Progressive Geographies

I’ve added a draft of a new essay, ‘Moving targets and violent geographies’, under the DOWNLOADS tab.  It’s a general essay on drones, summarising both their genealogies and geographies, and I would welcome any comments, preferably by e-mail so they don’t get lost in the spam nets: again, this is a draft, so please treat it as such.  I wrote it for a volume of essays in honour of the work of my great friend Allan Pred, though I’ll incorporate a different version in The everywhere war.  This raw draft doesn’t feature any images (despite the references to Figure 1, etc): I’m still trying decide what to include.

You’ll see that it draws on a number of posts on the blog – a large number, now I’ve realised just how how many drone sightings there have been on geographicalimaginations.com! – as well as recent presentations.  I’ve noted…

Hot off the presses – not the book, but the flyer – news of Andy Merrifield’s next book, The New Urban Question:

The ballots are out, the wheels are in motion. Union members have until Thursday 10 October to vote on strike action over the latest derisory pay offer of 1% (if you haven’t received a ballot, go here). The justness of the cause seems clear enough. Since 2009, every pay award has been several percentage points below inflation, leading to a consistent real terms drop in pay. And some of those paltry increases were only attained after negotiations. Yet, despite the protests from above (and excepting a brief dip in student numbers), British higher education is in fine financial health. The overall wage bill is decreasing at the same time that surpluses are growing. And for “growing” read “more than doubling”, from £488 million in 2007/8 to £1.1 billion in 2011/2012. Managers are reaping their rewards accordingly, and a significant portion of Vice-Chancellors are seeing their pay go…

AAG 2014 CFP

 “What Space for the Post-Security State?”

 Tampa, Florida, 8-12 April 2014

 Session organizers: Jeremy Crampton, University of Kentucky, Klaus Dodds, Peter Adey (Royal Holloway University of London)

 Session sponsored by the Political Geography Specialty Group

This session takes up recent challenges to the logics of security (Neocleous, Vine, the CASE Collective), and seeks papers that open up new ways of thinking about security through critiques, oppositions, limits, resistances, or different kinds of security altogether (e.g. alter-security).

The goal is to collectively sketch the contours of a possible “post-security” state in which security’s costs as well as its benefits are more critically understood. Where today’s security is usually positioned as “more is better” and “safer rather than sorry”, our goal is not to necessarily reject security, but rather to identify a range of different interventions, critiques (perhaps “affirmative” McCormack, 2012), alternatives, that might think