Progressive Geographies

Daniel G. König (ed.), Entangled Worlds: 600-1350 — Harvard University Press, March 2025

The period between the seventh and fourteenth centuries is hardly thought of as an era of globalization. Entire societies in the Americas, Australia, and Oceania developed in relative isolation from other parts of the world. Even on the interconnected landmass of Eurafrasia, many people had little to do with processes of transregional exchange.

Yet the period 600–1350 CE in fact witnessed an explosion of connectivity amid the consolidation of sophisticated approaches to human organization. Flows of people, goods, and ideas across regional boundaries intensified, changing lives at all social levels, from rulers to the enslaved. In the Americas, large cities and north-south trade networks took shape. The Arabic-Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, along with the Mongol expansion of the thirteenth, tied together diverse polities from southeast Asia to sub-Saharan Africa. Regions also became more culturally and politically integrated: Latin-Christian models of social organization spread across Europe; the Sinitic written language drew eastern Eurasia into a common elite culture; and the accumulation of significant agricultural surpluses in the Indian subcontinent supported the emergence of a settled political order.

Entangled Worlds sees the completion of the magisterial six-volume set History of the World, offering an authoritative introduction to a vibrant era of global history. The distinguished contributors make clear that there never was a stagnant “Middle Ages” wedged between Antiquity and Modernity but instead a period defined by decisive strides toward global connection, urbanization, and the cultural and political formations we live with today.

Valentina Antoniol and Stefano Marino (eds.), Foucault’s Aesthetics of Existence and Shusterman’s Somaesthetics – Bloomsbury, August 2024

Bringing together Michel Foucault’s aesthetics of existence and Richard Shusterman’s somaesthetics, this volume provides a critical comparison of two of the most influential philosophical theories of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Introduced by a comprehensive overview of both concepts by editors Stefano Marino and Valentina Antoniol, the ensuing chapters interrogate the affinities and variances between Foucault’s and Shusterman’s philosophies. Building on the interdisciplinary character of somaesthetics and aesthetics of existence, international scholars explore these ideas through a wide range of topics ranging from care of the self and of the social self to the ethical and political challenges posed by themes as white ignorance, construction of resistances, and production of subjectivities. Given the central role played by the body in both concepts, this volume also affords particular attention to the philosophy of sexuality.

Demonstrating the value of reading these two thinkers together through the adoption of radical interpretive perspectives, Foucault’s Aesthetics of Existence and Shusterman’s Somaesthetics highlights the potentialities and the relevance of Foucault’s and Shusterman’s theories, even with respect to our actualité.

Doyle D. Calhoun, The Suicide Archive: Reading Resistance in the Wake of French Empire – Duke University Press, October 2024

The open access introduction is available now.

Throughout the French empire, from the Atlantic and the Caribbean to West and North Africa, men, women, and children responded to enslavement, colonization, and oppression through acts of suicide. In The Suicide Archive, Doyle D. Calhoun charts a long history of suicidal resistance to French colonialism and neocolonialism from the time of slavery to the Algerian War for Independence to the “Arab Spring.” Noting that suicide was either obscured in or occluded from French colonial archives, Calhoun turns to literature and film to show how aesthetic forms and narrative accounts can keep alive the silenced histories of suicide as a political language. Drawing on scientific texts, police files, and legal proceedings alongside contemporary African and Afro-Caribbean novels, film, and Senegalese oral history, Calhoun outlines how such aesthetic works rewrite histories of resistance and loss. In so doing, Calhoun offers a new way of writing about suicide, slavery, and coloniality in relation to literary history.

Ingrid A. Medby, Arctic State Identity: Geography, History, and Geopolitical Relations – Manchester University Press, January 2025 

This book sets out to answer what it means to hold a formal title as one of the eight ‘Arctic states’; is there such a thing as an Arctic state identity, and if so, what does this mean for state personnel? It charts the thoughtful reflections and stories of state personnel from three Arctic states: Norway, Iceland, and Canada, alongside analysis of documents and discourses. This book shows how state identities are narrated as both geographical and temporal – understood through environments, territories, pasts and futures – and that any identity is always relational and contextual. As such, demonstrating that to understand Arctic geopolitics we need to pay attention to the people whose job it is to represent the state on a daily basis. And more broadly, it offers a ‘peopled’ view of geopolitics, introducing the concept and framework of ‘state identity’.

Shannon Mattern, Library as Infrastructure – Places Journal

Fascinating and beautifully illustrated piece on libraries.

Julie Zook and Kerstin Sailer (eds.), The Covert Life of Hospital Architecture, UCL Press, March 2022 (print and open access)

The Covert Life of Hospital Architecture addresses hospital architecture as a set of interlocked, overlapping spatial and social conditions. It identifies ways that planned-for and latent functions of hospital spaces work jointly to produce desired outcomes such as greater patient safety, increased scope for care provider communication and more intelligible corridors.

By advancing space syntax theory and methods, the volume brings together emerging research on hospital environments. Opening with a description of hospital architecture that emphasizes everyday relations, the sequence of chapters takes an unusually comprehensive view that pairs spaces and occupants in hospitals: the patient room and its intervisibility with adjacent spaces, care teams and on-ward support for their work and the intelligibility of public circulation spaces for visitors. The final chapter moves outside the hospital to describe the current healthcare crisis of the global pandemic as it reveals how healthcare institutions must evolve to be adaptable in entirely new ways. Reflective essays by practicing designers follow each chapter, bringing perspectives from professional practice into the discussion.

The Covert Life of Hospital Architecture makes the case that latent dimensions of space as experienced have a surprisingly strong link to measurable outcomes, providing new insights into how to better design hospitals through principles that have been tested empirically. It will become a reference for healthcare planners, designers, architects and administrators, as well as for readers from sociology, psychology and other areas of the social sciences.

Jo van Every – Spotlight on: Burnout

I published my first post with “burnout” in the title, “Burnout is real”,  in 2022. We were just coming out of the most intense phase of the COVID pandemic disruptions. The term was familiar to people, but the idea that it might be a real diagnosable medical condition was less well known. It might still be.

In March 2024, I interviewed a client of mine who had taken sick leave for burnout about her experience with clinically significant burnout. I learned a lot from that conversation. It gave me a different perspective on the situations other clients were facing, and a new perspective on some of the topics I’ve been writing about for years.

Burnout is characterised by severe fatigue. Physical fatigue may even result in collapsing at work. That physical fatigue will be accompanied by cognitive fatigue, symptoms of which include inability to concentrate, memory problems, and so on. Fatigue also contributes to emotional dysregulation.

Another major sign of burnout is starting to hate what you used to love. This may also present as a kind of malaise in which things seem meaningless.

Burnout is caused by exceeding your capacity for an extended period of time. Your physical capacity. Your cognitive capacity. Your emotional capacity. Your body will use adrenaline and cortisol to help you do this, but at some point, even your adrenal glands will give up. I hope you don’t get there.

If you get to that extreme stage, it is going to take time to recover. It is crucial to address fatigue earlier.

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