Books received

Posted on January 15, 2013 by stuartelden

Books 15 Jan 2013A pile of new books including six Polity titles received in recompense for review work, Tom McCarthy’s novel C, Esposito’s Living Thought, and a few by Hegel for a possible future project.

Posted in Ash Amin, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jean-Luc Nancy, Politics, Roberto Esposito | Leave a comment

Call for Papers and Contributions – Legal Geography

Posted on January 15, 2013 by stuartelden

A call for papers for the RGS-IBG conference in London in August 2013. Please contact a.layard@bham.ac.uk with all queries.

Submission Deadline for papers – Friday 8th February 2013 (other contributions can come later, please see below).

Organisers – Antonia Layard (Birmingham) and Luke Bennett (Sheffield Hallam)

Legal geography is an emerging discipline, located both within geography and law and society studies. At its core, it draws on legal and geographical techniques and concepts to understand ‘the role and impact that space and place have on the differential and discursive construction of law and how legal norms and practices construct space and places’ (Blomley 1993, 63).

While legal geography has been an emerging discipline for some time particularly in North America, it is not yet a clearly defined site of research in the UK or (with some notable exceptions) internationally. With the 2013 RGS Conference theme of ‘new geographical frontiers’ this seems as good a time as any to try to develop, collaboratively, how legal geography (or geographical law) might be understood and undertaken in the UK and beyond.

We make two proposals for sessions. The first is for a Roundtable on Legal Geography and we would be very interested in hearing from anyone with a paper that engages explicitly with legal geography as a discipline, mapping the subject in some sense, investigating the subjects, techniques and approaches that legal geography uses.

We also hope to organise a world café session, which would be entirely participatory aiming (perhaps) at creating some initial networks, contacts, collaborations (for grant or scholarly purposes), bibliographies or ideas for further research.

Please do get in touch if legal geography holds any interest at all! (a.layard@bham.ac.uk).

Antonia Layard
Professor of Law & Geography
Birmingham Law School

via here)

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Posted on January 15, 2013 by stuartelden

Three books on cities, urban and political geography and Central and Eastern Europe reviewed at the Society and Space open site.

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Resistance in Area E1

Posted on January 14, 2013 by stuartelden

A month ago I posted about Area E1 in the West Bank, an area Israel hopes to build settlements, but at present is a cleared space with the infrastructure for a settlement (roads, power cables, a police station, security apparatus, etc.) but, as yet, no homes. This may change as a result of recent events. The Funambulist has an interesting story about some recent Palestinian resistance to Israel’s building projects – “the disobedience is territorial and architectural”.

active stills pal tents02

Earlier this week, a group of about 250 Palestinians gathered in East Jerusalem in the E1 Area where the Israeli government announced the construction of 3,000 new housing units after the recent UN vote granting Palestine a status of observer member at the General Assembly. This group of people established a small village made out of tents on what is being stated as Palestinian owned private land. The photograph above shows the tents being set-up with the largest Israeli settlement in the West Bank in the background, Ma’ale Adummim (see previous article). Since then, the encampment got evicted by the Israeli army under the reason that it represented “a danger for the security of the area.” [continues]

Posted in Boundaries, Politics, Territory | Leave a comment

Two posts on the Zapatistas

Posted on January 14, 2013 by stuartelden

Two interesting posts on the Zapatistas – at Territorial Masquerades and For the Desk Drawer. Both look at related questions around territory and geopolitics, both explicitly relate to Lefebvre’s work in various ways, but there are links to his writings on space, the state and autogestion.

Posted in Henri Lefebvre, Politics, Territory, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Greenwald on the Mali Intervention

Posted on January 14, 2013 by stuartelden

In The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald discusses the intervention in Mali:

As French war planes bomb Mali, there is one simple statistic that provides the key context: this west African nation of 15 million people is the eighth country in which western powers – over the last four years alone – have bombed and killed Muslims – after Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and the Phillipines (that does not count the numerous lethal tyrannies propped up by the west in that region). For obvious reasons, the rhetoric that the west is not at war with the Islamic world grows increasingly hollow with each new expansion of this militarism. But within this new massive bombing campaign, one finds most of the vital lessons about western intervention that, typically, are steadfastly ignored.

Posted in Politics, Territory | 1 Comment

Reading Kant’s Geography – Atlanta APA Eastern talk audio

Posted on January 14, 2013 by stuartelden

The audio recording of my talk at the APA Eastern can be found here. I talk a bit about the session as a whole here. My talk draws on my 2009 paper “Reassessing Kant’s Geography” and also on my review of the Natural Science volume of Kant’s writings.

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Deleuze, Lyotard, de Gandillac, Klossowski, Derrida, Pautrat

Posted on January 14, 2013 by stuartelden

In the comments to the ‘When Heidegger met Lacan’ post, ‘Naxos’ shares a link to this photograph from Cerisy-la-salle in 1972.

d__Deleuze__Klossowski

left to right – Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Maurice de Gandillac, Pierre Klossowski, Jacques Derrida, and (Bernard?) Pautrat.

Posted in Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida | Leave a comment

Bradley Garrett’s five new rules for the neoliberal academy

Posted on January 13, 2013 by stuartelden

A suggestion of how to fight back against neoliberalism, by adopting its values. Much of how higher education works would collapse if we seriously adopted these – examining theses, reviewing for journals, speaking at conferences, department seminars, etc. But that may well be the implication of what is currently happening. One minor point in relation to the link to my 2008 Society and Space editorial – the exchange economy of peer review works on the basis of authors doing three reviews per paper they submit, not publish. Rejected papers were reviewed too. Brad’s post is well worth reading, though not necessarily adopting.

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The Intervention in Mali

Posted on January 13, 2013 by stuartelden

mali_pol94France’s intervention in Mali over the last few days hasn’t received that much notice in the Anglophone press. It has now been joined by Britain, providing logistical support and supplies, which may change that. The Observer has the story here, and there is a BBC report here. Much should be said about the depiction of any separatist or rebel group as terrorists, the linking of just about any Islamic group to al-Qaeda, about the absolute valorisation of the territorial integrity of the state, and the colonial power or powers getting involved again, even if at the behest of the government and with UN sanction. The intervention precedes a planned multi-national African force later this year.

Juan Cole at Informed Comment has some useful discussion and links.

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