Progressive Geographies

by Andy Merrifield, Leverhulme Visiting Professor, Geography, University of Manchester

“The form of a city changes quicker, alas, than the human heart”

— Baudelaire

“I am tempted to the belief that what are called necessary institutions are only institutions to which one is accustomed, and that in matters of social constitution the field of possibilities is much wider than people living within each society imagine”

— de Tocqueville

In a remarkable series of essays, bundled together under the rubric Paris sous tension (La fabrique, Paris, 2011), popular historian and organic intellectual Eric Hazan sings a paean for his hometown under fire, his Paris under tension; the pressure gauge is edging toward danger level and seems about to blow anytime. Hazan, who trained as a cardiologist and in the 1970s worked as a surgeon in poor Palestinian refugee camps in the Lebanon, now fronts the Left publishing house he…

You wait almost 35 years for a special issue on anarchist geographies, and then two arrive at once… Antipode‘s ‘Anarchist Geographies‘ came out late last year (you can see one of the guest editors, Simon Springer, talking about it here) and our colleagues at ACME have just released ‘Anarchist and Autonomous Marxist Geographies‘, guest edited by Nathan Clough and Renata Blumberg. It looks like there are some great open access papers, including contributions from Antipode authors Farhang Rouhani, Mark Purcell and Nathan himself, and one from our very own Nik Heynen.

For more on autonomy, check out our recent symposium, organised by Antipode editor Paul Chatterton, ‘Autonomy: The Struggle for Survival, Self-Management and the Common‘, featuring papers from John Holloway, Chris Carlsson and Francesca Manning, Massimo De Angelis, Gustavo Esteva, Jai Sen, and the Free Association.

4th Global Conference
Space and Place

Monday 9th September – Thursday 12th September 2013
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Presentations
Questions of space and place affect the very way in which we experience and recreate the world. Wars are fought over both real and imagined spaces; boundaries are erected against the “Other” constructing a lived landscape of division and disenfranchisement; while ideology constructs a national identity based upon the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion. The construction of space and place is also a fundamental aspect of the creative arts either through the art of reconstruction of a known space or in establishing a relationship between the audience and the performance. Politics, power and knowledge are also fundamental components of space as is the relationship between visibility and invisibility. This new inter- and multi-disciplinary conference project seeks to explore these and other topics and open up a dialogue about…