I’m delighted to announce that the very wonderful Michael Samers has arranged an Author Meets Critics session on The Priority of Injustice, my new book (did I mention that?) at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers in New Orleans in April. It’s a great panel, with Joshua Barkan (U. of Georgia), Jennifer Fluri (U. of Colorado, Boulder), Leila Harris (UBC), and Kirsi Kallio (University of Tampere) all commenting on the book. The session is sponsored by AAG’s Political Geography Specialty Group and Ethics, Justice, and Human Rights Specialty Group. There’s a nice symmetry about the prospect of discussing the book in New Orleans – the last time the conference was there, in 2003, I presented a paper on theories of radical democracy that was my first post-Culture and Democracy effort at articulating the limits of broadly post-structuralist approaches to that topic, an effort that led eventually to the shape of The Priority of Injustice (yes, I’m a slow thinker).

Here’s the pitch for the session, a somewhat revised version of the cover blurb for the book itself:

“In The Priority of Injustice, Clive Barnett challenges conventional ways of thinking about the spaces of democratic politics. In geography and related disciplines, debates about democracy have become trapped around a set of oppositions between deliberative and agonistic theories, in which the promotion of participatory experiments runs alongside widespread protestations about the post-political tendencies of contemporary events. Interrupting the broadly shared romanticization of spaces of assembly, public protest, and the street in these debates, Barnett unpacks the philosophical assumptions about space and time that underlie competing understandings of the sources of political conflict. Rather than developing ideal theories of democracy or ontological accounts of proper politics, he proposes an ordinary style of analysis that focuses on how experiences of injustice and demands for recognition, redress, and repair are articulated and processed across various spaces.

This Author-Meets-Critics panel brings Barnett into conversation with interlocutors with expertise in areas including environmental politics, feminist geographies, legal geography and political geography. Panellists will include Joshua Barkan, Jennifer Fluri, Leila Harris, and Kirsi Pauliina Kallio. Clive Barnett will respond to the critics and take questions from the audience.”