, geography, peace studies and development this innovative textbook is essential reading for all students of global politics and international relations.

Like the previous editions, I have a  chapter in this, entitled ‘Why is the world divided territorially?’