Progressive Geographies

Over the past few months I’ve taken a break from the Foucault work, due to other commitments.

Some of these were related to The Birth of Territory. One was an author response to ‘critics’ from the session on the book at the Association of American Geographers conference, destined for Political Geography; another was a response to John Agnew’s Dialogues in Human Geography lecture at that conference; the final was for that journal’s review forum on the book. I’m very grateful to the organisers and the reviewers.

I finally submitted two articles that I began work on some time back, but which I only managed to complete while in New York, plus a review essay. As mentioned here before, I also edited the translation, did the notes, and wrote an introduction for Kostas Axelos, On Marx and Heidegger, forthcoming with Meson Press (a few more details here). I finalised the text of an interview with Dale Leorke and Suneel Jethani for the University of Melbourne’s Research Unit in Public Cultures – this will appear as a pdf online and as a pamphlet. It was recorded when I visited earlier this year, and we did a little ‘post-production’ but not much. In New York I took part in three recorded discussions – a podcast at The Archipelago; a filmed discussion with Babette Babich at Fordham University and with Zoltan Gluck, Manissa Maharawai and Deshonay Dozier of the Graduate Center, CUNY. I’ll post a link to the last when available.

Having got all those things off my desk, it’s time to turn to the summer work. There are a couple of projects that might, or might not, materialise; I have agreed to write a review article on some recent works on territory; and I’d like to do some work on the Shakespeare project. The Shakespeare will probably run along in the background, with some reading, note-taking and certainly seeing several productions in London and Stratford. I’ve also agreed to give a couple of lectures in the autumn that I will need to turn to at some point.

But the priority is the Foucault’s Last Decade project. I’m about to go to Ghana and will be taking some of this work with me on that trip. I’d like to get the next two chapters drafted before the summer is over.