The review forum on The Birth of Territory in Journal of Historical Geography is now published. Reviews by Stephen Legg, Michael Heffernan, Briony McDonagh, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Saskia Sassen, and a response by me.
The full article requires subscription, but there is a preprint on academia.edu
Thanks again to Steve for organising this, and to Michael, Briony, Jeffrey and Saskia for their engagement with the book.
How did I not know there was a painting by Magritte called ‘Le territoire’ until now?
Deadline for call for papers is 20th November 2015
The sixteenth annual meeting of the Foucault Circle will be held in Sydney, Australia, June 29-July 2, 2016 (hosted by the University of New South Wales).
The Foucault Circle at UNSW will be held immediately before the Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference which in 2016 is being hosted by Monash University at the Caulfield campus. AAP Dates are: Sunday 3rd July – Thursday 7th July 2016. Scholars planning to attend the Foucault Circle may also wish to attend the AAP. Full details before or here.
We invite individualpapers and roundtable proposals(4-5 panelists) on any aspect of Foucault’s work. Studies, critiques, and applications of Foucauldian thinking are all welcome. We will aim for a diversity of topics and perspectives.
Abstracts should be prepared for anonymous review, and are to be submitted to the program committee chair, Richard A. Lynch, by email (lynchricharda@sau.edu) on/before Friday, Nov. 20, 2015. Please indicate “Foucault…
View original post 150 more words
The theorist and historian René Girard died yesterday. There is a good obituary which discusses his important work at the Stanford news service. Thanks to Robert Tally for the first alert to this story.
Update: also a brief piece at the Stanford University Press blog.
AAG Names Judith Butler as the 2016 Honorary Geographer – news here. Here’s one key paragraph.
AAG Past President Mona Domosh will confer the 2016 AAG Honorary Geographer Award upon Judith Butler at the 2016 AAG Annual Meeting in San Francisco during her plenary session, “Demography in the Ethics of Non-Violence,” on Tuesday, March 29. Butler’s plenary will focus on “A principled approach to non-violence that often admits to exceptions where violence is conceded as legitimate. To what extent does the exception to nonviolence in the name of self-defense or for close kin implicitly make a distinction between lives worth saving and dispensable lives? A practice of non-violence has to take into account the demographic distribution of grievability that establishes which lives are worthy of safeguarding and which are less worthy or not worthy at all. Otherwise, both biopolitics and the logic of war can permeate calculations about when and where non-violence can be invoked. Does the demographic challenge revise our approach to non-violence? and if so, how?”
Back in 2007, the last time the AAG was in San Francisco, we invited Butler to give the Society and Space lecture for the journal’s 25th anniversary. The AAG scheduled the lecture in a very small room, and I had to ask them to give us the biggest room they had. (Eventually they did, and it was still packed to bursting.) It took a bit of work back then to get the big room, and at one point I asked the conference organiser ‘you don’t realise who Butler is, do you?’ His reply was that he didn’t, and wasn’t sure why he should. It seems that they do now – a good thing. I’m sure her lecture will be a big draw again, and I’m sorry I’ll miss it.
A lovely piece by Derek Gregory remembering Edward Soja at Geographical Imaginations.
A mix of books recently received. Nietzsche’s Le livre du philosophe, Sloterdijk’s Stress and Freedom, Han’s The Transparency Society and The Burnout Society, Saramago’s The Notebook, the Penguin Macbeth, Jean-Pierre Couture’s book on Sloterdijk (which I endorsed), and Dardot and Laval’s The New Way of the World. The Sloterdijk was in recompense for review work, the Couture was complimentary, as were the two Han books. The rest I bought.
Some interesting discussion of why people decline review requests, based on data from American Political Science Review.
Eyal Weizman, “Forensic Architecture” video of 2015 Wall Exchange lecture UBC (via Derek Gregory’s Geographical Imaginations.)
Can architecture provide new tools of political analysis and intervention? This question is central to the work of Eyal Weizman, Israeli architect and scholar. By examining buildings, ruins, maps, satellite imagery and citizen images and video, his research teams investigate the sites of contemporary conflicts and monitor the crimes of states. Weizman unpacks state violence from the frontier regions of Pakistan, through the forests of South America to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Weizman visited Vancouver to deliver the fall 2015 Wall Exchange lecture, presented by UBC’s Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.
The Heterotopian Studies site has a useful resource page on ‘Foucault and Visual Art‘, providing links to images which Foucault discusses, along with a bibliography. As well as the obvious – Magritte, Picasso, Velázquez – it also has links to Foucault’s discussions of Paul Rebeyrolle, Duane Michels and Gérard Fromanger.
.jpg)
