Category Archives: Social Science

The Urbanization of Responsibility: Live

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CBSUKUI have finally made it on to You Tube! Here is a video of a live performance from back in February when I was in Cape Town, when I gave a rather more impromptu talk than I had expected at the launch event of a new programme on the theme of The Future of the City, linking the Universities of Stellenbosch and Leuven.

The sound is quite poor, and I’m not much to look at, but apart from that, this is me trying to explain to an audience of non-specialists what I mean by ‘the urbanization of responsibility‘.

 

 

Doing Theory Slowly: more on media, practices and urban politics

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9484-aldabra-giant-tortoise-1920x1200-animal-wallpaperFollowing up on the link to the Society and Space page with the podcast of a discussion between myself, Scott Rodgers, Allan Cochrane and Tim Markham, I thought it would be useful to recall the ‘arc’ of the conversations that Scott, Allan and I have been having since 2007. The podcast mentions the idea of ‘slow theory’ (an idea we might have stolen from a former OU colleague, Mike Saward), which is one way of capturing the process of collaborative thinking that we have been involved in that time.

– This all started when Scott was an ESRC-funded post-doc at the OU, from 2007-8, and then in turn working at CCIG at the OU.

-As part of the initial project, we held a workshop on the theme of Mediapolis, in June 2008.

– That generated the first published output of the collaboration, an edited section of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research in 2009, containing papers on the connections between urban thinking and media thinking by Gary Bridge, Kurt Ivesen, Kevin Ward, and ourselves (here and here).

– Then, in 2009, we organised a set of sessions at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, on the theme of ‘Where is urban politics?’.

– This was the basis of the Symposium of the same title in IJURR, published at the end of last year.

– The Society and Space paper on Mediated practices and urban politics is something we have been working on across these other activities, and has gone through various iterations. This paper is our attempt, I guess, to draw together the animating concerns that the three of us have bought to the collaboration.

– The podcast is a record of us talking through some of the background hang-ups that shape the paper.

Overall, I think that’s a decent return on the initial ‘investment’ – not so much in terms of quantity of outputs, but certainly, for me, in terms of the quality of the ongoing discussions we have engaged in while organising, convening, editing and writing together.

 

Media Practices and Urban Politics: A Conversation about Slow Theory

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Details below of a podcast, focussing on a recent Society and Space paper on media practices and urban politics. The paper itself is available on open access for the next month.

Approaches to Human Geography: new edition published

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91rdYH74XwLOh the excitement – a new year, and a new book in the pigeon hole at work. The new, second edition of Approaches to Human Geography, edited by Stuart Aitken and Gill Valentine, has been published. I have found this text, and various others in the ‘family’ of associated texts published by Sage on ‘Key Concepts’, ‘Key Texts’, ‘Key Thinkers’ really useful in my own transition back into not-so-distanced higher education teaching in the last year or so.

I happen to have a chapter in the Approaches volume, titled Postcolonialism: Powers of Representation. I don’t know about other chapters, but I think mine is a significant revision from the previous one, in tone if nothing else.

2014 Top Ten: Theory Books

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shoes’tis the season to make best-of-the-year lists, it seems. I read books for a living (which means not necessarily from start to finish, and generally by writing in them as I go along). These are my favourites from this year, ones which made me think the most, or confirmed my prejudices, or surprised me a little bit, and all of which also bought at least a little bit of pleasure.

1). Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice – Michel Foucault (like discovering a lost record by Talking Heads from somewhere between 1978 and 1982).

2). Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon – edited by Barbara Cassin.

3). Sophistical Practice: Toward a Consistent Relativism – Barbara Cassin.

4). Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problem of Modernity – Colin Koopman.

5). Keys to the City: How Economics, Institutions, Social Interaction, and Politics Shape Development – Michael Storper.

6). Democracy and Illusion: An Examination of Certain Aspects of Modern Democratic Theory – John Plamenatz (and oldie, bought by accident).

7). Making Human Geography – Kevin Cox (my favourite book by someone I know).

8). Africa’s Urban Revolution – edited by Sue Parnell and Edgar Pieterse (makes you think about cities and urbanization in new ways).

9). Justification and Critique: Towards a Critical Theory of Politics – Rainer Forst.

10). Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity – Charles Taylor (another oldie, and I’m not sure why I found myself reading this, but I did, and then I wondered why I hadn’t done so before).

Bite Size Theory: Lineages of Political Society

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“Most scholars find everyday politics excruciatingly boring. This may be the result of our habit of following politics through the news headlines where only the extraordinary, the spectacular, and the sensational find a place. Further, those who set store by the political subject engaging in the heroic politics of the street can never fail to find it if they regularly follow the headlines.”

Partha Chatterjee, 2011, Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy. Columbia University Press.

Bite Size Theory: Thinking in an Emergency

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“Insofar as I am making an argument about finding and following good habits, I am also making an argument about finding and following, binding ourselves to, good constitutional procedures. Conversely, I am suggesting that our contempt for our laws, the suspension of constitutional requirements overseeing our entry into war, is in part based on our contempt for the habitual that is undeserved.

Elaine Scarry, 2011, Thinking in an Emergency, W.W. Norton.

Bite Size Theory: On the Postcolony

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“By defining itself both as an accurate portrayal of Western modernity – that is, by starting from conventions that are purely local – and as universal grammar, social theory has condemned itself always to make generalizations from idioms of a provincialism that no longer requires demonstration since it proves extremely difficult to understand non-Western objects within its dominant paradigms.”

Achille Mbembe, 2001, On the Postcolony, University of California Press.

Power and Space in the City

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Details here of a series of workshops on the theme of Power and Space in the City, organised by Liza Griffin and others at the Bartlett School and the OU.

Anti-Politics?

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I went to the launch event yesterday of a new ESRC-funded project, led by Nick Clarke at Southampton, exploring Popular Understandings of Politics in Britain 1937-2014. It’s an innovative project, combining quantitative and qualitative methods – but especially interesting in attempting to get at the ways in which politics has been ordinarily talked about over this period. An interesting challenge, no doubt, is for the project to not get overwhelmed by a rhetoric of decline; the promise of the project is to re-frame how questions about changing practices of political engagement are asked in the first place.