AAG 2010 sessions on territory and cartography

I’ve mounted a website and blog for our sessions on Territory and Cartography at next year’s Association of American Geographers (AAG) conference. We have three sessions total and some of the papers have a definite Foucaultian approach, although this was not a prerequisite of the cfp.
Anyway, please jump over to the blog and leave comments [...]

CFP: “Deleuze: Ethics and Politics”

Rockwell Clancy sends the following message:
* * *
Call for Papers
 
4th Biennial Philosophy and Literature Conference
At
Purdue University
 
“Deleuze: Ethics and Politics”
 
April 9-10, 2010
Purdue University, West Lafayette
 
Deadline for Paper Submission:
January 15, 2010
 
The philosopher Michel Serres once described Gilles Deleuze as “an excellent example of the dynamic movement of free and inventive thinking.” Without [...]

If not mass consumption, then what?

Clare O’Farrell picks up on an interesting suggestion in Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics that the aim of (the) government is not to create a society of mass consumption. On the face of it this is a laughable claim, especially more so now than when Foucault originally made it 30 years ago. It also contradicts the [...]

Mayhew on historical geography

Just catching up with one of my favorite journals, Progress in Human Geography. Robert Mayhew, a geographer at Bristol, has a progress report on historical geography in the June issue. He  claims that historical geography today is suffused with Foucault’s influence.
I want to divide recent work in historical geography into three sets of interrelated inquiries, [...]

My new book

Readers of this blog may be interested in my new book, which I am very pleased to say has just been listed on Amazon. It is called simply Mapping, and is part of the Wiley-Blackwell series on Critical Geographies. This series is aimed at senior undergraduate and graduate (or post-graduate) students, and provides book-length discussions [...]

Emotional Cartography: technologies of the self

New book for psychogeographers, critical cartographers and those interested in applications of technologies of the self:
The book is the outcome of a research process which aimed to reach a deeper understanding of a project called ‘Bio Mapping’, which since 2004, has involved thousands of participants in over 16 different countries. Bio Mapping emerged as a [...]

Experimental geography

I recently purchased the book Experimental Geography, edited by Nato Thompson and Independent Curators International (ICI). It features essays by the geographer Trevor Paglen, and includes the work of several emerging “map artists” such as kanarinka, Spurse, and Lize Mogel.
(It can usefully be read in parallel with Mogel and Bhagat’s An Atlas of Radical Cartography.)
Now [...]

Bill Bunge at AAG

The following manifesto was available at last week’s AAG conference in Boston. It is signed by Bill Bunge, who was also rumored to actually be the conference (though I did not confirm that). Apropos several sessions on “subversive cartography” at the conference the map is also interesting.
Fidel Castro’s America (W. Bunge) (pdf).

An atlas of radical cartography

An atlas of radical cartography opens today in LA.

One exhibitor is Trevor Paglen, at Berkeley who has worked on the CIA extraordinary rendition. In an interview Paglen observes:
Trevor: I’ve actually tried to stay away from cartography and “mapping” as much as possible in my work. The “God’s eye” view implicit in much cartography is [...]

Three new ground-breaking books on spatial reason

Three new books on spatial reason and politics have recently appeared. Remarkably, they all come from a single publisher, the University of Chicago Press in the last year or so.

The History of Cartography Vol III, Cartography in the European Renaissance (edited by David Woodward).

Abysmal, by Gunnar Olsson.

The Sovereign Map by Christian Jacob.