Progressive Geographies

I talked about some of the sights I saw during last week’s AAG conference in Chicago in an earlier post but here I just want to mention some of the fantastic talks I attended. Quality was very high this year, and not without some controversy.

There were plenty of choices–I’ve heard there were 97 concurrent sessions. So 97 people giving papers at any one time! This is clearly ridiculous. The conference is 5 days long, papers start at 8am and go past 7pm every day. There’s also a full day of papers on the last Saturday, which everybody also complains about (it’s the day most people do their sightseeing, so sessions are lightly attended). An obvious solution to that problem is to have the conference M-F instead of T-Sat.

As for the number of sessions this is a result of the AAG policy of accepting every paper. While on…

Foucault against Himself
By (author) Francois Caillat
Translated by David Homel

Arsenal Pulp Press

Price: $17.95 CAD $17.95 USD
ISBN: 9781551526027
EPUB ISBN: 9781551526034 (check your favourite retailer)
Availability: Coming soon. For more information contact sales@arsenalpulp.com

A thought-provoking collection of essays on Michel Foucault that reframes his legacy.

In his private life, as well as in his work and political attitudes, Michel Foucault often stood in contradiction to himself, especially when his expansive ideas collided with the institutions in which he worked. In Francois Caillat’s provocative collection of essays and interviews based on his French documentary of the same name, leading contemporary critics and philosophers reframe Foucault’s legacy in an effort to build new ways of thinking about his struggle against society’s mechanisms of domination, demonstrating how conflict within the self lies at the heart of Foucault’s life and work.

Includes a foreword written especially for this edition by Paul…

I had a wonderful time at the Balsillie School at Waterloo last week – good company, constructive conversations and endless hospitality – and I’m truly grateful to Simon Dalby, Jasmin Habib and all the graduate students who made my visit so enjoyable.  I finished by giving one of the Centre for Global Governance Innovation (CIGI)’s Signature Lectures.

This was the latest (and near-final) version of “Dirty dancing: drones and death in the borderlands”.   The argument has developed considerably since my first presentations; I’ll upload the written version once it’s finished, but CIGI has posted the lecture and Q&A online here.  I’ve also embedded the YouTube version below, but if that doesn’t work try here.

My thanks to the AV technicians who made this possible: their help with the production followed by their assured and rapid-fire editing beats anything I’ve encountered anywhere.

In this version, I…

PDF of flyer

DePaul University Humanities Center & the Department of Philosophy

Foucault and the legacy of the prisons information group (GIP)

MAY 8th, 2015
Richardson Library 115
2350 N. Kenmore
Chicago, IL 60614

Scholars Symposium

1:00-1:10 Opening Remarks
Kevin Thompson, DePaul University

1:10-1:30 “The Dialectic of Theory and Practice”
Bernard Harcourt, Columbia University

1:30-1:50 “Prisoners Inside / Intellectuals Outside: The GIP and the French prison revolts (1971-2)”
Nicolas Drolc, Documentarian

1:50-2:10 “The Creaturely Politics of Prisoner Resistance Movements”
Lisa Guenther, Vanderbilt University

2:10-2:30 “The GIP and the Question of Failure”
Perry Zurn, DePaul University

2:30-3:00 Q & A

Film Screening

7:00-8:30 Sur les toits (2014, French with English Subtitles)

8:30-9:00 Q & A with Director Nicolas Drolc

SUR LES TOITS
(2014, French with English Subtitles)
Nicolas Drolc, Director

Between September 1971 and the end of 1972, for the very first time in French history, prison inmates collectively initiated revolts…