Progressive Geographies

I’m happy to announce that beginning in October 2013 I will take up the post of Professor of Political Geography at Durham University in the UK. Leaving Florida State’s Department of Geography will not be easy (I’ve been there since 1997), but I am truly excited about the opportunities ahead of me.

Not only is the Durham Geography Department enormous (over 60 teaching staff, plus another 40 or so non-teaching academic staff), but it’s also an excellent department that is consistently ranked in the top 5 in the UK (as is Durham University as a whole). As part of my position there, I will have a leading role joining the existing expertise of the Geography Department’s International Boundaries Research Unit with academic research on the changing nature of borders, sovereignty, and territory. Thus, the Durham post provides the perfect opportunity for me to pursue my interests at the intersection of…

This is the text of a document prepared by Meera and me on Article Processing Charges as currently understood and the serious risks we think they pose to academic freedom and funding, broadly understood (previous discussed by severalcontributors toour openaccess series). It is also available as a pdf, and we encourage academics to think carefully about the issues foregrounded, and to act accordingly.

Summary

• The Government is pushing academic publishing to a ‘pay-to-say’ model in order to achieve open access to publicly funded research
• This ‘gold’ route to open access, which levies Article Processing Charges (as proposed in the Finch Report and taken up by RCUK and HEFCE) poses a major problem for academics in the UK:
  • It threatens academic freedom through pressures on institutions to distribute scarce APC resources and to judge work by standards other than peer review
  • It threatens research funding by…

Claire Pagès and Mathieu Trachman conduct a concise but wide-ranging interview with Judith Butler at Books & Ideas, in which she asks this about neo-liberalism and the economic:

‘[I]f we claim that neo-liberalism disposes populations to become disposable, and exposes populations to precarity, we have to ask whether we are speaking about a purely economic rationale and regime of power (by “ neo-liberalism ”), a regime of power that governs the practices of subject-formation, including self-making, and the valorization of the metric of instrumentality in ways that include and exceed the sphere conventionally denoted as “ economic ”.  Indeed, does the power and pervasiveness of “ neo-liberalism” compel us to think about the heteronomy of the economic and the way that the rationalities that govern its operation exceed the purely economic. Must we give up an idea of the purely economic by virtue of neo-liberalism at the same time…