Progressive Geographies

Troels Schultz Larsen and Kristian Nagel Delica, Fragmenting Cities: The State, Territorial Stigmatization and Urban Marginality – Edward Elgar, 2025

Fragmenting Cities offers a conceptionally innovative and empirically detailed analysis of the surprising acceptance and normalization of state-based stigmatization and discrimination based on place. It does this by drawing on the example of the first state-sanctioned definition of “ghetto”, the controversial “ghetto list” produced by the Danish government.

Troels Schultz Larsen and Kristian Nagel Delica introduce policy schizophrenia as a concept to describe instances where the state simultaneously stigmatizes people from the top while engaging in urban renewal at the bottom, deepening the fragmentation of the city. They develop a meticulously researched neo-Bourdieusian model of the state as nested fields, designed for empirical confrontation and comparative analysis. Through comprehensive socio-historical analysis, this book demonstrates how marked urban and political changes over the past four decades constituted a symbolic revolution, radically upending the fundamentals of not-for-profit housing.

Investigating relationships that have been neglected in contemporary governance research, urban studies, and critical political geography, this book is an essential read for academics, researchers and students of human geography, sociology, urban studies, planning, and governance. Additionally, it is an accessible and innovative resource for policymakers in the field.

Efimia D. Karakantza, Alexandros Velaoras, and Marion Meyer (eds.), Ancient Necropolitics: Maltreating the Living, Abusing the Dead in Greek Antiquity – Brill, January 2025 

This is the first collection of essays approaching aspects of Greek antiquity and its reception through ‘necropolitics’. It discovers traces of necropolitics in the unburied and maltreated corpses of the Homeric epics; it follows the manifestations of necropower in Greek tragedy, historiography, and biography; and it delves into torture, capital punishment, and non-normative burials in the ancient Greek world. It contributes to the debate – much of which is only available in modern Greek – on recent archaeological evidence, notably the iron-bound individuals discovered in the Athenian suburb of Phaleron, and includes a captivating exploration of necropolitics in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Greek-tragedy-inspired cinema.

Open access directories – a resource page on Foucault News

Linda Peake, Anindita Datta and Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankin (eds.), Handbook on Gender and Cities – Edward Elgar, 2024

This Handbook is a state-of-the-art exploration of the multidisciplinary field of gender and cities scholarship, providing in-depth assessments of the latest research within key areas of feminist urban academia. Editors Linda Peake, Anindita Datta and Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankin have brought together over 60 feminist scholars to present cutting-edge insights into this important field of study.

The Handbook on Gender and Cities presents a cross-section of contemporary feminist work, spanning a range of theories and practices associated with urban space. Contributing authors explore key issues including urban policy, planning and politics; the urban economic arena; the urban environment; the urban everyday; feminist imaginaries of urban spaces and places; and feminist and decolonial urban knowledge production. The editors trace numerous crucial themes across the Handbook’s chapters, namely patriarchy, social reproduction, gendered violence, and women’s agency and the arena of the everyday. Whilst the Handbook celebrates the continually developing field of feminist urban studies, it acknowledges the volume of work still to be done and encourages future research to better accept and understand its complex and multiplicitous nature.

This forward-thinking Handbook is a vital resource for students, scholars and researchers in the fields of urban studies, geography, sociology, anthropology, women’s and gender studies and development studies. Its discussion of contemporary issues in urban settings will also appeal to professionals and practitioners working in public policy, urban design and planning.

Anthony Burke and Stefanie Fishel, The Ecology Politic: Power, Law, and Earth in the Anthropocene – MIT Press, May 2025

A compelling proposal for new international law and institutions to address the planetary crisis that improves biodiversity protection, supports Indigenous peoples, and prevents catastrophic climate change.

In The Ecology Politic, Anthony Burke and Stefanie Fishel contend that the roots of our planetary crisis lie in the modern state: in its destructive entanglement with capitalism and its colonial legacies of extraction and oppression. This, in turn, has shaped global governance and international law, as they continue to fail to curb global heating, deforestation, and extinction. In a far-reaching critique of the foundational political theory of the modern state—the body politic—the authors insist that nothing less than a radically different model of the polity—an ecology politic—is needed if we are to escape this impasse.

Burke and Fishel argue that the international rule of law enacts a sovereign ban of nature that appropriates nonhuman lives for profit and use while denying them political and legal standing. We fail because we rely on the very institutions, worldviews, and systems that generated the crisis to solve it. The authors reconsider political power, agency, scale, and democracy in the Anthropocene and assert a biospheric ethic that values the entangled planetary structure of matter, energy, and life. Further, they argue for more-than-human beings to be represented in an ecological democracy that flows across borders. In short, they imagine a polity whose fundamental purpose is to protect planetary ecosystems and nurture interlocking systems of social and ecological justice.

Marina F. Bykova (ed.), Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: A Critical Guide – Cambridge university Press, December 2024

Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature constitutes the second part of his mature philosophical system presented in the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and covers an exceptionally broad spectrum of themes and issues, as Hegel considers the content and structure of how humanity approaches nature and how nature is understood by humanity. The essays in this volume bring together various perspectives on Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, emphasizing its functional role within the Encyclopaedia and its importance for understanding the complexity of Hegel’s philosophical project. Together they illuminate the core ideas which form Hegel’s philosophical framework in the realm of nature.

• Offers a systematic reading of the Philosophy of Nature, emphasizing its functional role within Encyclopaedia and its importance for understanding the complexity of Hegel’s philosophical project
• Brings together fourteen contributors who represent various traditions and a diverse array of interpretive positions
• Addresses both traditional themes and new, rarely explored topics within Hegel scholarship

Franck Billé, Somatic States: On Cartography, Geobodies, Bodily Integrity – Duke University Press, April 2025

In Somatic States, Franck Billé examines the conceptual link between the nation-state and the body, particularly the visceral and affective attachment to the state and the symbolic significance of its borders. Billé argues that corporeal analogies to the nation-state are not simply poetic or allegorical but reflect a genuine association of the individual body with the national outline—an identification greatly facilitated by the emergence of the national map. Billé charts the evolution of cartographic practices and the role that political maps have played in transforming notions of territorial sovereignty. He shows how states routinely and effectively mobilize corporeal narratives, such as framing territorial loss through metaphors of dismemberment and mutilation. Despite the current complexity of geopolitics and neoliberalism, Billé demonstrates that corporeality and bodily metaphors remain viscerally powerful because they offer a seemingly simple way to apprehend the abstract nature of the nation-state.

Update: the introduction is open access here