Progressive Geographies

We are pleased to announce the theme of our 2016 symposium, “Spatializing Sovereignty,” which will be held at UC Berkeley on Friday, March 4, 2016 and feature keynote addresses by Dr. Mishuana Goeman, Associate Professor of American Indian Studies and Gender Studies at UCLA, and Gelare Khoshgozaran, writer and multi-disciplinary artist. Please find our call for papers and presentations below!

2016 Symposium CFP: “Spatializing Sovereignty”

Featuring keynote addresses by:
Dr. Mishuana Goeman, Professor of American Indian Studies and Gender Studies, UCLA
and Gelare Khoshgozaran, Writer and Multi-disciplinary Artist

UC Berkeley
March 4, 2016

While sovereignty is often defined in terms of the bounded nation-state, this symposium convenes to examine competing, overlapping, and “nested sovereignties” (Simpson 2014). How is the spatiality of sovereignty felt, practiced, embodied, inhabited, or imposed at various scales? We might consider how the thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada and the U.S. lay bare logics of…

Ben Golder, Foucault and the Politics of Rights, Stanford University Press, 2015, Now available.
Publisher’s page

This book focuses on Michel Foucault’s late work on rights in order to address broader questions about the politics of rights in the contemporary era. As several commentators have observed, something quite remarkable happens in this late work. In his early career, Foucault had been a great critic of the liberal discourse of rights. Suddenly, from about 1976 onward, he makes increasing appeals to rights in his philosophical writings, political statements, interviews, and journalism. He not only defends their importance; he argues for rights new and as-yet-unrecognized. Does Foucault simply revise his former positions and endorse a liberal politics of rights? Ben Golder proposes an answer to this puzzle, which is that Foucault approaches rights in a spirit of creative and critical appropriation. He uses rights strategically for a range of political…

Putting a piece of writing out into the world is a bit like tossing a pebble down a mountainside. Usually it clatters down alone, bouncing a bit off this outcrop or that. It eventually loses momentum, settles in with other older pebbles, mostly forgotten. But sometimes, the pebble will bounce in such a way that it triggers other pebbles, and a little landslide ensues. Larger chunks of rock start to break loose and fall, and there the metaphor breaks down.

My blog post from a few months ago, Wilderness Group Tour, ended up being just such a pebble. It is far and away the most visited entry I’ve posted on this blog. It was shared quite a bit on Facebook, and several long, involved, thoughtful, rewarding discussions grew around it. One of these discussions grew into a twinned pair of blog posts by Professors Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Alexandra…