I wrote a guest blog post for Future Agricultures that gives a straight-forward preview of the talk I’m giving this week at the Global Land Grabs conference hosted by Cornell University. A teaser:
With the start of peace negotiations this week that will hopefully bring an end to Colombia’s civil war, it’s time for researchers and watchdog groups to take a closer look at the role of armed conflict in the rising global interest in farmland. Continue reading
I read the article “Attention Disorder or Not, Pills to Help in School” this morning in the NY Times and it freaked me out. Then, the article was sent around on my department’s listserve and I just can’t get over it. A pediatrician in a suburb of Atlanta gives his “disadvantaged” or “low income” patients Aderall (a.k.a. speed), a powerful stimulant that in constant dosage makes kids less hyper. (You know, because they’re kids and therefore shouldn’t be hyper.) Justification for the widening use of the psychotropic drugs for “low income” children is failing elementary schools. The prescription-happy doctor featured in the story explains, “We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.” Obviously, what government can afford such extravagant luxuries like after-school programs, counseling, tutoring, and decent pay for teachers these days? Nothing a little speed can’t help! Continue reading
You know how sometimes you learn about something you had never heard of before and then you start seeing it everywhere? The New Aesthetic has been one of those things for me since Derek Gregory turned me on to it (sue me if I’m behind the curve). I watched James Bridle’s provocative talk, which is as conceptually sticky as a pop song. Basically, according to Bridle, The New Aesthetic refers to the way in which the irruption of digital technology into “real life” is literally changing the way we see things, how we make them, and understand them. Continue reading
Benjamin Kunkel in the New Statesman critiques what he calls the “unbearable lightness of Slajov Žižek’s communism” and notes how the Slovenian philosopher’s celebrity produced an odd result: “A ruthless criticism of capitalism, it turned out, could still be contemplated outside the academy – but only on condition that it appear as the work of a jester or provocateur.”
PM Press just came out with a new edition and revised translation of The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967) by Raoul Vaneigem. The edition includes a new preface by Vaneigem, who became a founding member of the Situationist International after being introduced to Guy Debord by Henri Lefebvre in 1960.
Nato Thompson interviews Trevor Paglen about his new project “The Last Pictures,” which we’ve looked at before. The interview confirmed for me what a weird montage of art, philosophy, and geography this project really is.
Julianne Malveaux has an interesting review of The Black Revolution on Campus by Martha Biondi that looks at the anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles of African-American college students in the 1960s and 1970s. Changing the university, they hoped, would help bring about broader changes in society.
An interesting conversation recorded sometime around 1982 between two of my favorite historians: EP Thompson and CLR James. The most fascinating part of the 50-minute conversation/interview comes toward the end, beginning at about minute 43′ in which they start talking about how and why to write history. The conversation nicely gives a flavor of both historians’ Marxism: the “unpredictability of process,” defining human need beyond narrow economic needs, and how to make history contemporary. Below is an annotation for those that want to browse through pieces of video.
[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI7n7M6nAOA”] Continue reading
Like so many others I was saddened to hear about Neil Smith’s untimely passing. People who knew him have all mentioned what a kind, warm, down to earth, and funny person he was—in this, I hope I follow his footsteps. In terms of his intellectual work, this blog has posted notes on his writings on uneven development and scale. His influence on geography and beyond will be missed.
Eric Hobsbawm also died this week. I have not read his massive “Age of…” books, but I’ve posted about his Bandits and Primitive Rebels. The two books inspired a raft of studies I’ve also posted about—from Colombia, Italy, Mexico, and beyond—that build on and critique his work.
All this is just to say that both thinkers changed my thinking and it’s a huge loss that they’re gone.
The Altlantic dissects “Gangnam Style,” the South Korean music video sensation that has reached a gajillion youtube views, revealing its critical edge: a commentary on wealth, class, and value (aka capitalism) in contemporary South Korea by skewering one of its richest neighborhoods, Gangnam. Seoul’s One Percent lives in Gangnam (literally).
Also on the u-tubes is the full-length version of We Are Legion: The Story of the Hactivisits (2012), a documentary on Anonymous. Since Anonymous is a minor obsession of this blog, we highly recommend this doc.
The fight against the politically motivated move to effectively close the Politics and Government Department of Ben Gurion University in Israel has a website and a letter from the Association of American Geographers (AAG). Sign the petition.
The Johannesburg Workshop on Theory and Criticism published Volume 5 of its inhouse journal Salon (open access). The issue has a debate forum on the Comaroffs’ Theory from the South: Or, how Euro-America is Evolving toward Africa. I had seen something posted about this somewhere, but can’t remember where. The debates raise some really interesting questions about the present conjuncture of world affairs and the geopolitics of knowledge and scholarship. The issue also has an audiovisual section with works from Colombia. Rather than a showcase of “Colombian documentary,” Juan Orrantia explains that the point of this issue’s section is to examine how “in a place like Colombia, artists, intellectuals and media practitioners working in various mediums have been reflecting on the experience of life amidst conflict.” Interesting stuff, too, on Fanon, anti-racism, Latour and more.
[youtube_sc url=”http://youtu.be/9ChdRWJkF4o”]
A more in depth written description of my project is forthcoming in the pages of Antipode. Thanks to the entire Antipode crew for the award and to others for their kind words.
Experimental geographer and artist Trevor Paglen’s most experimental project (so far) must be this new thing called “The Last Pictures” (video below) and it’s about to debut in New York. The itinerary of events in the U.S. and Europe are posted online. “The Last Pictures” was commissioned by Creative Time and involves a “collection of ultra-archival images attached to a communications satellite, headed for a very stable geostationary orbit, where they will remain for billions of years.” Right?!? Since it’s sort of something you have to see to believe, and since we’re not yet routine outer-space travelers, he also wrote a book about the project with the same title co-published by Creative Time and University of California Press. It’s well worth checking out the project’s site and reading the book description on the UC Press site to get a sense of the project, which is both crazy and cool. Our satellites will out live humanity for billions of years to come so the book critically examines the 100 photographs Trevor is shooting into space. The choice of photographs, says UC Press, was “influenced by four years of interviews with leading scientists, philosophers, anthropologists, and artists about the contradictions that characterize contemporary civilizations.” Check out his other works on the Pentagon’s “Dark Geographies.”
[vimeo video_id=”45171706″ width=”600″ height=”380″ title=”Yes” byline=”Yes” portrait=”Yes” autoplay=”No” loop=”No” color=”00adef”]
