Theory & Event supplement on Occupy

Posted on December 4, 2011 by stuartelden

Theory & Event special issue. Open access for three months – papers by Zizek, Wendy Brown, John Protevi, Bill Connolly, McKenzie Wark and others. Thanks to John Protevi for the link.

Posted in Politics, Slavoj Zizek, Wendy Brown, William E Connolly | Leave a comment

Sevilla Buitrago, Gregory, Elden interview – open access in Spanish and English

Posted on December 3, 2011 by stuartelden

The English version of the interview in Acme has been available for a while – and like all material in that journal is open access. Now the Spanish translation – which appeared earlier this year in Revista Urban – is also freely available, here.

Posted in Derek Gregory, My Publications | Leave a comment

Secure the Volume abstract

Posted on December 3, 2011 by stuartelden

This is the abstract for the Kentucky Committee for Social Theory lecture (late March) and the Political Geography plenary lecture at the RGS-IBG conference in Edinburgh (early July).

Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power

We all-too-often think of the spaces of geography as areas, not volumes. Territories are bordered, divided and demarcated, but not understood in terms of height and depth. ‘Secure the area’ is a common expression for the military and police, but what happens if another dimension is taken into account and we think what it means to ‘secure the volume’? How do questions of height change how we understand the space of the world? What happens if we think of the vertical as much as the horizontal? In this talk I will draw on the emergent literature on vertical geopolitics – works by Weizman, Graham, Gregory, Williams, Adey et. al. – and Peter Sloterdijk’s work on spheres, but also look at what happens below the surface, with a particular focus on tunnels. As Foucault suggests, “the vertical is not one of the dimensions of space, it is the dimension of power”. The world does not just exist as a surface; security goes up and down; space is volumetric.

Posted in Conferences, Derek Gregory, Michel Foucault, Peter Sloterdijk, Stephen Graham, The Space of the World | Leave a comment

Graham Harman on Open Access Publishing and Sales

Posted on December 3, 2011 by stuartelden

Some interesting comments here.

Posted in Graham Harman, Publishing | Leave a comment

The LSE and Libya – the Woolf Inquiry

Posted on December 3, 2011 by stuartelden

The Woolf Inquiry report on Libya and the LSE, and in particular Saif Gaddafi’s plagiarised PhD thesis, has been published. There are some good questions at New APPS

Posted in Politics, Universities | Leave a comment

Some other good Occupy links

Posted on December 3, 2011 by stuartelden

Bernard Harcourt in The Guardian on its ‘new grammar of civil disobedience’

A couple of interesting posts that look at the spatio-temporal aspects of the protests – Occupy Time and Occupy Volume, Occupy Verticality

Posted in Politics | Leave a comment

99% v 1%: the data behind the Occupy movement

Posted on December 3, 2011 by stuartelden

Thanks to Annick Wibben for the link

Posted in Politics | Leave a comment

To do list

Posted on December 2, 2011 by stuartelden

In the immortal words of Malcolm Tucker, “I’ve got a to-do list longer than a Leonard Cohen song”…

One of the things that has suffered has been this blog. As the last, somewhat grumpy, post indicated, we are moving, and so that has taken quite a bit of time. But I’ve also been teaching, marking, attending meetings, conducting annual staff reviews, applying for a grant, dealing with hundreds of emails, editing a journal, writing an editorial, another short piece, meeting current and potential PhD students, doing reviews for journals, proposal and manuscript reviews for publishers, booking flights and organising trips… My role as Academic Director of the International Boundaries Research Unit is one of the best bits of my job, but that’s taken up a lot of time recently. And I was on strike for a day, but everything I would have done on that day seems to have ended up being done anyway just at another time.

I have a paper which is probably 1 or 2 days away from being submitted; more conference/speaking travel to organise; a couple of invited lecture abstracts to write; another journal review to do; a publisher to chase; a lecture to write; and probably loads more. I don’t miss deadlines: I just sleep less.

Posted in Publishing, teaching, Travel, Universities | Leave a comment

November is the cruelest month

Posted on December 2, 2011 by stuartelden

With all due respect to T.S. Eliot, I think November wins the prize. Setting the clocks back is brutal, the weather is tough, and the days continue to get shorter. Getting some disappointing news in the middle of the month didn’t help. With December at least the days start getting longer towards the end, and there are the holidays. January and February the end is in sight. I don’t mind a proper winter; it’s this damp and dreary stuff I find hard.

This is the first time I’ve actually spent a November in York. We bought this place in October 2007, but I went to New York for three months almost immediately. The next year I was in Singapore; we then lived in London for just over a year; and last year I was in Seattle. I’ve spent at least part of every other month of the year here, but this is the first November. And it will be the last. Sometime over the Christmas/New Year period we’re moving back to County Durham.

Posted in Travel | Leave a comment

Queen Mary PhD studentships

Posted on November 28, 2011 by stuartelden

Funded PhD studentships for 2012-13 entry at Queen Mary, University of London. Some are for specific topics; many are open. Details here.

Posted in Universities | Leave a comment