Progressive Geographies

An example of the kind of building which is currently being constructed by universities in Australia. Interestingly, in this rendering, nobody actually seems to be doing any real work. And unless I missed it, there is a glaring absence of reference to the space that staff will be spending most of their time working in.

The teaching and public spaces are lovely, but what are the primary work spaces for academic staff going to look like? Contrary to public perception, perhaps, academics only spend a small proportion of their working time in classrooms.

At NDPR here. Having not read this yet, this looks like a great text to work through the next time I teach a course on violence. Here, May goes through Balibar’s “civility” approach as a counter to violence and non-violence:

If violence, or at least its threat, cannot be eliminated, what can be done to address it? Balibar briefly considers and rejects two options before embracing a third. The two he rejects are nonviolence and counterviolence. Nonviolence is to Balibar an “abstraction” (22) from violence. It fails to recognize that violence is always a threat, opting instead to occupy a position that seeks to be beyond the threat of violence. Counterviolence, by contrast, seeks to invoke violence against violence, hoping to end violence by violent means. This strategy, however, is simply an “inversion” (22) of violence, one whose consequence is often to repeat the cruelties that it set out…