Progressive Geographies

One of the key people I am in dialogue with for my work on terrain is UBC Anthropology Professor, Gaston Gordillo. He provides a preview of a forthcoming essay on terrain at his Space and Politics blog. It will appear in Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen, edited by Anand Pandian and Cymene Howe (2017, Punctum).

The piece begins with the rich ethnographic description familiar to readers of his books  Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco and  Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. But it shifts into a powerful emphasis on the concept of terrain:

Global warming challenges human-centered views of places, landscapes, and territories as socially configured spatial fields for a simple reason: it confronts us with the vast, uncontrollable physicality of terrain. I propose “terrain” for our lexicon of the future because only this term admits that all actually-existing places have volumes, forms, and textures that are irreducible and indifferent to human practice, and whose dynamism becomes most apparent in the elusive physicality of the wind. And the air moves because we live in a planet in motion that rhythmically exposes the ocean and the atmosphere to the heat of the sun, creating temperature imbalances, flows, and currents in a state of flux.

You can learn more about his remarkable work in an interview I conducted with him for the Society and Space open site a couple of years ago.

As ever, a very useful roundup here.

Peter Adamson, professor of philosophy at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and creator of the podcast History Of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, has put together a list of 20 rules or “suggestions of best practice” for doing the history of philosophy.

The rules were culled from various podcasts and posts over the past couple of years. Some of them, he admits, are obvious, and others he says he ought not have to say but must owing to common violations of it.

Read more at the Daily Nous (summary), or History of Philosophy (original version). Lots of good advice here, and I think this is useful for more general work in the history of thought or intellectual history too. Many of these are principles I try to follow (but don’t necessarily or always succeed in doing…)

Achille Mbembe, ‘The age of humanism is ending‘, Mail and Guardian, 22 December 2016

There is no sign that 2017 will be much different from 2016.

Under Israeli occupation for decades, Gaza will still be the biggest open prison on Earth.

In the United States, the killing of black people at the hands of the police will proceed unabated and hundreds of thousands more will join those already housed in the prison-industrial complex that came on the heels of plantation slavery and Jim Crow laws.

Europe will continue its slow descent into liberal authoritarianism or what cultural theorist Stuart Hall called authoritarian populism. Despite complex agreements reached at international forums, the ecological destruction of the Earth will continue and the war on terror will increasingly morph into a war of extermination between various forms of nihilism.

Warwick historians have written a powerful piece about the growing racism in the UK at Open Democracy.