Thus Bakes Zarathustra on finishing a PhD

Posted on September 18, 2011 by stuartelden

The brilliantly named ‘Thus Bakes Zarathustra’ (academic stuff meets cooking) has a really helpful advice post on finishing a PhD. Definitely worth a look if you are anywhere in that process, and also helpful for planning and completing any large project.

Posted in Publishing, Universities | Leave a comment

Translation, discuss

Posted on September 18, 2011 by stuartelden

An interesting post, and developing discussion, about translation of philosophical texts, here.

Posted in Books, Publishing | Leave a comment

Territorial Masquerades on Spatiality and Power

Posted on September 18, 2011 by stuartelden

Interesting discussion here.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

‘How should we do the history of territory?’ – Berkeley audio

Posted on September 16, 2011 by stuartelden

The audio recording of my Berkeley talk is now available. Many thanks to Ilaria Giglioli for making the recording.

“How should we do the history of territory”, University of California, Berkeley, 14 September 2011.

Posted in Conferences, Giovanni Botero, Gottfried Leibniz, Michel Foucault, Niccolò Machiavelli, Quentin Skinnner, Reinhart Koselleck, Territory, The Birth of Territory | Leave a comment

Society and Space – supplementary website and book reviews

Posted on September 14, 2011 by stuartelden

The Society and Space supplementary website is now much more than a blog. It will include book reviews and other pieces additional to those in the print and online journal. The editors hope that the book review forum will become a major source of discussion of recent scholarship in geography, social/spatial theory and all the other fields the journal covers.

You can always find the most recent reviews at this address – www.societyandspace.com/reviews – or via the link on any page on the site.

All reviews that have appeared here will be listed in a permanent archive at this address – http://societyandspace.com/reviews/reviews-archive/

More details on the book reviews here; and a list of additional material can be found here

We would welcome book reviews for the site, and you should speak to the two review editors Mary Thomas and Christian Abrahamsson to discuss your ideas.

Posted in Society and Space | Leave a comment

Foucault sculpture in a nursing home

Posted on September 14, 2011 by stuartelden

Okay, this is odd. A Dutch nursing home, built in the form of a panopticon, has a sculpture of Foucault’s head and one forearm in the foyer. Brief video clip below, and story here. Thanks to Mark Kelly for the link.

Posted in Michel Foucault | Leave a comment

Society and Space – Writing its History

Posted on September 13, 2011 by stuartelden

(Cross posted from Society and Space)

I’ve recently completed work as the managing editor of a five volume compilation of papers from the four Environment and Planning journals. This is a collaborative venture between Pion, who publish the journals, and Sage. The first four volumes take papers from the four journals, and are edited by the current or recent editors of those journals. The fifth volume takes papers from all four journals across themes of common interest, and is edited by us all.

The collection is designed for libraries that don’t have access to the archive of these journals, and is priced accordingly. The only pieces in the collection that are not otherwise available are the introductions. My introduction to volume D: Society and Space, which provides a brief history of the journal, is available here – Society and Space – Writing its History, open access.

Thanks to Sage for permission to make this available, and Amye Kenall at Pion for design and layout.

You can find more details of the collection on the Sage website.

Posted in Books, My Publications, Society and Space | Leave a comment

Stuart Hall on neoliberalism

Posted on September 13, 2011 by stuartelden

Interesting piece in The Guardian. [Update longer versionin Soundings here – thanks to Peter Gratton, via Paul Gilroy, for the link]

Posted in Politics, Stuart Hall | Leave a comment

Details of Berkeley and Tucson lectures

Posted on September 12, 2011 by stuartelden

14 September 2011 – “How should we do the history of territory?” Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley, USA (details)

16 September 2011 – ”How should we do the history of territory?” School of Geography and Development, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA (details)

This is the abstract:

Foucault did not say very much about territory, and what he does is, at best, misleading. Nonetheless, Foucault is extremely helpful in beginning to think about the history of territory. The basis for these two claims is the purpose of this talk, as I offer some reflections on the work I have been doing over the past decade on the history of territory, culminating in the book The Birth of Territory. It moves through four stages. First, I discuss what Foucault does says about territory, and indicate why it is misleading. Second, I try to show what Foucault might offer to a more adequate history of territory. Third, briefly, I outline some of the other approaches I have utilised in this work, specifically looking at the German tradition of Begriffsgeschichte and the Cambridge school of contextual history. Finally, I outline some of the key elements of the account I offer in The Birth of Territory.

You can find more details on the context for this work here.

Posted in Conferences, Michel Foucault, The Birth of Territory | 1 Comment

Sensualising Deformity – Call for papers

Posted on September 12, 2011 by stuartelden

This could be interesting. Sensualising Deformity: Communication and Construction of Monstrous Embodiment, at the University of Edinburgh, June 15-16 2012. The link takes you to the call for papers, and they have a linked blog.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is one of the keynotes, which would also be very good. Thanks to In the Middle for the link.

I need to write a piece on monstrosity for the planned Foucault book, and while I’ve written on Foucault’s work on monsters before – “The Constitution of the Normal: Monsters and Masturbation at the Collège de France“, boundary 2, Vol 28 No 1, Spring 2001, pp. 91-105 – this might be a good opportunity to revisit those themes in the light of newly available material. In particular I think Foucault’s comments about monstrosity and political leadership are worth exploring, and of course his work on monstrosity was related to the planned fifth volume of his History of Sexuality project, Les pervers. I recently read Andrew Sharpe’s Foucault’s Monsters and the Challenge of Law which was quite interesting but would be rather different from my take. Steven Maynard is also doing some important work on this aspect of Foucault. For some reason Foucault’s 1973-75 lectures (Psychiatric Power and Abnormals) have received much less attention than the governmentality or government of the self courses.

I also intend to write some material on horror and the concept of the ‘wound’ in my planned The Space of the World book, so the other papers would likely be useful for that.

Posted in Conferences, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Michel Foucault, The Space of the World | 1 Comment