Progressive Geographies

Power and Space in the City – a series of conversations at UCL. I’ll be part of the first conversation on Powerful Urban Territories on November 18th 2014, along with Wendy Pullan, Allan Cochrane and Janet Newman. Here’s the description for the whole series:

Conversations on Power and Space in the City is a series of workshops designed to challenge current academic debates and influence thinking and policy on cities in this period of rapid urban change and unrest. The series of five workshops runs from November 2014 to May 2015 bringing together internationally renowned researchers, architects and activists working on and in urban space. Our aim is to foster interdisciplinary conversations on how city spaces – imaginary, relational, material – not only influence the ways in which power is exercised, but also how power is fundamental to the production of cities. The question driving this workshop series asks how…

In a fascinating, apparently not-peer-reviewed non-article available free online here, Tommaso Venturini and Bruno Latour discuss the potential of “digital methods” for the contemporary social sciences.

The paper summarizes, and quite nicely, the split of sociological methods to the statistical aggregate using quantitative methods (capturing supposedly macro-phenomenon) and irreducibly basic interactions using qualitative methods (capturing supposedly micro-phenomenon). The problem is that neither of which aided the sociologist in capture emergent phenomenon, that is, capturing controversies and events as they happen rather than estimate them after they have emerged (quantitative macro structures) or capture them divorced from non-local influences (qualitative micro phenomenon).

The solution, they claim, is to adopt digital methods in the social sciences. The paper is not exactly a methodological outline of how to accomplish these methods, but there is something of a justification available for it, and it sounds something like this:

Thanks to digital traceability, researchers no…

Lengthy review essay by Stuart Elden of two recent Foucault publications On the government of the living, and Wrong-doing, truth-telling: the function of avowal in justice, in Berfrois.

Some quotes:

It is perhaps too little noted that what we have in these and other publications, expertly edited and translated though they are, are transcribed lecture courses, supplemented by material from manuscripts. The references are, for the most part, the work of the editors, rather than Foucault’s own, and they bear many marks of their verbal delivery.

…

As he [Foucault] notes: “what I would like to do and know that I will not be able to do is write a history of the force of truth, a history of the power of truth, a history, therefore, to take the same idea from a different angle, of the will to know.”

…

But it is in confession that perhaps…

More than thirty years ago the artist-philosopher Jacques Derrida was working in the Old Bodleian Library in Oxford when he strayed into the shop. On offer were postcards  richly and decoratively redolent of the Western heritage. The shop has since moved to an enlarged space on the far side of the Schools quad and won a prize for its innovative approach to museum marketing. But we didn’t care about commercial opportunities in our universities then. When Derrida visited, in 1977 and 1979, the postcard stand was just a draughty space, clustered at one end of the seventeenth-century Proscholium.

Derrida chose a reproduction of a medieval illustration showing Plato standing behind Socrates. It showed Plato looking over Socrates’s shoulder as if he, Plato, were the teacher and Socrates the scribe. Seeing these two philosophers pictured in the wrong chronological order, Derrida instantly got an idea. What did it mean if the…