Social science and participation: open access teaching resources

Posted on 12 Sep 2013 by Admin

My penultimate contribution to OU teaching is now online, at the OU’s OpenLearn site – Social Science and Participation is the open-access unit drawn from The Uses of Social Science module that was launched last year (it’s open, and it’s online, but it’s not really a course as such, since the assessment elements are not included, and it may or may not turn out to massive – so, it’s not a MOOC, obviously, more like a MOO, or an OO?). The unit tells some stories about how social science investigates people’s participation in various activities; how people actually participate in social science; and how ideas about participation have been important for how social scientists have contributed to public debates about poverty, including a film on this topic.

This unit has some overlaps with another OpenLearn resource, curated by Nick Mahony and Hilde Stephanson, Participation Now – which seeks to trace all sorts of new forms of public action.

Chatterjee on Subaltern Studies and Capital

Posted on 10 Sep 2013 by Admin

Andy Davies at Contentious Geographies has news of a piece by Partha Chatterjee entitled Subaltern Studies and Capital in Economic and Political Weekly, a response to Vivek Chibber’s book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital.

While on the subject of Chatterjee, here is a link to details (and the first chapter) of his newish book, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power.

Let’s have a party…

Posted on 1 Sep 2013 by Admin

Last week, I presented a paper at the annual conference of the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers (‘the IBG’, if you’re old and slow enough). This was my last formal act as an OUer. The paper was in one of two sessions on Geographies of the Political Party, organised by James Scott and Jane Wills. The two sessions were full of entertaining stuff, about patronage and corruption in New South Wales, Communist Party reinvention in the Czech Republic, versions of Max Weber, and much else besides.

Anyway, my paper was an attempt to think about some of the reasons why political parties don’t show up in ‘critical’ research on politics in geography, beyond a handful of stereotypes. In part, it was based on some reflections on how and why they have and haven’t shown up in some research projects I have been involved in, although that part is not very explicit. In the same spirit as my posting of my AAG paper earlier this year, I have added this paper to the Things to Read section, if anyone is interested to know what I spent at least some of the summer thinking about.

Politics and public space

Posted on 11 Aug 2013 by Admin

If you are stuck for holiday reading, perhaps a short debate on how best to theorise the relationship between public space and politics is what you are looking for? If you have access to the journal Policy and Politics, you will find a couple of responses in the current issue by myself and Quentin Stevens to a short provocation in the previous issue by John Parkinson entitled ‘Political public space: what it is, why it is special and why standard spatial nostrums mislead’. My contribution is really an elaboration of some aspects of Parkinson’s argument, an appreciation, just to show I am not only ‘critical’ when writing in critique-mode. To cut a long story short, Parkinson’s argument is that the ‘big-P’ political significance of certain sorts of public spaces is dangerously sidelined by arguments about the ‘little-P’, or shall we say, ‘cultural politics’ significance of public space understood as a field of broad, dispersed sociable encounters. I think he might be right. What is interesting about the ‘debate’ is that it does underscore the degree to which the precise relationship between political-politics uses of public space and cultural-politics uses of public space, to make a simple distinction, remains poorly theorised and difficult to investigate empirically in interesting ways (I think the significance of Parkinson’s argument, in his work on public space and democracy, lies precisely in focussing clear attention on the Big-P political relevance of uses of public space, something which is often taken for granted in more or less dismissive ways by arguments which are keen to claim ‘political’ relevance for any and all uses of public space).

The same issue of the journal also has an interesting collection of essays exploring the theme of Reconfiguring the Local Public Realm, which comes out of a workshop held in Bristol a couple of years or so ago, which I did attend and present a paper at, but was unable to contribute a final paper towards. It includes a range of pieces from planners, political scientists, and others – I would recommend the paper by Jeremy Seekings in particular, on the question of ‘Is the South Brazilian?‘