Progressive Geographies

Lieba Faier, The Banality of Good: The UN’s Global Fight against Human Trafficking – Duke University Press, September 2024 (open access)

In The Banality of Good, Lieba Faier examines why contemporary efforts to curb human trafficking have fallen so spectacularly short of their stated goals despite well-funded campaigns by the United Nations and its member-state governments. Focusing on Japan’s efforts to enact the UN’s counter-trafficking protocol and assist Filipina migrants working in Japan’s sex industry, Faier draws from interviews with NGO caseworkers and government officials to demonstrate how these efforts disregard the needs and perspectives of those they are designed to help. She finds that these campaigns tend to privilege bureaucracies and institutional compliance, resulting in the compromised quality of life, repatriation, and even criminalization of human trafficking survivors. Faier expands on Hannah Arendt’s idea of the “banality of evil” by coining the titular “banality of good” to describe the reality of the UN’s fight against human trafficking. Detailing the protocols that have been put in place and evaluating their enactment, Faier reveals how the continued failure of humanitarian institutions to address structural inequities and colonial history ultimately reinforces the violent status quo they claim to be working to change.

Brian Eno and Bette A, What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory (print and e-book)

The e-book is currently available for just £1

WHAT ART DOES examines the function of fictional worlds – such as pop songs, detective novels, soap operas, shoe tassels and the hidden language of haircuts – and suggests a new theory of art.

Why do we do it? How does it help us? And how does it hold us all together?

WHAT ART DOES is a full colour illustrated hardback book, initially available in a limited edition of 777 signed copies. Each copy comes with its own unique slipcase hand painted by Brian and Bette A. This limited edition is available exclusively from Metalabel for North American collectors, and Enoshop for collectors in the rest of the world.

Hardback and ebook editions will be available on general release from Faber on 16th January 2025.

All profits from the limited edition and PDF go to charity 

Most of my publications are listed on my Warwick webpage, with links to the publisher pages

Warwick’s online repository is WRAP, and my page is here. This has preprints of pieces from 2014 onwards for open access compliance.

I keep a list of publications on this site, providing links to as many as I can – separate pages for articles and chapters, a couple of links to books, interviews, audio and video, and reading lists.

Some forthcoming pieces are listed here.

I also try to keep ResearchGate updated, with several pieces available there. I deleted my academia.edu account some time ago (I briefly say why here).

If you can’t find an article or chapter by one of those routes then you can email me, and I’ll try to help. But I don’t have pdf copies of absolutely everything, unfortunately.

Journal of the History of Ideas Virtual Issue: Recent Work in French Intellectual History

This virtual issue highlights recent publications in the JHI of relevance to French intellectual history since the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The reason for compiling it is relatively simple—we hope that readers might enjoy it. This string of recent publications (roughly since 2016) indicates some significant turns in the field. “French” intellectual history is certainly no longer limited to the hexagon, nor to the existentialist, Marxist, structuralist and “liberal 1980s” storylines. It belongs squarely in transnational and postcolonial discussions; it is invested in close philological and theoretical work as much as in detailed contexts and sociological frames, some of which have long been underexamined; and it is far more genuinely transnational than it has been before. The research expected nowadays of articles on classic authors is both denser and broader in scope than it was even a decade ago. 

The essays in this set include work on the French Extreme Right, on classic figures like Deleuze and Foucault, on Black internationalism and anticolonialism, on Catholic theology, on the history of theory, and on a series of other topics. We also include texts which cut diagonally across the traditional field (like Asbrink’s “When Race was Removed from Racism,” whose second half considers Maurice Bardèche, ethnopluralism, and the New Right), Sarah C. Dunstan’s “The Capital of Race Capitals” (which considers Paris in the context of other sites of Black internationalism), and Nicolas Guilhot’s essay on the paranoid style (which brings Jacques Lacan’s early writings in conversation with the broader international discourse on the “paranoid style”). We as editors think that these are essential to seeing how to work transnationally on different registers. 

 —Stefanos Geroulanos, on behalf of the Executive Editors

André Leroi-Gourhan on Technology: A Selection of Writings from the 1930s to the 1960s, ed. Nathan Schlanger, trans. Nils F. Schott – Hau Books, February 2025

A selection of Leroi-Gourhan’s most important texts—many translated into English for the first time.

André Leroi-Gourhan is undoubtedly one of the most acclaimed figures of twentieth-century anthropology and archaeology. In France, his intellectual importance rivals that of the Claude Lévi-Strauss, yet Leroi-Gourhan’s major contributions are almost entirely unknown in the Anglophone world. This collection seeks to change that. This selection highlights some of his chief influences, such as elaborating a theory of technology, which argues that material culture focuses on the object in use and how use is a dynamic feature that has specific consequences for human evolution and human society. With serious ramifications for our understanding of material culture, putting Leroi-Gourhan’s thinking about technology into English will have an immediate and transformative impact on material culture studies.

Nedim Nomer and Kaya Șahin, Histories of Political Thought in the Ottoman World – Oxford University Press, March 2025

This collection of papers is intended to provide a survey of the history of political ideas in the Ottoman world from its dawn around 1300 to its downfall in the early 20th century. It features fourteen original papers by some of the most prominent and innovative scholars of Ottoman history. The book sheds light on the complex role that ideas have played in all aspects of Ottoman social and political life throughout the history of the Ottoman world, across time, space, social class, and ethnic and religious identity. 

Histories of Political Thought in the Ottoman World takes exception to a common tendency, both among Ottoman historians and in the broader academic world, that considers Ottoman political life exclusively in terms of the political ideas of the Sunni Muslim governing elite. It makes clear that the non-elite, non-Sunni Muslim, non-Muslim, non-Turkish, and female members of the Ottoman society have also significantly contributed to the making of Ottoman political culture throughout its history.

Lynne Huffer, These Survivals: Autobiography of an Extinction – Duke University Press, May 2025

A collage-style work in fragments, Lynne Huffer’s These Survivals brings together philosophy, memoir, poetry, and original multimedia artworks to articulate an ethics of living on a devastated planet. Focusing on climate change and mass species extinction, Huffer approaches ruination through assemblages rendered in sharp-edged prose, vibrant color images, and experimental features that include black-out poems, weather reports, and abecedarian essays. She considers her struggles with everyday life and confronts the immensity of extinction across the expanse of geological time, recognizing the self’s insignificance in the context of the planet’s 4.5-billion-year existence. As she moves across autobiographical, political, and literary registers, her abiding theme is the repeated phrase: the fragment remains while the whole crumbles. At every turn, Huffer insists on the fragmentary, provisional nature of anything taken to be whole as well as the impartial conditions under which we write, at times experienced as constraint and, at others, freedom. Reveling in interruption, obliquity, and layering, Huffer opens space for thought to emerge in unexpected and innovative ways—ways that are grounded in the material practices of writing and living.

Update: if you order direct from Duke, E25HUFFR gets 30% off.