Progressive Geographies

Applications are invited for an indefinite Assistant Professorship in Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Studies (PAIS) at the University of Warwick. The position is open with respect to specialism within political theory, but preference will be given to candidates who are able and willing to teach modules addressing historical political thought.

Applications from female candidates and those from a minority ethnic background are particularly welcome as these groups are currently underrepresented within the Department.

The successful candidate will have a demonstrable track record of delivering high-quality research publications ahead of REF2021 and a commitment to securing external grant income in support of their research programme.

For an informal and confidential discussion about this opportunity, please contact Professor Simon Caney (s.caney@warwick.ac.uk).

For more information, and to apply, please see: https://atsv7.wcn.co.uk/search_engine/jobs.cgi?owner=5062452&ownertype=fair&jcode=1727017&vt_template=1457&adminview=1

Franco Farinelli, Blinding Polyphemus: Geography and the Models of the World, translated by Christina Chalmers and in Seagull Books Italian list.

This appeared over a year ago, but I didn’t realise this was in English until Alberto Toscano kindly gave me a copy today. Italian geographer friends have long told me of the importance of Farinelli’s work, and I’ve only read a little of it in French – this is the first book of his in English.

Today, we believe that the map is a copy of the Earth, without realizing that the opposite is true: in our culture, the Earth has assumed the form of a map. In Blinding Polyphemus, Franco Farinelli elucidates the philosophical correlation between cultural evolution and shifting cartographies of modern society, giving readers an interdisciplinary study that attempts to understand and redefine the fundamental structures of cartography, architecture and the notion of ‘space’.

Following the lessons of nineteenth-century critical German geography, this is a manual of geography without any map. To indicate where things are means already responding, in implicit and unreflective ways, to prior questions about their nature. Blinding Polyphemus not only takes account of the present state of the Earth and of human geography, it redefines the principal models we possess for the description of the world: the map, above all, as well as the landscape, subject, place, city and space.

Franco Farinelli is an Italian geographer who researches the intersections of cartography, logic, philosophy, politics and economics which underlie the phenomena of the built environment through history. He is a professor of human geography and head of the Department of Philosophy and Communication Studies at the Università di Bologna, and the president of the Italian Geographers Association. He has taught at Nordplan, the Università di Ginevra, University of California Los Angeles, Univeristy of California Berkeley, the Sorbonne and the École Normale Supérieure. He is the author of several books, including Geografia (2003), L’invenzione della Terra (2007) and La Crisi della Ragione Cartografica (2009).

Christina Chalmers is a poet, writer and translator who lives in London. She is in the editorial collective of the journal Cesura/Acceso.

William Davies, Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World

In this age of emotional political conflict, there is less and less to agree upon. Experts are no longer respected as impartial; public debate is reduced to attack and counter-attack; the boundary between facts and propaganda seems to be dissolving. We live in a world not quite at war but nor exactly at peace.

How did things reach this point, and what can we do about it? In this enlightening, far-reaching and provocative book, William Davies explores how physical and emotional feeling came to reshape our world today, destabilising governments and placing us all on high-alert. Drawing on a 400-year history of scientific and political ideas, he shows how our sensations were once treated with suspicion, before being seized enthusiastically as a path to mass mobilisation in war.

As we enter a new technological and political era, this book reveals the origins of the nervous states in which we now live.

Stuart Schrader, ‘Henri Lefebvre, Mao Zedong, and the Global Urban Concept’ at Global Urban History.

Global urban history takes three primary forms. One is to direct the analytic gaze beyond Euro-America, to cities that were once “off the map” of urban studies. Another is to study the interconnections among far-flung cities. Extensive commercial, cultural, and intellectual networks that underpin “globalization” have long been grounded in cities. With the increasing popularity of global and world history, it makes sense to emphasize the centrality of cities and the unique role they play in globalization. A third form is to analyze the history of an uneven global urban fabric. Works like Carl Nightingale’s Segregation or Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums analyze how the form of the urban changes as it also “globalizes.” In this post, I delve into this third mode of global urban history.

The theoretical innovation that allows us to conceive of an uneven global urban fabric itself has an intellectual history. One important genealogy draws us back to the French social theorist Henri Lefebvre, particularly his work on space and the urban in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He is a key figure who inspired the “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences. Yet what inspired Lefebvre to develop a global urban concept, and to whom was it addressed? [continues here]

From the Lighthouse: Interdisciplinary Reflections on Light, edited by Veronica Strang, Tim Edensor, and Joanna Puckering – now out with Routledge.

What is a lighthouse? What does it mean? What does it do? This book shows how exchanging knowledge across disciplinary boundaries can transform our thinking. Adopting an unconventional structure, this book involves the reader in a multivocal conversation between scholars, poets and artists. Seen through their individual perspectives, lighthouses appear as signals of safety, beacons of enlightenment, phallic territorial markers, and memorials of historical relationships with the sea. However, the interdisciplinary conversation also reveals underlying and sometimes unexpected connections. It elucidates the human and non-human evolutionary adaptations that use light for signalling and warning; the visual languages created by regularity and synchronicity in pulses of light; how lighthouses have generated a whole ‘family’ of related material objects and technologies; and the way that light flows between social and material worlds.