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.
Just noticed a new blog by Mark Purcell, Path to the Possible, on issues of urbanism, politics, democracy. Mark is author of Recapturing Democracy, one of the few books I can think of in geography/urban studies that engages in detail with democratic theory. I was on the ‘author-meets-critics’ panel for this book at the Annual Meeting of the AAG in Boston in 2008, the only time I have done one of these. I remember thinking how weird it must be to have to sit through other people picking holes in one’s work in such detail. I now have to sit through one of these on a book of my own in a month or so, so what goes around comes around I guess.
My colleague at the OU, Nick Mahony, has just posted an invite to contribute to a new blog hosted by the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG), discussing ‘the politics of the present’, focussing initially on the theme of ‘Big Cuts, Big Society’ – see: http://www.open.ac.uk/ccig/dialogues/blogs/big-cuts-big-society
Pop Theory 