Progressive Geographies

David Beer discusses Metric Power on the New Books in Critical Theory podcast with Dave O’Brien.

How do metrics rule the social world? In Metric Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) David Beer, Reader in Sociology at the University of York, outlines the rise of the metric and the role of metrics in shaping everyday life. The book outlines the core theoretical concepts, such as neo-liberalism, bio-power, and bio-politics, alongside the characteristics themes of metric power, including practices of making (in)visible, the social life of methods and data, and questions of agency. These theoretical discussions are set against the broad backdrop of the rise of big data, corporate power, social media, and algorithm based decision making. Metric Power is located within the study of broader social inequalities, meaning the book makes important reading for anyone concerned with how our daily experiences of technologies, organisations, and social institutions, are shaped, unequally, by the power of metrics.

Michel Foucault e as insurreições: é inútil revoltar-se?, Margareth Rago, Sílvio Gallo (orgs.).

Thanks to Marcelo Hoffman for the link to this collection, who says that many of the contributors will also be contributing to the next issue of the Carceral Notebooks.

O X Colóquio Internacional Michel Foucault, realizado na Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp) entre 24 e 27 de outubro de 2016, teve como proposta de reflexão as revoltas, as resistências e as insurreições na filosofia desse pensador. Procurou discutir a dimensão da liberdade, da desobediência e das lutas em suas reflexões, na contramão das leituras simplificadoras, para não dizer ressentidas, que se satisfazem em enquadrar sua filosofia como antiemancipacionista, isto é, como incapaz de fornecer saídas, a despeito das brilhantes análises sobre o exercício do poder na vida cotidiana.
Assim, este livro, organizado a partir de um conjunto de textos especialmente escritos para o evento e devidamente revistos por seus respectivos autores, nos apresenta um amplo panorama do pensamento de Michel Foucault e derivações dele para pensar nossas questões contemporâneas.

I’ve mentioned Helen Sword’s book Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write here before. There is a short discussion on this theme from her in the Times Higher Education.

How do successful academics write, and how do they learn to write? What are their daily routines, their formative experiences, their habits of mind? What emotions do they associate with their academic writing? And where do they find the “air and light and time and space”, as the poet Charles Bukowski put it, to get their writing done? These were among the questions that I asked as part of a research project that eventually took me to 45 universities in 15 countries.

Feedback from more than 1,300 academics, PhD students and other researchers from across the disciplines revealed that successful writing is built on a complex and varied set of attitudes and attributes, including behavioural habits of discipline and persistence, artisanal habits of craftsmanship and care, social habits of collegiality and collaboration and emotional habits of positivity and pleasure. [more here]

Sandro Mezzadra and David Harvey discuss the right to the city in Bologna.