Politics, infrastructure and representation: The case of Jerusalem’s Light Rail

Posted on December 6, 2014 by stuartelden

20130506-190122.jpgI’ve written briefly about the Jerusalem Light Rail before. There is a very interesting article by Amina Nolte and Haim Yacobi, ‘Politics, infrastructure and representation: The case of Jerusalem’s Light Rail‘, in Cities (requires subscription) which discusses the politics and geographies of this in some detail.

Posted in Politics, Territory, urban/urbanisation | Leave a comment

# THE FUNAMBULIST PAPERS 57 /// Patterns of Life: A Very Short History of Schematic Bodies by Grégoire Chamayou

Posted on December 6, 2014 by stuartelden

Grégoire Chamayou discusses bodies and movement on The Funambulist; Derek Gregory continues the conversation here.

Léopold Lambert's avatarThe Funambulist

Pablo Picasso drawing with light / Photograph by Gjon Mili (1949)

The second series of The Funambulist Papers continues around the topic of bodies. Today, I am glad and honored to welcome Grégoire Chamayou to this ‘assignment,’ after his three books (Vile Bodies (2008), Manhunts (2010), and Theory of the Drone (2013)) were discussed on this blog. The fifty-seventh text of the series, “Patterns of Life: A Very Short History of Schematic Bodies,” is an illustrated essay about bodies’ movement traceability, using Michel Foucault’s historical and philosophical method of genealogy. From the scientific domains of archaeology and ethology that particularly focused on animal itineraries, the evolution of traceability technology shifted to the capitalist and military realms. While the traceability of gesture and movement was able to both optimize the working gesture, as well as the consumer’s approach to the commodity, Western armies engaged in the so-called “war on terror,”…

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Call for Papers: Power and Space in the Drone Age – Neuchâtel, 27-28 August 2015

Posted on December 5, 2014 by stuartelden

Call for papers for an interesting conference coming up next year

Call for Papers: Power and Space in the Drone Age

Two-day international workshop, Institute of Geography, Neuchâtel University, Switzerland
27-28 August 2015
Organizers: Francisco Klauser and Silvana Pedrozo, Institute of Geography, Neuchâtel University

Today, a variety of surveillant technologies that were hardly accessible previously to the public are becoming cheaper and more sophisticated at an exponential rate. This includes drones. In Switzerland, 20,000 drones are currently estimated to be in public and private use. The resulting proliferation of aerial control raises a series of critical questions. These range from the changing regimes of visibility across urban and rural space to the novel dynamics of power, counterpower and resistance implied by contemporary drone developments. In approaching these issues, the workshop places centrally the concepts of space and power. Drones are hereby approached as techniques of power that are intrinsically bound up with space: they combine various geographical scales and spatial logics of control; they offer novel ways of monitoring, following and orchestrating flows of people and objects; and they allow the administration of wider urban areas and border regions. At the same time they create a parallel world of control rooms in which ‘drone surveillance’ is put into action. Thus the workshop starts from the basic assumption that a distinct ‘spatial curiosity’ and ‘power sensitivity’ are required to understand the logics, functioning and implications of drones in the present-day world.

Workshop topics
There is now a growing social-scientific literature that focuses on drones in military conflict. In contrast, civil and commercial applications of drones have remained widely unnoticed in academic research. Addressing this research lacuna, the workshop encourages reflection on differing applications, interests and actors in the field of drone surveillance, in order to generate a wider picture of how drones interact with space today, and of what power issues this raises. We welcome submissions on any aspect of this broad area, but would particularly encourage papers in relation to the following subthemes:

.       Drones in urban and rural environments
.       Democratization of vertical control, as exemplified by private and commercial drones
.       The imbrications between drone surveillance and sociospatial imaginaries
.       Changing regimes of visibility in the drone age
.       Drones and the management of mobilities
.       Spatialities of the drone
.       Drones, social exclusion and power
.       Etc.

Confirmed keynote lectures will be given by

* Peter Adey, Royal Holloway University of London, UK
* Jeremy Crampton, University of Kentucky, US
* Stuart Elden, University of Warwick, UK
* Ole Jensen, University of Aalborg, DK
* Ian Shaw, Glasgow University, UK

Abstract submission and registration
Please forward your abstracts of a maximum of 400 words by 31 January 2015 to Silvana Pedrozo (silvana.pedrozo@unine.ch).
It is expected that selected papers of the workshop will be published in a theme issue of Geographical Helvetica, the Swiss journal of Geography (open access from 2015).
A detailed programme will be posted online from 1 May 2015 at http://www2.unine.ch/inst_geographie.

Registration fees for the workshop: 200 CHF (includes coffee/tea and two lunch meals). For registration and further details with regard to travel, accommodation, meals etc., please contact Noémie Béguelin Caudoux at Secretariat.Geographie@unine.ch. Deadline for registration: 31 July 2015.

Posted in Conferences | 4 Comments

Contested Political Spaces – report and recordings from a PAIS conference

Posted on December 5, 2014 by stuartelden

Report from the organisers, and audio files of Alex Jeffrey’s excellent keynote and the closing roundtable, from the Contested Political Spaces workshop held in Warwick last week.

stuartelden's avatarPolitics Reconsidered

tumblr_nb0rcfshqz1tkco2xo1_1280-pngAntónio Ferraz de Oliveira and Mara Duer reflect on the ‘Contested Political Spaces’ postgraduate conference held at Warwick University last week.

Last Thursday and Friday, a few months of learning-as-you-go intensive teamwork coalesced into a successful conference that made all the effort involved seem more than justified. Over two days, over twenty people gathered in Warwick to present an exciting range of papers around a broad common concern – that of understanding how physical and social space is entangled with political contestation of various kinds and contexts. The panels organized were thematically arranged around the issues of borders and mobility, the play between spatial arrangements and certain subjectivities, productions of territory (materially and semantically), contestation in cities and the struggles which attempted, theoretically or in practice, to establish alternative concepts of space and politics, alternatives relations between place and power. The conference had been set up to ask difficult and daring…

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History of Sexuality volume II – detailed discussion of the three different introductions

Posted on December 5, 2014 by stuartelden

HS II 3 introsOn a page on this site I discuss in detail the three versions of the introduction to the History of Sexuality volume II.

  1. The May 1984 version, which introduced the book itself – L’usage des plaisirs, translated as The Use of Pleasure.
  2. An earlier version was published in November 1983 in Le Débat as “Usage des plaisirs et techniques de soi”.  This is Dits et écrits text 338. There is no published English translation.
  3. A still earlier version appeared in The Foucault Reader in 1984, without a contemporaneous corresponding French publication. It is reprinted with amendments in Ethics and that version is reprinted in The Essential Foucault. This text appears is Dits et écrits text 340.

In particular I track all the differences between texts 1 and 2, showing how text 1 is a version of 2 with changes that could have been made a proof-stage. The majority are minor – a few deleted words, the odd additional clause or short sentence, the addition of a footnote, changes to punctuation, sentences linked or broken etc. There are two exceptions – the concluding paragraph of HS II 21/13, which is markedly different to DE IV, 546; and a paragraph on DE IV, 547-8 which is different from HS II, 23-4/15.

I then move onto text 3, which is the first draft of the introduction, but this is a very different text. I suggest that the Dits et écrits editors may have had access to a hitherto unpublished French original. The text we have is very interesting, providing an overview of Foucault’s works, major and minor, and how they led him to the point he is at the time of its writing. I suggest that this text may date from March 1983, and be a fragment of the introduction to a manuscript Daniel Defert tells us was drafted at that time under the title of L’usage des plaisirs, a long volume that comprised the entirety of what actually became volumes two and three of the History of Sexuality – BNF NAF28284 (2-5). 

The three texts I listed at the outset appear there in reverse chronological order. Put in the right order

  1. DE text 340; The Foucault Reader – draft from May 1983?
  2. DE text 338; no English translation – version from Le Débat, November 1983.
  3. HS II – final version, May 1984.

Reading the first of these, especially in the improved translation in Ethics, and then the third of these in The Use of Pleasure is instructive. The information here should help with understanding how the second text was lightly edited to become the third, and stand in place of an English translation – what I’ve provided is essentially the editorial apparatus you’d need to construct a critical edition of the text.

Posted in Foucault's Last Decade, Michel Foucault, Publishing | Leave a comment

New Directions in International Political Economy Conference, Warwick, 13-15 May 2015

Posted on December 5, 2014 by stuartelden

New Directions in International Political Economy Conference, Warwick, 13-15 May 2015 – Programme now available.

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The Birth of Territory – Chinese translation forthcoming

Posted on December 5, 2014 by stuartelden

The Birth of Territory12 The Birth of Territory is forthcoming in Chinese translation. While this is good news, it’s hardly the path to riches. The royalty rate is 7%, rising to 8% in the unlikely event of it selling more than 10,000 copies. This is split between me and the publisher, so I’ll get 50% of that rate. Then there is a “10% agency commission”, and of course this is all taxable. So I think the eventual rate is about 1.9%… This is of publisher net receipts, not cost at point of sale. For a book that gives the publisher $20, I’ll see about 38 cents. We don’t write academic books for the money, but even so!

Posted in Books, Publishing, The Birth of Territory | 1 Comment

Statements by UCU, VC, Staff, Amnesty International and petitions about Warwick events on December 3 2014

Posted on December 5, 2014 by stuartelden

I’ve updated this with some more links

Alumni petition

Student Union statement

Amnesty International press release

Warwick for Free Education site

Statement by Vice-Chancellor, Nigel Thrift

Letter to Registrar from Warwick staff (another version appears here, with more signatories)

Statement by Warwick UCU (below):

Warwick WUCU branch committee are concerned at the incidents which occurred on Wednesday 3rd December in Senate House when a group of Warwick University students, staging a sit-in to protest against university tuition fees, were subject to what appears to be excessive police action.

A video, which was subsequently posted on YouTube, showed students being grabbed and pushed and having their hair pulled, followed by CS spray being used at very close range. Also in the footage, a taser gun can be seen and heard, and there have been subsequent reports that it may have been discharged against one student. At the time of writing, three students are being held at Coventry police station.​

According to reporting in the Coventry Telegraph, the police were called by university officials to attend the protest after a claim that a protester had attacked a member of staff. There is nothing in the video or other reporting to suggest that there was an imminent threat at the time of the police action, and their behaviour appears disproportionate and unacceptable. ACPO guidelines, for example, state that CS spray ‘should not be used at a distance of less than one metre unless the nature of the risk to the officer is such that this cannot be avoided’ – it is not at all clear from the video footage and reporting that there was such a risk. The students state that they had been sitting in a circle discussing free education and the university community and that they had not been informed that the police had been called and nor did the police, on arrival, tell them why they were there.

We call on the university to publicly affirm its commitment to democratic values and the rights of students and staff to protest peacefully against policies and practices with which there is disagreement. The university is our common space and we protest in the strongest terms against the violations that were allowed to take place here today.

Warwick UCU

Posted in Politics, Universities | 1 Comment

The 10 Best Books by Academic Publishers in 2014

Posted on December 5, 2014 by stuartelden

A bit early for best-of-year lists, but apart from the first, this picks some different and interesting-sounding books.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Statements by UCU, VC and concerned Warwick staff about yesterday’s events

Posted on December 4, 2014 by stuartelden

Update: there is an Alumni petition here

Update 2: Student Union statement and Amnesty International press release

Update 3: Warwick for Free Education site

Original links:

Statement by Vice-Chancellor, Nigel Thrift

Letter to Registrar from Warwick staff (Update: another version appears here, with more signatories)

Statement by Warwick UCU (below):

Warwick WUCU branch committee are concerned at the incidents which occurred on Wednesday 3rd December in Senate House when a group of Warwick University students, staging a sit-in to protest against university tuition fees, were subject to what appears to be excessive police action.

A video, which was subsequently posted on YouTube, showed students being grabbed and pushed and having their hair pulled, followed by CS spray being used at very close range. Also in the footage, a taser gun can be seen and heard, and there have been subsequent reports that it may have been discharged against one student. At the time of writing, three students are being held at Coventry police station.​

According to reporting in the Coventry Telegraph, the police were called by university officials to attend the protest after a claim that a protester had attacked a member of staff. There is nothing in the video or other reporting to suggest that there was an imminent threat at the time of the police action, and their behaviour appears disproportionate and unacceptable. ACPO guidelines, for example, state that CS spray ‘should not be used at a distance of less than one metre unless the nature of the risk to the officer is such that this cannot be avoided’ – it is not at all clear from the video footage and reporting that there was such a risk. The students state that they had been sitting in a circle discussing free education and the university community and that they had not been informed that the police had been called and nor did the police, on arrival, tell them why they were there.

We call on the university to publicly affirm its commitment to democratic values and the rights of students and staff to protest peacefully against policies and practices with which there is disagreement. The university is our common space and we protest in the strongest terms against the violations that were allowed to take place here today.

Warwick UCU

Posted in Politics, Universities | 2 Comments