Five videos about urbanization in Africa

Posted on May 31, 2014 by stuartelden

All at the Urban Africa site – here’s the first one:

Posted in urban/urbanisation | 1 Comment

AAG award citation for The Birth of Territory

Posted on May 30, 2014 by stuartelden

I announced the AAG Meridian award for The Birth of Territory before, but they have now posted the citation online:

AAG Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography

12 The Birth of Territory

This award is given for a book written by a geographer that makes an unusually important contribution to advancing the science and art of geography.

The Birth of Territory is a landmark study of territory as an organizational principle to divide, order, and control land.  Despite territory’s foundational position in geography and politics, it has received relatively little critical attention in terms of its historical, geographical, and political production.  Stuart Elden provides a thorough genealogy of territory and its evolution in western political thought from ancient to early modern periods and substantially pries open a concept that is often taken for granted. He convincingly presents a case for territory as contingent, contested, and far from settled in terms of its political salience and uneven development, with sources ranged from historical, political, and literacy texts and practices. Written in an eloquent and engaging style, Elden’s work will surely provide a new baseline for geographers’ understanding of territory and become an important text for geography and associated disciplines in the investigation of space, power, land, development, and political order.

Also at this award notice are the citations for the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize for Anne Kelly Knowles, Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800-1868; the Globe Book award for Michael Dear, Why Walls Won’t Work: Repairing the US–Mexico Divide; and 2012 Meridian Book award for Richard Schroeder, Africa after Apartheid: South Africa, Race and Nation in Tanzania.

Posted in Books, Politics, Territory, The Birth of Territory | 1 Comment

Simon Russell Beale as King Lear; Kenneth Branagh as Macbeth

Posted on May 30, 2014 by stuartelden

King_LearTomorrow – my last full day in New York – will be a day of Shakespeare. At lunch time I am going to see the ‘live in Cinema’ screening at the Brooklyn Academy of Music of King Lear with Simon Russell Beale in the title role. That should be a good contrast with the Michael Pennington Lear I saw earlier in my time here. I also have a ticket to see Beale on stage in London when I get back.

And then in the evening I get to see Kenneth Branagh as Macbeth at the Park Lane Armory – reviewed in The New York Times. I’ve never seen Branagh on stage before, and this is his New York debut, so very much looking forward to this. Both plays will be discussed in my planned book on Shakespeare, and the production details of Macbeth, in particular, suggest it will be inspirational for this work.

 

Posted in Shakespearean Territories, William Shakespeare | 1 Comment

Derek Gregory interviewed at The Archipelago

Posted on May 30, 2014 by stuartelden

Archipelago-Banner-header

Derek Gregory interviewed by Léopold Lambert at The Archipelago.

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The Other Adam Smith – forthcoming book from Mike Hill and Warren Montag

Posted on May 30, 2014 by stuartelden

Given the uses to which he is put – or, at least, his name invoked in support of – it’s easy to be critical of Adam Smith. This book, due out in December, sounds like it will provide both his detractors and advocates much to think about…

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The Other Adam Smith represents the next wave of critical thinking about the still under-examined work of this paradigmatic Enlightenment thinker. Not simply another book about Adam Smith, it allows and even necessitates his inclusion in the realm of theory in the broadest sense. Moving beyond his usual economic and moral philosophical texts, Mike Hill and Warren Montag take seriously Smith’s entire corpus, his writing on knowledge, affect, sociability and government, and political economy, as constituting a comprehensive—though highly contestable—system of thought. We meet not just Smith the economist, but Smith the philosopher, Smith the literary critic, Smith the historian, and Smith the anthropologist. Placed in relation to key thinkers such as Hume, Lord Kames, Fielding, Hayek, Von Mises, and Agamben, this other Adam Smith, far from being localized in the history of eighteenth-century economic thought or ideas, stands at the center of the most vibrant and contentious debates of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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The problems of peer review

Posted on May 29, 2014 by stuartelden

Society and Space editor Mary Thomas picks up on a discussion at New APPS concerning peer review.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Foucault’s Lectures on the Punitive Society IX

Posted on May 28, 2014 by stuartelden

Barry Stocker’s reading of Foucault continues…

Barry Stocker's avatarStockerblog

Lecture of 28th February, 1973

Rural illegality went under the same transformation as the urban illegality described in the last lecture. It was a part of the survival strategies of the poorest peasants who were using common and uncultivated land. Goods taxed by the office of the ‘régie’, salt and tobacco, were smuggled. There was a change in the second half of the eighteenth century due firstly to growing population, and then from 1730 an increase in tax revenues which made land more economically interesting, and finally a great demand to invest in land. The abolition of feudal rights and and large scale transfer of property during the Revolution contributed to the change. Landed property became a part of simple contract (presumably because of the abolition of feudal constraints).

This had negative effects on peasant who lost traditional de facto rights of ‘illegality’ and communal rights through the increasingly consistent…

View original post 524 more words

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The Politics of Legality in a Neoliberal Age, 1-2 August 2014, University of New South Wales

Posted on May 28, 2014 by stuartelden

The Politics of Legality in a Neoliberal Age

1-2 August 2014, University of New South Wales

Very interesting looking conference – speakers include Paul Patton, Jessica Whyte, Miguel Vatter, Ben Golder and many more. Full programme and details here. The organisers have stressed that registration is free but registering in advance is essential as spaces are limited – email  gtcentre@unsw.edu.au with the subject line ‘Neoliberalism Symposium’.

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‘Who owns land in Scotland’? Mapping ownership

Posted on May 28, 2014 by stuartelden

A few days ago I said a little about the map on the front cover of  the report The Land of Scotland and the Common Good. My focus in those comments was about the cover image and the maritime boundaries. As Phil Steinberg comments in his far-more-expert analysis, it is striking this is the cover image given the imbalance in the report itself, which largely comments on onshore land ownership. The BBC News site now has a story about a project to map land ownership in Scotland over the next decade.

Posted in Boundaries, Politics, Territory | Leave a comment

Mapping the world through its airport connections – excellent visualisation

Posted on May 28, 2014 by stuartelden

 

At geoawesomeness.com:

Global-Airport-Map-Geoawesomeness

Data visualization designer Jason Davies has been playing with the topic of boundaries for some time already. Jason is exploring mathematical functions to redraw the global boundaries according to different phenomena. In his latest map he used a spherical Voronoi diagrams to draw global airport map where each region is closer to a particular airport than any other.

Full story here; and map itself here as a rotatable globe – one of many maps at that site. Thanks to various people for sharing this with me on Facebook.

Posted in Boundaries | 5 Comments