Camilla Boano reviews Lefebvre’s Towards an Architecture of Enjoyment in The Journal of Architecture (requires subscription).
The review is quite detailed, and makes use of the interview I conducted with editor Łukasz Stanek for the Society and Space open site.
Good to see this book get some more attention – there was also a review by Gastón Gordillo for Society and Space earlier this year – this is open access.
A little late linking to this, but the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released information of what was found in the compound used by bin Laden. (It would appear the timing is linked to the Seymour Hersh story about the raid that killed him, just published in London Review of Books). This includes what was on his ‘bookshelf‘, though they later clarify that all the English-language texts were e-books – see also news reports such as the one from the BBC. I’m sure there’s a joke to be made about Amazon delivery here…
Here are some of the books:-
These are an interesting mix, and assuming they were read, would give a range of perspectives from the Washington-insider approach of Woodward, to the critique of US-foreign policy of Blum and Chomsky to the conspiracy theories of Griffin. There was a section of my book Terror and Territory called ‘Reading bin Laden’. Some of the rest of the book might have been called ‘Reading bin Laden’s reading’.
Thanks to Derek Sayer’s Coasts of Bohemia blog for the alert to this depressing piece about a very real possibility in UK higher education.
Liz Morrish discusses some new ways the Conservative government will seek to assess and rank universities. ‘Learning gain’ is about to be ‘a thing’.
It is just over two weeks after the General Election, and our thoughts turn to the prospect of more cuts in public spending, a new leader for the Labour Party, some uncertainty over Brexit and the referendum on EU membership, and, post UKIP, a somewhat muted dialogue over immigration. But what lies in the future for higher education? Have you been paying selective attention over the months leading up to the election? A tuition fee cut may have lodged in your memory, but that was Labour Party policy, and we can forget that now. What does a Conservative government have planned for universities? We know that abolition of the cap on student numbers was already in the offing, as was a national postgraduate loan system for…
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Interesting piece on academia and bureaucracy in The Times Higher Education, partly drawing on David Graeber’s new book The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy.
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Political Geography looking for new associate editors – please spread the word.
Political Geography is seeking two new associate editors, to start in January 2016.
Political Geography operates in a decentralized manner with each member of the editorial team having full responsibility for her or his queue. Therefore, after being assigned an article, associate editors are responsible for all aspects of manuscript processing, including selecting and recruiting referees, managing the revision process, making acceptance decisions, and, when necessary, facilitating communication between authors and Elsevier production and publishing staff. Typically, each associate editor will process between 40 and 50 articles per year, with about half of these going to publication. As a member of the editorial team, each associate editor will also be expected to work with other team members to chart the journal’s future direction as well as the conceptualization and organization of special issues, conference-based plenary lectures, and other activities that advance the journal’s standing and facilitate the publication and promotion…
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I previously shared the call for papers for the Theatre, Performance, Foucault! workshop at King’s College London on 4 July 2015.
I’ll be presenting on the topic of “Foucault and Shakespeare: Ceremony, Theatre and Politics”. This is the intersection of my two main current projects. Here’s the abstract.
Foucault only refers to Shakespeare in a few places in his work. He is intrigued by the figures of madness that appear in King Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth. He occasionally notes the overthrow of one monarch by another, such as in Richard II or Richard III, arguing that “a part of Shakespeare’s historical drama really is the drama of the coup d’État”. For Foucault, the first are illustrations of the conflict between the individual and the mechanisms of discipline. The second are, however, less interesting than moments when the sovereign is replaced, not with another sovereign, but with a different, more anonymous, form of power. Yet, in 1976, where he treats the theme at most length, he intriguingly suggests that “Shakespearean tragedy is, at least in terms of one of its axes, a sort of ceremony, or a rememorialization of the problems of public right”. Foucault was long fascinated by the theatre, and especially its relation to political ceremony. Drawing especially on his 1972 lectures in Paris and a related presentation in Minnesota, I will begin to sketch how we might understand the relation between ceremony, theatre and politics in Foucault and Shakespeare.
Marcelo Hoffman, Foucault and Power: The Influence of Political Engagement on Theories of Power – is now available in paperback.
Michel Foucault is one of the most preeminent theorists of power, yet the relationship between his militant activities and his analysis of power remains unclear. The book explores this relationship to explain the development of Foucault’s thinking about power.
Using newly translated and unpublished materials, it examines what led Foucault to take on the question of power in the early 1970s and subsequently refine his thinking, working through different models (war and government) and modalities (disciplinary, biopolitical and governmental). Looking at Foucault’s political trajectory, from his immersion in the prisoner support movement to his engagements with the Iranian revolution and Solidarity in Poland, the book shows the militant underpinning of his interest in the question of power and its various shifts and mutations.
This thorough account, which includes the first translation of a report edited by Foucault on prison conditions, will provide students in contemporary political theory with a better understanding of Foucault’s thinking about power and of the interplay between political activities and theoretical productions.
Historical Materialism 2015 London – call for papers.
Chris Watkins follows his Serres bibliographic work with an introduction to his writing.
I have just uploaded a paper on Michel Serres to academia.edu. Here is the abstract:
This is an expanded version of a paper originally given at the English and Theatre Studies research seminar at Melbourne University in May 2015, and it retains its oral tone. My intention both for the original paper and for this expanded version is to provide a first introduction to the work and thought of Michel Serres. I discuss how Serres’s work has been received in the French-speaking and English-speaking worlds to date, briefly highlight the different areas in which his thought is making a decisive contribution today, and then offer reflections on what it is that characterises his writing as a whole. I finish by examining some of his recent thought in more detail, specifically his recent elaboration of an econarratology around the idea of the “Great Story” of the universe, opening the way, for…
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Derek Gregory with details of a very interesting event coming up in Indiana.
In July I’m thrilled to be speaking at Reconfiguring Global Space: the geography, politics and ethics of drone war, to be held at Indiana University – Bloomington, 14-17 July.
The other speakers – which explains why I’m thrilled to be going – include Medea Benjamin, Mark Neocleous, Priya Satia and Madiha Tahir: people I know only through print, video or e-mail (sometimes all three!) and it will be good to meet them in non-digital form. Which, given the subject of the conference, is an all too appropriate wish….
There are lots of other interesting participants too: the outline program is here, and the organizers hope to have full details available at the end of this month.
