Progressive Geographies

On 12 November 2014, I’ll be giving a University of Nottingham Centre for Critical Theory lecture at Nottingham Contemporary gallery. The title is “Foucault, Subjectivity and Truth”, and I’ll be speaking about the most recently published lecture course within the wider context of the work I’ve been doing for Foucault’s Last Decade. Details are here – the event is free, but needs to be booked.

Translated by Gloria Custance, I was disappointed by this work, which I hoped would be the necessary background for providing links among Latour’s disparate works, from his PhD in philosophy of religion to laboratory life to his late AIME work. Originally published in German as Bruno Latour zur Einführung (2011), the books is at its best with Latour’s earliest writings, showing how in each of them there was a subterranean dialogue with a given thinker of power (Nietzsche, Spinoza, Foucault, Deleuze), but as it goes on, it can go through texts (We have never been Modern, Reassembling the Social, Modes of Existence) with longer summaries of, say, a piece by Lyotard than anything in the actual texts. Indeed, it’s notable that one could read this “intellectual biography” and not even get stated the main thesis many of these texts (We have never been Modern is…

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…