Two posts on writing at The Sociological Imagination and An und für sich

Two posts on writing at The Sociological Imagination and An und für sich.

The first talks about writing being disconnected from the internet, and whether this works for different writers or not. It’s written by David Beer, reflecting on the process used by the novelist Iain Rankin. The second talks about the question of mood relating to finishing a project, written by Adam Kotsko. Both are well worth reading – the second fits with some of my own recent thinking having brought one project to a finish and beginning another (or two); the first was interesting as this week I was working in the Bibliothèque Nationale manuscript room, where there was no internet signal. So I sat for almost eight hours each day – the whole time it was open, except a brief lunch break – reading Foucault’s handwritten notes. Not having the internet as a distraction – or even to check things – made me focus much more intensely on what I was doing. More on the Foucault work in a subsequent post, but for now, two interesting things to read about writing.

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David Harvey discusses his recent work at Mimar Sinan Güzel Sanatlar Üniversitesi (May 2015 video)

Via a comment on a post commenting on my post on writing after completing a book ms.

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Benjamin Tallis interviews Claudia Aradau on Critical Security Studies

Benjamin Tallis interviews Claudia Aradau on Critical Security Studies – in three parts

via CEE New Perspectives

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How to make our cities open and democratic – Bradley Garrett TEDx talk (video)

How to make our cities open and democratic – Bradley Garrett TEDxSouthamptonUniversity

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Palgrave’s Publishing resources for early career academics

Early_Career_Researcher_GuidePublishing resources for early career academics from Palgrave – a pdf to download from academia.edu. Thanks to Robert Tally for the link.

Focuses on books, with advice on revision from PhD thesis, proposals, glossary of terms, etc. – much of this is relevant to people further ahead in their career.

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Fiona Allon reviews Martijn Konings, The Emotional Logic of Capitalism at Progress in Political Economy.

Fiona Allon reviews Martijn Konings new book, The Emotional Logic of Capitalism at Progress in Political Economy.

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Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition – forthcoming in December 2015

Perry Zurn and Andrew Dilts (eds.), Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition – forthcoming in December 2015 from Palgrave. I was one of the readers of the manuscript to provide an endorsement – it’s a very good and interesting collection. Few details on the Palsgrave site as yet, except for this description:

This book is an interdisciplinary collection of essays on Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons (The Prisons Information Group, the GIP). The GIP was a radical activist group, extant between 1970 and 1973, in which Michel Foucault was heavily involved. It aimed to facilitate the circulation of information about living conditions in French prisons and, over time, it catalyzed several revolts and instigated minor reforms. In Foucault’s words, the GIP sought to identify what was ‘intolerable’ about the prison system and then to produce ‘an active intolerance’ of that same intolerable reality. To do this, the GIP ‘gave prisoners the floor,’ so as to hear from prisoners themselves what to resist and how. The essays collected here explore the GIP’s resources both for Foucault studies and for prison activism today.

In a related development, many of the writings of the GIP are forthcoming in an English translation – more details when available.

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Foucault’s major works to appear in a Pléiade edition – a few more details

Last year I shared this story:

Foucault’s major works – his sole-authored books, plus some articles – will appear in a two-volume collection in 2015 as a prestigious Pléiade edition. Thanks to Colin Gordon for alerting me to the news. Frédéric Gros is interviewed about this here (in French). Among other things the interview says that the final Collège de France course, Théories et institutions pénales (1971-1972), is due out in 2015, and that, in common with other volumes, the Pléiade volumes will be a critical edition.

A few more details in Le mondethanks to Romain Garcier for the link.

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The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism & Biopolitics (pdf)

Open access collection of and on recent Italian theory.

dmf's avatarDeterritorial Investigations

Click to access OA_Version_9780980544077_The_Italian_Difference.pdf

“This volume brings together essays by different generations of Italian thinkers which address, whether in affirmative, problematizing or genealogical registers, the entanglement of philosophical speculation and political proposition within recent Italian thought. Nihilism and biopolitics, two concepts that have played a very prominent role in theoretical discussions in Italy, serve as the thematic foci around which the collection orbits, as it seeks to define the historical and geographical particularity of these notions as well their continuing impact on an international debate. The volume also covers the debate around ‘weak thought’ (pensiero debole), the feminist thinking of sexual difference, the re-emergence of political anthropology and the question of communism. The contributors provide contrasting narratives of the development of post-war Italian thought and trace paths out of the theoretical and political impasses of the present—against what Negri, in the text from which the volume takes its…

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Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment (2015)

News of a recent collection on Gramsci and Foucault.

Clare O'Farrell's avatarFoucault News

krepsGramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment.Edited by David Kreps, Ashgate, February 2015

Mapping the resonances, dissonances, and linkages between the thought of Gramsci and Foucault to uncover new tools for socio-political and critical analysis for the twenty-first century, this book reassesses the widely-held view that their work is incompatible.

With discussions of Latin American revolutionary politics, indigenous knowledges, technologies of government and the teaching of paediatrics in post-invasion Iraq, complexity theory, medical anthropology and biomedicine, and the role of Islam in the transition to modern society in the Arab world, this interdisciplinary volume presents the latest theoretical research on different facets of these two thinkers’ work, as well as analyses of the specific linkages that exist between them in concrete settings.

A rigorous, comparative exploration of the work of two towering figures of the twenty-first century, Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment will appeal to scholars and students of social and…

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