Progressive Geographies

Simon Dalby’s Political Geography plenary lecture at the AAG in Los Angeles in early 2013 looks very interesting. It picks up some of the concluding comments to my own Political Geography lecture from the Royal Geographical Society conference last year. (I’ve just approved the revised proofs of that piece, so it should be available soon.) Here’s the abstract for Simon’s talk:

In his 2012 Political Geography plenary at the Royal Geographical Society meeting, Stuart Elden posed the possibilities of a “geopolitics” that engages the earth, the air and volumetric understandings as an alternative to geopolitics as a synonym for global politics with its two dimensional cartographic imagination. More is needed than political geography writ large: a material sensibility is necessary to think about security and geography but one that is not linked to traditional determinist formulations. Picking up these themes, this lecture explores how taking the physicality of climate change seriously requires a rethinking of politics in the face of numerous transformations in what is becoming a more obviously artificial planetary.