Progressive Geographies

Virginia Mantouvalou and Jonathan Wolff (eds.), Structural Injustice and the Law – UCL Press, open access, October 2024

In developing her conception of structural injustice, Iris Marion Young made a strict distinction between large-scale collective injustice that results from the normal functions of a society, and the more familiar concepts of individual wrong and deliberate state repression. Her ideas have attracted considerable attention in political philosophy, but legal theorists have been slower to consider the relation between structural injustice and legal analysis. While some forms of vulnerability to structural injustice can be the unintended consequences of legal rules, the law also has potential instruments to alleviate some forms of structural injustice.

Structural Injustice and the Law presents theoretical approaches and concrete examples to show how the concept of structural injustice can aid legal analysis, and how legal reform can, in practice, reduce or even eliminate some forms of structural injustice. A group of outstanding law and political philosophy scholars discuss a comprehensive range of interdisciplinary topics, including the notion of domination, equality and human rights law, legal status, sweatshop labour, labour law, criminal justice, domestic homicide reviews, begging, homelessness, regulatory public bodies and the films of Ken Loach. Drawn together, they build an invaluable resource for legal theorists exploring how to make use of the concept of structural injustice, and for political philosophers looking for a nuanced account of the law’s role both in creating and mitigating structural injustice.

Michael Hughes, Feliks Volkhovskii: A Revolutionary Life – Open Book, now published and available open access as pdf

Feliks Volkhovskii (1846-1914) was a significant figure in the Russian revolutionary movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He lived through pivotal changes ranging from the rise of ‘nihilism’ in the 1860s and the growth of populism in the 1870s, through to the creation of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in the early 1900s. Imprisoned three times before he turned thirty, he spent ten years in Siberian exile before fleeing abroad to join the fight against tsarist autocracy from western Europe.

Following Volkhovskii’s arrival in Britain in 1890, he played a central role in the campaign to win sympathy for the Russian revolutionary movement, editing newspapers and journals including Free Russia. He also helped to smuggle propaganda into Russia as well as becoming one of the most prominent figures in the émigré leadership of the Socialist Revolutionaries. Throughout his life, Volkhovskii was also a prolific writer of poetry and short stories, and was on good terms with many leading literary figures of the time including Ford Maddox Ford and Edward and Constance Garnett. 

Michael Hughes’s groundbreaking new biography provides a vivid history of this notable but hitherto neglected figure of both the political and literary worlds. Based on ten years of research in archives across the world and drawing on sources in multiple languages, this masterful biography explores how Volkhovskii’s life illuminates broader intellectual and historical questions about the Russian revolutionary movement. It is essential reading for anyone interested in late Imperial Russia and the Russian revolution.

Seminar: Resistance and Pleasure in Foucault: Recovering a Lost Connection?

The University of Warwick invites you to a two-day seminar exploring the connections between resistance and pleasure through Michel Foucault’s thought. This seminar is part of the World Congress Foucault: 40 Years After series.

Event Information

• Date: Friday, October 25th 2024
• Location: Ramphal Building R1.13, University of Warwick, and online
• Time: 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm

• Location: Common Ground, Coventry
• Time: 11:00 am – 2:00 pm

Register to attend here

Gillian Rose, Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory – Afterword by Martin Jay, edited by James Gordon Finlayson and Robert Lucas Scott, Verso Books, July 2024

I shared news of this book earlier this year, but it is now published and there is a review by Adrian Wilding in Historical Materialism (open access)

Lectures on art, Marxism, and critical theory by the legendary philosopher, collected for the first time

Marxist Modernism is a comprehensive yet concise and conversational introduction to the Frankfurt School. It is also a new resource from one of the twentieth century’s most important philosophers: Gillian Rose.

Her 1979 lectures on the Frankfurt School explore the lives and philosophies of a range of the school’s members and affiliates, including Adorno, Lukács, Brecht, Bloch, Benjamin, and Horkheimer, and outline the way each theorist developed Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism into a Marxist theory of culture.

Michael J. Shapiro, Negotiating Civic Life: Literature, Film, Politics – Edinburgh University Press, May 2025

A politically-attuned textual journey through civic life

• Contributes to thinking about civic life both thematically and methodologically
• Features critical interventions into gender, race, sexuality, and clothing
• Emphasises the historiographic contributions of artistic genres

Focused both thematically and methodologically on diverse aspects of civic life, this book elucidates the mentalities and forces involved in the way individuals and collectives negotiate ways of being in common. The chapters feature critical interventions into the civic lives of grief, of things, of Blackness, and of trans identity.

With an emphasis on the historiographic contributions of literature, film, objects and embodied memories of events, Shapiro’s textual analyses treat the way artistic genres supply the critical thinking needed to encourage a more egalitarian and convivial life world.