Living with Poverty

Later this week, a news series of documentaries about poverty in the UK starts, a BBC/OU collaboration called Living with Poverty. Links to OU-related resources can be found here, including an interactive tool for exploring (mis-)representations of poverty.

Debating the politics of consumption

The latest issue of the journal Area has just published a Review Forum on the Globalizing Responsibility book which came out of a research project on the politics of ethical consumption. The Forum arises from a session held at the RGS-IBG conference in 2011, which included critical commentaries on the book by Alex Hughes and Mike Goodman. Both Alex and Mike have written responses to the book for the Forum. They raise various issues at stake in analysing and evaluating the politics of this field, including conceptualisations of the materiality of consumption, postcolonial approaches to consumption, issues of inequality and corporate power, and the role of media and communications practices in the extension of ethical discourses around consumption. We have a response/clarification/defence of the approach pursued in the book, grandly titled Problematising Practices, which, as the name might suggest, elaborates a little on the idea of focussing on ‘problematisation’ as both an object and method of analysis.

Policing the crisis

Details here of the new edition of Policing the Crisis, 35 years on from its first publication, with new chapters on its relevance to ‘the current conjuncture’, as the old saying goes.

Old haunts: is this what happened to postcolonial theory?

A couple of days ago, Dissent pointed to an almost real-time, developing ‘debate’ about the trajectories of postcolonial theory - in the form of the response to the publication of Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. The book is largely a refutation/attack/hatchet-job/demolition job (depending on how you read it) on the work of the Subaltern Studies historians, who are taken as standing in for the whole field of ‘postcolonial theory’ (come in Aijaz Ahmad, all is forgiven….). If you don’t want to read the whole book (which can currently be surreptitiously downloaded if you stumble across it…), you can get a sampling of Chibber’s argument in an interview at Jacobin, titled How does the subaltern speak? (I wonder how many variations on that title there have been, and how many more we could all imagine in the future?).

There is already a debate emerging around Chibber’s book, not least encouraged by Verso’s own blog site – they have posted a response to a critical review by Chris Taylor, which Taylor has himself responded to in the update to his original piece.

Blog-twitter-sphere excitement about all this is circulating around a set-piece ‘debate’ between Chibber and one of his targets, Partha Chatterjee, in New York last month – via Andy Davies’s blog, I see that the video of this encounter is now up on YouTube. 

 

 

Deconstruction specialists

This made me laugh (should I get out more?): Rachel Bowlby in LRB, ending a discussion of J. Hillis Miller’s evolving ideas about the uses of literary reading:

“Out for a walk last week with a head full of Miller’s theoretical realities, I suddenly thought that I’d just seen the word ‘deconstruction’ on the side of a parked grey van. Assuming I must have misread this (misreading does happen), I went back, curious to see what it was that I’d managed to twist. I hadn’t misread it. The van was marked ‘Deconstruction specialists’. The company’s name was Protech. Based in Bexhill. There were fax and phone numbers – a proper landline. Below, in two neat blue columns, a list of the services offered. Concrete Cutting. Concrete Bursting. Concrete Crunching. Structural Works. Temporary Support. Partial Demolition. A whole history of literary theory, if that’s the way you want to look at it”.

Change of scenery

One way of thinking about the ever-so slightly old fashioned practice of blogging is as a way of producing so many ‘advertisements for myself’. I think this might be perfectly defensible. So, in this spirit, this seems as good a medium as any to let anyone out there who might be interested know that I have accepted a position as Professor of Geography and Social Theory at the University of Exeter, in the Department of Geography, starting later this year.

I have spent a decade at the OU – one half of my grown-up academic career, and I must admit to being a little bit daunted by the idea of returning to the world of face-to-face teaching, seasonal Terms, that sort of thing. I suspect that one might remain ‘ex-OU’ for quite a while after leaving, in various ways. I’m really looking forward to working with the range of great people in Geography at Exeter, and also, maybe, living close to the seaside.

On the shelf

Just came across this little essay by Francesca Mari on shelving books….

Impact agendas and public value

Back in February, Rachel Pain of Durham University presented a Keynote Lecture as part of a series organised by the Creating Publics project in the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG) at the OU, on the theme of ‘Impacting publics: striking a blow or walking together?’. Her talk addressed the ambivalence of the impact agenda, as opening up some possibilities for people, for example, working in PAR traditions of social science. You can now listen to the lecture here, which also includes some bumbling comments from me as a ‘respondent’.

Critical spatial theory: my thoughts

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….

The Cultural Logic of Late Marxism

I’m just making ready to fly off to the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, held this year in LA. It’s twenty years since I first attended one of these events, in Atlanta – held in the Hyatt Regency hotel, designed by John Portman, with it’s vast Alien-like Atrium. This time, it’s at the Westin Bonaventure hotel – also by Portman, and of course, made cultural-studies-famous by Fred Jameson. I have a feeling I might be the last geographer of a certain generation and theoretical inclination to not yet have visited this emblematically ‘postmodern’ site: for anyone out there who is attending and needs a refresher, here is a reminder of Jameson’s reading of the building.