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 […]

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 […]

Why are there no geography blogs?

This is a Foucault blog. I am a geographer by training. But it is not a geography blog. Why are there no geography blogs? There are a lot of blogs; some 60 million perhaps.

Foucaultblog on hiatus?

Foucaultblog was founded in 2007 as a kind of indirect adjunct to my and Stuart Elden’s co-edited book on Foucault and geography. I’ve been the sole owner and contributor to it during that time, passing on Foucault news (I set up a Google Alert: whenever anybody mentioned “Foucault” on the web I would check out what they said and link to […]

Wikileaks and secret intelligence on Afghanistan

The massive release by Wikileaks of 90,000 pages of classified material on the war in Afghanistan has once again raised the question not only of how that war is prosecuted–and the details fill in a picture that will need an equally massive effort of discussion–but also of the way in which governments routinely classify and […]

“So Yahoo hired a professional ontologist…”

This article by Clay Shirky is a good encapsulation of the computer/GIScientist understanding of ontology that is rapidly entering geography and especially mapping and GIS: It is a rich irony that the word “ontology”, which has to do with making clear and explicit statements about entities in a particular domain, has so many conflicting definitions. […]

Two new books from Blackwell

First is Foucault and Philosophy which is already out, edited by Chris Falzon and Timothy O’Leary (2010). Second is a Blackwell “Companion” to Foucault, which Falzon will edit with O’Leary and Jana Sawicki. The Companion books tend to be hefty and significant books (I’m familiar with the ones for Heidegger and Political Geography) and it’s […]

Monsters, Pliny and Races

Today has been the first day back from AAG and a nice sunny day here in Atlanta, so naturally I took the opportunity to read through the 19th century translation of Pliny that I had received through ILL shortly before I left town. Pliny’s Natural History (trans. John Bostock and H.T. Riley, 1855, and H. […]

The Ister DVD released

The 2004 documentary The Ister is released on DVD this week. Daniel Birmbaum: The film traces the Danube’s full course, from the Black Sea all the way to its source in southern Germany. Part rhapsodic journey replete with moments of great beauty, part tedious educational program rife with digressions on politics and history, it is […]

New book: Stuart Elden Terror and Territory

Stuart has a new book out: Terror and Territory, The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty. From the publisher: A timely analysis of the contemporary state of territory Today’s global politics demands a new look at the concept of territory. From so-called deterritorialized terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda to U.S.-led overthrows of existing regimes in the Middle […]