Progressive Geographies

Jean Wahl, Transcendence and The Concrete: Selected Writings is reviewed at NDPR. Although not that well known in English, Wahl was a significant figure in France in the mid-twentieth century, and among other things was one of Foucault’s teachers. His book Human Existence and Transcendence was translated in 2016 and was reviewed at NDPR too.

Some interesting thoughts here – ‘7 things I wish I had done during my PhD‘. Though largely from the perspective of a scientist, there are things here relevant to other disciplines.

A number of responses to Peter Sloterdjk’s ‘Pseudonymous Politics’ are now available to download from New Perspectives here. The original article is also open access here.

Claudia Aradau – Performative Politics and International Relations –

Friedrich Kratochwil – Of Myths, Lies, and Phantasies: Some Critical Remarks on Sloterdijk’s “Pseudonymous Politics”

Barry J Ryan – Platonic Speleology and Peter Sloterdijk’s Theory of Pseudonymous Politics

Sassan Gholiagha – On the Meaning of Democracy: Critique and Counter-Critique

Benjamin Tallis – Names and Roses: The Democratic Potential of Sloterdijk’s Authentic Lies

Thresholds – A pop-up symposium – 22 September 2017, University of York

Thresholds is intended to bring together diverse disciplines including sociology, politics, history, anthropology, women’s studies, critical management, human geography, social policy. The format will be a short papers (10mins) followed discussion.

This event platforms scholars working across the humanities and social sciences around the theme of ‘thresholds’. It explores perspectives on the liminal edges of everyday, organisational and social life. What and who reside beyond or within different types of thresholds? Who has to cross thresholds? What prevents people or things crossing? How does power operate through different thresholds? How do thresholds articulate with limits, extremes, dangers and tipping points? These are just some of the questions explored in this one day symposium.

Thresholds is intended to bring together diverse disciplines including sociology, politics, history, anthropology, women’s studies, critical management, human geography, social policy. The format will be a short papers (10mins) followed discussion.

Organisers: Joanna Latimer, David Beer, Nik Brown, Rolland Munro

Time and Place: 22 September 2017 – 10:30 to 15:30; Berrick Saul Building, The Treehouse – University of York

REGISTER HERE

Supported by: the University of York ‘Culture and Communication’ Research Theme; The Department of Sociology; Science and Technology Studies Unit (SATSU)

Tea/coffee will be served at breaks with a light lunch offered – concluding with a drinks reception

Thresholds Programme (PDF , 109kb)

Jason Dittmer’s new book, Diplomatic Material: Affect, Assemblage, and Foreign Policy is out with Duke University Press.

In Diplomatic Material Jason Dittmer offers a counterintuitive reading of foreign policy by tracing the ways that complex interactions between people and things shape the decisions and actions of diplomats and policymakers. Bringing new materialism to bear on international relations, Dittmer focuses not on what the state does in the world but on how the world operates within the state through the circulation of humans and nonhuman objects. From examining how paper storage needs impacted the design of the British Foreign Office Building to discussing the 1953 NATO decision to adopt the .30 caliber bullet as the standard rifle ammunition, Dittmer highlights the contingency of human agency within international relations. In Dittmer’s model, which eschews stasis, structural forces, and historical trends in favor of dynamism and becoming, the international community is less a coming-together of states than it is a convergence of media, things, people, and practices. In this way, Dittmer locates power in the unfolding of processes on the micro level, thereby reconceptualizing our understandings of diplomacy and international relations.

• “Working at the rich interface of social theory and international relations theory, Jason Dittmer provides a novel and important rereading of diplomatic practice, demonstrating how diplomacy and international relations are profoundly influenced by material and bodily contexts. Diplomatic Material speaks to pressing debates in social theory and international relations, making this important book one of the best in its field.” — Mark B. Salter, editor of, Making Things International 1 and Making Things International 2

  “Jason Dittmer innovatively combines multiple literatures and empirical cases to render familiar issues in novel ways. His engaging writing makes the work accessible to undergraduates. Diplomatic Material will be of interest to those working in diplomacy, assemblage theory, and more-than-human approaches in political geography and international relations.” — Merje Kuus, author of, Geopolitics and Expertise: Knowledge and Authority in European Diplomacy

Ernesto Bassi discusses his book An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World at the New Books Network.

Here’s the book description from the Duke UP site:

In An Aqueous Territory Ernesto Bassi traces the configuration of a geographic space he calls the transimperial Greater Caribbean between 1760 and 1860. Focusing on the Caribbean coast of New Granada (present-day Colombia), Bassi shows that the region’s residents did not live their lives bounded by geopolitical borders. Rather, the cross-border activities of sailors, traders, revolutionaries, indigenous peoples, and others reflected their perceptions of the Caribbean as a transimperial space where trade, information, and people circulated, both conforming to and in defiance of imperial regulations. Bassi demonstrates that the islands, continental coasts, and open waters of the transimperial Greater Caribbean constituted a space that was simultaneously Spanish, British, French, Dutch, Danish, Anglo-American, African, and indigenous. Exploring the “lived geographies” of the region’s dwellers, Bassi challenges preconceived notions of the existence of discrete imperial spheres and the inevitable emergence of independent nation-states while providing insights into how people envision their own futures and make sense of their place in the world.

Thanks to dmf for the link

Stefanos Geroulanos, Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present is now out with Stanford University Press.

This book returns to a time and place when the concept of transparency was met with deep suspicion. It offers a panorama of postwar French thought where attempts to show the perils of transparency in politics, ethics, and knowledge led to major conceptual inventions, many of which we now take for granted.

Between 1945 and 1985, academics, artists, revolutionaries, and state functionaries spoke of transparency in pejorative terms. Associating it with the prying eyes of totalitarian governments, they undertook a critical project against it—in education, policing, social psychology, economic policy, and the management of information. Focusing on Sartre, Lacan, Canguilhem, Lévi-Strauss, Leroi-Gourhan, Foucault, Derrida, and others, Transparency in Postwar France explores the work of ethicists, who proposed that individuals are transparent neither to each other nor to themselves, and philosophers, who clamored for new epistemological foundations. These decades saw the emergence of the colonial and phenomenological “other,” the transformation of ideas of normality, and the effort to overcome Enlightenment-era humanisms and violence in the name of freedom. These thinkers’ innovations remain centerpieces for any resistance to contemporary illusions that tolerate or enable power and social coercion.