Progressive Geographies

Following the publication of my monographa few months ago, I recently spoke to Tee at Stylish Academic about the process of writing and getting publishedas an early career researcher. We talked about my journey from PhD thesis through to publication, and some of the things I learnt along the way, including approaching a publisher, rewriting the thesis into book form, and balancing the book with the rest of your career development.

Stylish Academic has some excellent features for early career academics, so do take a look at the rest of the blog if you’re not already following.

Marcelo Hoffman, Foucault and the Political Party
20th March 2015 | 11:00 – 11:45

Audio, podcast on the Voice Republic site

Marcelo Hoffman holds a PhD from the University of Denver, and has taught at Earlham College and Marian University. His research focuses on contemporary political theory, with a particular emphasis on the contributions of Michel Foucault. He is the author of Foucault and Power: The Influence of Political Engagement on Theories of Power (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). His writings have been published in New Political Science, Telos, Philosophy & Social Criticism and Michel Foucault: Key Concepts.

Over the past few weeks I have been working my way through Michel Serres’s 1980 Le Parasite: a dense, poetic, brilliant text that seeks to tear down and rebuild the way we think about everything. In reading the book I kept a running list of intertexts to which Serres refers, a document that runs to some 148 pages. I have decided to make this Reader’s Guide available to download so that those seeking to grapple with Serres’s forbidding erudition and the proliferation of references and allusions in Le Parasite can have a slightly easier time of it than I did. The document is available here.

Here is an extract from the Introduction:

Michel Serres’s Le Parasite is a foundational text not only for the understanding of Serres’s own imposing and timely thought but also for key debates in contemporary posthumanism, object oriented thought, new materialisms, ecology, ontology and politics.

However…

‘The Gentrification of the Political’

A Workshop at the University of Kent

School of Politics & International Relations

6th & 7th June 2016

Gentrification, as an urban phenomenon, is one of the central issues around which contemporary political struggles are organised. This workshop seeks to contribute to understanding the ways in which the process of gentrification occurs, by seeing it as a political problem at the level of conceptualisation itself. It seeks to investigate how academic and intellectual practice can be ‘gentrified’, what the effects of this process are, and how it can be prevented. By taking a transdisciplinary approach to these questions, we seek to explore the valences of the concept of ‘gentrification’ when applied to ‘the political’, beyond the immediate process of urban development. In other words, how can the logic of gentrification be applied and resisted at the level of thought itself, and to what extent is…