Progressive Geographies

I started this blog on 10 July with a promise to see how it went: I said I’d been told that blogging wasn’t a distraction but a helpful way of sorting out ideas and opening up conversations.  So what have I learned from the experience?  For me, I’ve found that blogging does several things.

First, it means that I read more attentively.  This doesn’t mean that I’m constantly thinking of the next post, simply that when something catches my attention I’m more inclined to follow it up and see where it goes rather than transfer it to the “to be pursued later” (and forgotten sooner) box.  I suspect that many of us have our favourite displacement activities, particularly online: sites we visit (or stumble upon), flitting from one link to the next and telling ourselves that this is all part of the research process.  It often is, but it…

Work by the winners of the 2012/13 and 2011/12 Graduate Student Scholarships is now freely available (i.e. no subscription required) at Wiley Online Library – Teo Ballvé’s ‘Territories of Life and Death on a Colombian Frontier‘ and Oliver Belcher’s ‘Best-Laid Schemes: Postcolonialism, Military Social Science, and the Making of U.S. Counterinsurgency Doctrine, 1940-2009‘.  We’ve also made interventions from the participants of the first two Institutes for the Geographies of Justice open access – the 283 Collective’s ‘What’s Just? Afterthoughts on the Summer Institute in the Geographies of Justice 2007‘ and the SIGJ2 Writing Collective’s ‘What Can We Do? The Challenge of Being New Academics in Neoliberal Universities‘.

And don’t forget that the Foundation is now accepting applications for places at the next IGJ which will take place in Durban, South Africa, from May 27th to June 1st 2013.  Click here for…