Progressive Geographies

The Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Complete Works of Alfred North Whitehead, edited by Brian G. Henning and Joseph Petek

One volume was published in 2022, but three more are now announced.

Alfred North Whitehead was one of the 20th-century’s most original and significant philosophers. For the first time, this critical edition brings together his complete published works and previously unpublished lectures, papers and correspondence in a series of critically edited volumes.

The edition will include a projected six volumes of Whitehead’s unpublished works, including newly discovered materials long thought lost or destroyed. Many of these illustrations, equations and chalkboard diagrams used by Whitehead in classroom settings have never been seen before by contemporary scholars. They will illuminate many factors that influenced the development of Whitehead’s initial and later thought and elucidate, in considerably greater detail than ever before, many of his principal philosophical concepts set out in his published works.

New critical editions of Science and the Modern World, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect, The Function of Reason, Process and Reality and collections of later essays and public lectures such as Adventures of Ideas, Modes of Thought and Essays on Science and Philosophy will round out this ambitious edition, making it the ultimate scholarly collection of Whitehead’s work.

Stéphane Füzesséry, La Destruction de Berlin: De l’explosion urbaine à Germania, 1860-1945 – La Découverte, August 2025

Thanks to John Raimo for the link.

La croissance explosive de Berlin entre 1860 et 1910 a-t-elle favorisé la réception du nazisme ? La ” décivilisation ” qu’a connue l’Allemagne après 1933 est-elle née en réaction à la nouvelle civilisation urbaine apparue en plein cœur du Brandebourg au début du XXe siècle ? Pourquoi les nazis, qui n’ont pourtant cessé de clamer leur haine de la très grande ville, ont-ils voulu transformer leur capitale en une mégalopole de dix millions d’habitants ? Et dans quelle mesure la mise en œuvre de ce projet à partir de 1938 a-t-elle préfiguré la destruction de Berlin par les bombes alliées ? 
Le livre tente de répondre à ces questions. Envisageant à nouveaux frais l’histoire convulsive de Berlin entre 1860 et 1945, il observe comment deux générations d’Allemands, confrontés au brutal changement d’échelle de leur capitale et aux formes inédites empruntées par la vie métropolitaine, sont parvenus à en surmonter les effets les plus déstabilisants tout en nourrissant de profonds doutes sur la viabilité à long terme de la très grande ville – une forme de peuplement en rupture complète avec la tradition urbaine allemande. 
Il apporte ainsi un éclairage neuf sur la détestation nazie de Berlin et sur la manière dont, une fois au pouvoir, les dirigeants du IIIe Reich ont voulu reconstruire leur capitale. Revenant sur la genèse et la mise en œuvre de ce projet connu sous le nom de  Germania, il montre que la destruction de Berlin a commencé avant les bombardements alliés et que le chantier de la mégalopole nazie – par ses besoins en main-d’œuvre et en matériaux – a participé à la fuite en avant du régime vers la guerre, entraînant en retour l’une des plus vastes campagnes de dévastation jamais entreprises contre une ville.

Sheila Hones, Interspatiality: Inhabiting Literary Geography – University of Wales Press, January 2025

A consideration of literary geography as a specialist academic field.

Interspatiality is a book about the language, theory, and practice of a literary geography which takes as its subject matter the inseparability of writing, reading, and living. It explores ways of engaging with interrelated textual-social-spatial processes, working with the problem of how to appreciate these processes as inseparable; how to articulate the complex spatialities they generate; and how to convey their presence, power, and significance in literary texts. By focusing on literary geography as something inhabited as well as studied, it draws attention to the interspatiality of routine daily life.

David A. Westbrook, Social Thought from the Ruins: Quixote’s Dinner Party – Routledge, August 2025, print and open access

Through stories, conversations, and essays, this book pursues interwoven critical and philosophical inquiries into the nature of the contemporary in the North Atlantic, asking how are we to live as intellectuals, individually and in community?

Social Thought From the Ruins: Quixote’s Dinner Party is the product of informal discussion and academic work done over the last two decades among an international group of social scientists. An extended critique of academic life today and the context of our own thinking, this book interrogates aspects of our modernity, with its pervasive sense of crisis and uncertainty, and the difficulty of thinking clearly about things like the state and power, data and violence. Reflecting that the United States, indeed the North Atlantic countries, seem to have entered autumn, David A. Westbrook asks what spring might be. Will the critical social sciences have anything to offer the exercise of power, or are we doomed to incessant and ineffectual critique? Can bureaucracy be made at least more accountable, if not democratic? Conversely, can we feel less alienated from the structures of power that rule us, or that fail to govern at all? Can we feel at home?

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

Kären Wigen ed., Territorial Imaginaries: Beyond the Sovereign Map – University of Chicago Press, April 2025

Fresh offerings on world mapping beyond Western conventions.
 
This strikingly colorful volume contends that modern mapping has never been sufficient to illustrate the complex reality of territory and political sovereignty, whether past or present. For Territorial Imaginaries, editor Kären Wigen has assembled an impressive slate of experts, spanning disciplines from political science to art history, to contribute perspectives and case studies covering three main themes: mapping before the nation-state, rethinking and critiquing mapping practices, and robust traditions of counter-cartography.
 
Each contributor proposes alternative ways to think about mapping, and the essays are supported with rich archival documentation. Among the far-reaching case studies are Barbara Mundy’s cartographic history of Indigenous dispossession in the Americas, Peter Bol’s examination of two Chinese maps created five hundred years apart, and Ali Yaycıoğlu’s exploration of tensions between top-down and bottom-up mapping of Habsburg and Ottoman border claims.

Daniel Bessner & Michael Brenes eds. Cold War Liberalism: Power in a Time of Emergency – Cambridge University Press, January 2026

In the mid-twentieth century, Cold War liberalism exerted a profound influence on the US state, US foreign policy, and liberal thought across the North Atlantic world. The essays in this volume examine the history of this important ideology from a variety of perspectives. Whereas most prior works that analyze Cold War liberalism have focused on small groupings of canonical intellectuals, this book explores how the ideology transformed politics, society, and culture writ large. From impacting US foreign policy in the Middle East, to influencing the ideological contours of industrial society, to reshaping the urban landscape of Los Angeles, Cold War liberalism left an indelible mark on modern history. This collection also illuminates the degree to which Cold War liberalism continues to shape how intellectuals and policymakers understand and approach the world.

Adrian J. Ivakhiv, The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worlds – Stanford University Press, September 2025

In this ambitious new work, eco-philosopher and cultural theorist Adrian Ivakhiv presents an incisive new way of thinking about images and imagination. Drawing upon an immense range of materials, Ivakhiv reassesses the place of imagination in cultural life, analyzing how people have interacted with images in the past and the ways that digital media are profoundly altering these relationships today. The book contributes powerfully to the study of visual culture and digital media, and provides provocative interpretations of a range of important artists and media movements: from the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky, the ambitious multi-screen installations of John Akomfrah, the abstract art of Swedish spiritualist Hilma af Klint, and the Afrofuturism of jazz musicians like Sun Ra and poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs, to the ever-expanding universe of animal videos on YouTube. Along the way, the book delves into animacy and religious imagery, iconophilia and iconoclasm, divination and prophecy, “truthiness” and “enchantment networks,” online communities and artificial intelligence, the political and affective economies of digital media, and the role of utopian futurism in the present “climate-colonial Anthropocene” predicament. The result is a vital contribution toward a more empowering conception of the creative imagination and its possibilities in today’s emerging digital ecology.