Progressive Geographies

We’ve been here before – ‘wars’ on this and ‘wars’ on that.  It’s strange how reluctant states are to admit that their use of military violence (especially when it doesn’t involve ‘boots on the ground‘) isn’t really war at all – ‘overseas contingency operations’ is what the Pentagon once preferred, but I’ve lost count of how many linguistic somersaults they’ve performed since then to camouflage their campaigns – and yet how eager they are to declare everything else a war.

These tricks are double-edged.  While advanced militaries and their paymasters go to extraordinary linguistic lengths to mask the effects of their work, medical scientists have been busily appropriating the metaphorical terrain from which modern armies are in embarrassed retreat.

Yet all metaphors take us somewhere before they break down, and the ‘war on Ebola’ takes us more or less directly to the militarisation of the global response…

A reminder of this conference coming up at Warwick, with a call for papers. Please spread the word in your institutions to potentially interested participants.Please consider submitting a paper for the next Warwick Graduate Conference in Political Geography, held at the University of Warwick on 27-28 November, 2014.

Full details here – keynote from Alex Jeffrey (University of Cambridge)

Three travel grants of up to £250 each for non-UK attendees are available by Warwick’s politics department. All potential participants should submit a title, abstract (of no more than 300 words), and evidence of institutional affiliation by 25 October, 2014 to the organisers: Antonio Ferraz de Oliveira and Mara Duer (politicalgeographywarwick@gmail.com).

Mark D. Jordan, Convulsing Bodies. Religion and Resistance in Foucault, Stanford University Press, October 2014

Further info

By using religion to get at the core concepts of Michel Foucault’s thinking, this book offers a strong alternative to the way that the philosopher’s work is read across the humanities. Foucault was famously interested in Christianity as both the rival to ancient ethics and the parent of modern discipline and was always alert to the hypocrisy and the violence in churches. Yet many readers have ignored how central religion is to his thought, particularly with regard to human bodies and how they are shaped. The point is not to turn Foucault into some sort of believer or to extract from him a fixed thesis about religion as such. Rather, it is to see how Foucault engages religious rhetoric page after page—even when religion is not his main topic. When readers follow his…