Progressive Geographies

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…

Just a reminder that the November 15 submission deadline for our 2015 symposium, “Inhabiting Containment,” is rapidly approaching. See below for CFP and symposium details:

Inhabiting Containment

Seeking to address the ongoing state violence against bodies of color in Gaza and Ferguson, MO, the Society for Radical Geography, Spatial Theory, and Everyday Life solicits abstracts for our 2015 symposium “Inhabiting Containment.” This symposium seeks work that addresses the spatiality of phenomena such as containment, racialization, and racialized-sexualized state aggression. The imprisonment and January release of CeCe McDonald, indigenous actions protesting the TransCanada Pipeline, the Israeli massacre of Gazans, the operationalization of racist policies to contain Ebola in West Africa, and the murders of black bodies in the U.S., such as Eric Garner, Renisha McBride, and Michael Brown, all demonstrate the ways that race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity are often experienced as forms of embodied violence in the everyday. With that in…

I’m currently writing the introduction to The Human Remains, discussing the figure of the human in the new materialism. I thought I would share the table I drew up of all the thinkers identified as part of the new materialism in different monographs and collected volumes. I have excluded individual journal articles from the list below in order to keep it under a page, and the table also excludes occasional references to the term “new materialism” by writers in the list (Catherine Malabou, for example, uses the term on a number of occasions).

Some of these texts employ the “new materialism” tag explicitly, while others have been included because the themes they identify in contemporary thought overlap substantially with at least some of the main concerns of NM. I was inspired by the table drawn up by Joe Hughes in his review of Ian James’s The New French Philosophy