Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

Joel Wainwright (OSU) has a new publication coming out (October 2012) called Geopiracy, Oaxaca, Militant Empiricism and Geographical Thought (Palgrave Pivot).

According to the blurb:

Why have geographers remained so quiet about the resurgence of military funding for geographical research? Joel Wainwright argues that the underlying problem stems from our epistemic commitment to empiricism. Much as some would like to deny it, many geographers are executing their own ‘expeditions’ in the spirit of Isaiah Bowman, the early twentieth-century geographer who shaped the discipline’s empiricist epistemology while helping the US to build its empire (and from whom the Expeditions take their name). Geopiracy delivers a critique of the ‘Bowman expeditions’—a project through which geographers, with funding from the US Army, are mapping the ‘human terrain’ of foreign lands. Since the beginning of the controversy surrounding the Bowman expeditions, the discipline of geography has been rocked by debates concerning research methods, the…

In Caracas, these two scenes lie side by side. The developers’ version of the city, and the people’s version: barrios built over 25-30 years, a flexible city that is constantly adapting itself to the growth of surroundings and families, plugging in to existing electricity and water supplies, and adding rooms and floors so that the mountain feels like one big house.

How important is the infrastructure in the informal city and how is it built?
People cut out parts of the mountain, and then put the land on the other side of the hole, creating a horizontal parcel which is used to make the first hut. Then later on a concrete structure is built ontop of these foundations. This unstable frame is later filled with the available block leaving steel rods poking out: a symbol for continued growth and construction.

As buildings are getting taller, the steel rods and concrete…

As previously posted, we are currently reading Thrift’s Non-Representational Theory. It has a sexy subtitle: Space | politics | affect, and having just come off of a quarter of tangling with Spinoza, thinking that everything is ‘political’ in general, and being in a program that is decidedly spatially oriented, what’s not to like? There are plenty of good things, to be sure. Some of it feels very familiar; but in many respects, he has a quietly political- political, not Political- message that is important to hear out. (We discussed in our last meeting that the chapters thus far seem to lack a critical, political stance, but perhaps this emerges in the third installment…) We are only a third of the way through the book, so I’m going focus on a particular chapter. Given that the chapters were written at different points as journal articles, and subsequently compiled together…