Progressive Geographies

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…

The webpage of the Espais Crítics collective has now links to the set of presentations of the conference in tribute to the late Neil Smith. It was a remarkable and yet kind of sad occasion, given Neil’s absence in what would have otherwise been a festive celebration of his contribution to critical geography and urban studies — as I mentioned in a previous post the conference was organized to coincide with the publication of the book on Smith by Luz Marina García Herrera and Fernando Sabaté Bel, who were working on the manuscript before he passed away. In any case, the event was rich and deep enough to resuscitate his spirit in Barcelona and the final visits and activities with social movements in Raval (see some photographs here) were perfectly attuned to Neil’s wise balance between powerful theoretical production and the solidarity and engagement with concrete struggles on the…