Progressive Geographies

Posted on behalf of Mark Usher

State, territory, urbanism: Exploring the nexus between government and infrastructure
Convenors:
Mark Usher, University of Manchester (mark.usher@manchester.ac.uk)
Rhys Jones, Aberystwyth University (raj@aber.ac.uk)
Ingrid Medby, University of Durham (i.a.medby@durham.ac.uk)

This session will consider how research on the techno-political nexus between sovereignty and the ‘stuff’ of public services, namely large technological systems, infrastructural capacity and logistical centres, can provide original insights into traditional issues of statehood, nation-building, governance and socio-economic restructuring. The logistical matrix and everyday infrastructural workings of the state have become a ‘matter of concern’ (Barry 2013) not only for civil engineers but increasingly for scholars in the humanities and social sciences (Mukerji 2009; Guldi 2012; Jones and Merriman 2012; Joyce 2013; Harvey and Knox 2015; Swyngedouw 2015). Here, what Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari called ‘collective equipment’- canals, roads, railways, dams, utilities and telecommunications systems inter alia – have been conceptualised as a networked technological medium through which administrative control over territory and population has been consolidated, organised and urbanised (McFarlane and Rutherford 2008; Bennett and Joyce 2010). This session invites submissions that further our understanding of the nexus between infrastructure, territory and the state through empirical and theoretical analysis. In particular, how are nation-states assembled and endowed with ontological solidity as technological networks emerge, consolidate and integrate (Mitchell 2002), and indeed, what happens to our understanding and experience of government when these systems fragment and disperse? Can we think of infrastructure as a strategic medium between cities and the nation-state? How can a topological and ‘volumetric’ (Elden 2013) understanding of infrastructural space advance existing theories of the state?
Potential themes could include, but are not limited to, the following:
– State formation, nation-building and techno-nationalism
– Restructuring, austerity and state dismantling
– Territorialisation, assemblages and worlding
– Urbanism, municipal governance and new state spaces
– Material politics of infrastructure and engineering
– Governmentality and material geographies of governance
– Failing states and infrastructural incapacity
– Techno-politics of logistics, circulation and mobilities
– Political subjectivity, biopolitics and cyborg citizens
– Socio-spatial theory and the post-structural state
Please send abstracts (250 words max) to mark.usher@manchester.ac.uk by Friday 12th February, with your name and affiliation included.

• Five strategies to get your academic writing “unstuck”
• Mapping Post-Capitalism
• David Harvey, The Ways of the World – now published, and open access extract
• Foucault and the Politics of Health: Collaborative research and activism – audio recording of UCL talk
• Springer acquire Palgrave, and future Foucault translations
• New issue of Antipode including Gregory, ‘The Natures of War’ and Lefebvre, ‘The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology’
• Foucault: the Birth of Power Update 11: clearing the decks and beginning to move from Foucault to Shakespeare
• Foucault and the Groupe Information Santé – a bibliography
• Academic Books of 2015 – my top twenty
• Derek Gregory’s ‘Reach from the Sky’ Tanner lectures

News of the Society and Space lecture at the 2016 AAG meeting.

The new issue of Antipode is out, and includes Derek Gregory’s ‘The Natures of War’ and Henri Lefebvre, ‘The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology‘. The second piece is translated by Matthew Dennis, and edited by Adam David Morton and me. We also contribute an introduction to the piece. The entire issue is free to download.

At the Antipode Foundation site they introduce the issue, and have this to say about the Lefebvre piece:

Next up is Stuart Elden and Adam David Morton with Thinking Past Henri Lefebvre: Introducing “The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology”. As the title suggests, this piece introduces that which follows: Henri Lefebvre’s The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology. Lefebvre will be known to most geographers for his prodigious work on everyday life, the city, the production of space, and, increasingly, the state. Less well known is his longstanding interest in questions of the rural. This new translation is the first step in Stuart and Adam’s project to take on a disciplinary reductionism that “essentialises a critique of the political economy of space to urban space at the neglect of the rural-urban dialectic”, opening up new lines of geographical investigation.

The Antipode Foundation funded the translation as part of our efforts to facilitate engagement with scholarship from outside the English-speaking world. In the coming months and years we hope to break down some of the barriers between language communities, enabling hitherto under-represented groups, regions, countries and institutions to enrich conversations and debates in the journal. Watch this space…

Adam and I are obviously grateful to the Foundation for funding the translation; to Matthew for taking on the work; and Editions Anthropos for the rights.

Details of a conference at Durham in May