I accidentally came across this great blog today, bookshy, dedicated to contemporary African literature. In addition to reviews, it also includes a page of African book covers, and a link to a whole tumblr site of even more images of book covers, old and new.
There is, of course, a whole political-economy of the covers of African books. Apparently.
Details of the Visualising Atmospheres exhibition in London on Gillian Rose’s blog.
Bio-Social Methods for a Vitalist Social Science
Institute of Advanced Studies Workshop, University of Birmingham
16th July 2013
A workshop commentary written by Dr Bryony Enright is available here (PDF).
Some interesting quotes on the concept of the bio-social can be found here (Powerpoint).
Presentations and audio recordings of presentations will be added as available below:
Nudging Into Subjectification (Powerpoint)
Dr John Cromby, Loughborough University (AUDIO)
Porosity, Virality and the Study of Contagion (Prezi Presentation)
Professor Steve Hinchliffe, University of Exeter (AUDIO)
Experimental Entanglements in Cognitive Neuroscience (LINK)
Dr Felicity Callard, Durham University and Dr Des Fitzgerald, Aarhus University
Nanny, Nudger or Therapist? Therapeutic Approaches to Behaviour Change in an age of ‘Vulnerability’
Professor Kathryn Ecclestone, University of Sheffield (AUDIO)
Using Mindfulness Training in Pro-environmental Behaviour Change (Powerpoint)
Rachel Lilley, Aberystwyth University (
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From my colleague Shonil Bhagwat, a new blog on nature-culture issues, starting with posts on invasive species.
Re-blogging a re-blog from Progressive Geographies, the latest issue of Dialogues in Human Geography is currently available on open access. Includes a section on academic blogging and public geographies, and also a debate section revolving around an intervention by Kevin Cox on the relations between critical realism and Marxism in and around geography (Blur or Oasis? The Beatles or The Stones? The Beatles and the Stones?).
I was conferencing last week, at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers in LA. I was involved in two sessions, the first a panel discussion, organised by Scott Rodgers and Rosie Cox, on the uses of social media by academics, including reflections on how blogging, tweeting, and Facebooking can be used to carve out some new spaces of communication with academic and non-academic audiences. The second was on the theme of ‘defining the contours of a new 21st century critical urban theory’, a series of paper sessions organised by Chris Baker and Justin Beaumont. I presented a paper to the title of Where is the action? in which I tried to articulate some of the problems, as I see them, with prevalent approaches to critical urban theory, and critical spatial theory more broadly, and to say too something about some alternatives ways of proceeding. My paper was an attempt to articulate the whole arc of an argument that links, in my head at least, a series of pieces on urban theory, democracy, on ‘ethics’, on ‘class’, and other themes which I have written over the last two or three years (and have therefore already trailed on this blog), as well as some thinking done while developing an online Masters CPD course on critical spatial theory. So, the paper is rather allusive, shall we say.
Anyway, in the spirit of the first of these sessions, I thought I may as well post up the paper I presented in the second session – it will also be linked on the Things to Read page. This is the written paper which I spoke to at the conference – it has no references, although I imagine it as full of invisible hypertext links to other things I have written and to lots of things other people have written. I guess I’m thinking that since I said this all out loud at the conference, there is no good reason not to share these thoughts with the anonymous audience that may or may not be out there reading this blog – and to share it in much the same spirit as one does a ‘live’ conference performance, as a work in progress, awaiting further elaboration, and open to comments and questions….
At Social Epistemology, Zsuzsa Gille questions whether ontological positions on ‘matter’ have any necessary ‘political valence’ – in response to a piece by Myra Hird on indeterminacy and waste. I find it quite peculiar that people do still make arguments which presume that ontological claims have political significance – mainly, because the significance that they are meant to have always ends up looking a little predictable: things could be different, things are a little bit contingent, things are open to transformation, and by all sorts of influences, things could be more inclusive. Not sure one really needs a strong or even a weak ontology to find those sorts of ideas persuasive – the presumption that one does need ‘ontology’ to open up new political possibilities perhaps tells us more about what people think politics is, rather than what ‘ontology’ is good for.
When is an academic blogging an academic blogger? Here is Alex Marsh with some sensible observations on the limits of ‘academic blogging’ hype.
I picked this up via Craig Jeffrey, so thanks for the heads-up – here is a review symposium on the Comaroff’s Theory from the South, from The Salon, the on-line journal of the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism.
WordPress have very kindly provided an end of year summary of this year’s Pop Theory activity, and it turns out the most popular things to post about are neoliberalism, governmentality, affect theory, injustice, and, er, Derek Parfit, still. So I guess next year I should continue to grumble about the first three, worry about the fourth one a little more, and reflect a little more on why, or how, any of them matters.
Pop Theory 