Posted on March 31, 2013 by stuartelden

Elizabeth Grosz interview in Interstitial journal, along with some links to discussions of her work in Society and Space.

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International Political Sociology virtual theme issue on Territorialities, Spaces, Geographies

Posted on March 31, 2013 by stuartelden

International Political Sociology has just put together an open access virtual theme issue on Territorialities, Spaces, Geographies – including papers by Nisha Shah, John Agnew, Neil Brenner and me, and Nick Vaughan-Williams:

This special issue presents a selection of work at the interstices between international relations and geography. It is an invitation for intensifying debates in International Political Sociology on transformations of space and scales, the use of geographical methods and concepts, and the nature and limits of geographical thought in international and global relations.
‘The international is a spatial category and has been invested by variable geographies. The world of the international is flat; a two-dimensional world of relations between sovereign states claiming exclusive power over their territory and people. The international also persistently and often violently draws lines between itself and its outside: worlds of colonies, the uncivilised, transnational networks, and others. Recently, topographic categories are increasingly challenged by topological modes of enacting spatial relations and by analyses foregrounding the importance of temporal practices and narratives.
This special issue samples an international political sociology that deploys and critically engages territorial, spatial, geographical modes of thinking and politics. What are the limits and transformations of spatial practices in contemporary politics? How are territorialities, borders, and lines invested in methods of governing and conceptions of order? What is the impact of foregrounding temporality and mobility on spatial categorizing of the international? How are geopolitics and territoriality produced?

Table of contents

The Territorial Trap of the Territorial Trap: Global  Transformation and the Problem of the State’s Two Territories
Nisha Shah

Henri Lefebvre on State, Space, Territory
Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden

Know-where: Geographies of Knowledge of World Politics
John Agnew

Space, Boundaries, and the Problem of Order: A View from Systems Theory
Jan Helmig, Oliver Kessler

Borders, Territory, Law
Nick Vaughan-Williams

Rethinking Community: Translation Space as a Departure from  Political Community
Reiko Shindo

Education and the Formation of Geopolitical  Subjects
Martin Muller

Think Locally, Act Globally
Terrence Lyons and Peter Mandaville

Posted in Boundaries, John Agnew, Neil Brenner, Politics, Publishing, Territory | 1 Comment

Posted on March 29, 2013 by stuartelden

Catastrophic Urbanism: a workshop at LSE

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Verso Radical Thinkers – series 8 and call for suggestions

Posted on March 29, 2013 by stuartelden

From Sebastian Budgen at Verso – comments below are fine and I’ll pass them on:

Series 8 of Radical Thinkers will consist in the following:

Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings –  Louis Althusser

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics – Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe

The Philosophy of Marx – Étienne Balibar

Political Writings: 1919–1929 – Georg Lukács

Screened Out – Jean Baudrillard

State, Power, Socialism – Nicos Poulantzas

Hatred of Democracy – Jacques Rancière

Freud and the Non-European – Edward Said

The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno – Gillian Rose

The Concept of Nature in Marx – Alfred Schmidt

Women, Resistance, Revolution: A History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World – Sheila Rowbotham

The Ego and His Own: The Case of the Individual Against Authority – Max Stirner

Time to nominate new candidates. They must be:

– out of print
– already in English (translated or orginally English)
– generally in the “Theory” category
– important or interesting
– preferably not ridiculously long

They don’t have to be previous NLB/Verso titles. Suggestions of titles by female authors particularly welcome.

Please check first the previous sets

Posted in Books, Etienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière, Louis Althusser, Publishing | 11 Comments

Nina Power interviewed at Figure/Ground Communication

Posted on March 29, 2013 by stuartelden

Nina Power is interviewed at Figure/Ground Communication – mainly on universities today.

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‘V for Visibility’ in Interstitial journal

Posted on March 29, 2013 by stuartelden

Guy_Fawkes_Mask_by_waran4A little piece by me on the Guy Fawkes/V for Vendetta masks used in the Occupy protests has been published in the open access journal Interstitial. A shorter version first appeared on the Society and Space open site in November 2011 as part of a forum on the Occupy movement convened by Deborah Cowen. The longer version was first written for a forthcoming book, but the editors asked if it could also appear in this new journal – Interstitial: A Journal of Modern Culture and Events.

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Foucault books received

Posted on March 29, 2013 by stuartelden

Foucault books receivedTwo new books – the Blackwell A Companion to Foucault, and the new collection La grande étrangère. I’ll be reviewing the Companion for Cultural Geographies. It looks really good including a translation of Daniel Defert’s ‘Chronology’ from Dits et écrits and pieces by Colin Gordon, Paul Patton, Amy Allen, Johanna Oksala, Paul Rabinow, and many others. Jeremy Crampton has a piece entitled ‘Space, Territory, Geography’  which I’m sure will become a standard reference point. The book ends with Richard A. Lynch’s “Michel Foucault’s Shorter Works in English: Bibliography and Concordance” which has long been available online.

Posted in Jeremy Crampton, Michel Foucault | 2 Comments

Toys for the State of Exception

Posted on March 28, 2013 by stuartelden

tumblr_mkd6wghBAj1s9d11ko1_400Agamben Toys – Apposite Baubles for the State of Exception (via Derek Gregory, who acknowledges Alex Vasudevan). Derek’s post at Geographical Imaginations is worth a look for the more sinister side of all this – though comedy as opposition and critique shouldn’t be underrated.

Posted in Derek Gregory, Giorgio Agamben, Politics | Leave a comment

Understanding Society on Michael Mann on Power

Posted on March 28, 2013 by stuartelden

 

Daniel Little on Michael Mann’s hugely ambitious four volume The Sources of Social Power.

In 1986 Michael Mann began a strikingly ambitious project — to give a theoretical and historical account of the history of power in human history.  This effort came to closure in the past few months with the publication of volume 3 (The Sources of Social Power: Volume 3, Global Empires and Revolution, 1890-1945) and volume 4 (The Sources of Social Power: Volume 4, Globalizations, 1945-2011). (Two other titles were published as offshoots of this project, Fascists and The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing.)

This is an amazing corpus, and I think it throws important light on both the theory and the history. It is historical sociology on a macro-scale; and yet Mann also provides careful, almost ethnographic details at the level of individual actors — fascists, ethnic paramilitaries, legislators, colonial administrators. So I think Mann also offers a great example of a sociologist who is not prisoner to a single methodology or a single avenue of approach to these supremely complex social processes. [more]

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A Latin Empire versus German Hegemony? Agamben on contemporary Europe

Posted on March 27, 2013 by stuartelden

A provocative piece by Giorgio Agamben, drawing on a 1945 essay by Alexandre Kojève. Thanks to Elliott Jarbe and Sebastian Budgen for the link.

Posted in Boundaries, Giorgio Agamben, Politics | 5 Comments