Tim Cresswell on Occupy and ‘pop-up politics’

Some thoughts here. Tim’s paper ‘Towards a Politics of Mobility’ appeared in the journal in 2010, and has received more downloads than any other paper in the journal in the last 12 months. Click here to see the full list of the most downloaded papers.

Gabriel Tarde – Monadology and Sociology

Gabriel Tarde’s Monadology and Sociology has now published by re.press as open access PDF. Thanks to ANTHEM for the link.

Back in 2008 Society and Space published “The debate between Tarde and Durkheim” (also open access). Here’s the opening note:

A momentous debate concerning the nature of sociology and its relation to other
sciences took place between Gabriel Tarde and Eèmile Durkheim at the Ecole des
Hautes Etudes Sociales in 1903. Unfortunately the only available record of the event
is a brief overview which English readers may find in Terry Clark’s 1969 edited volume
On Communication and Social Influence (University of Chicago Press, Chicago).
The present recension of the debate, therefore, is based on a script consisting of
quotations from the works of Gabriel Tarde and Emile Durkheim, arranged to form a
dialogue. All text, save that in square brackets, consists of quotations from published
works by Emile Durkheim and Gabriel Tarde. A short version of it was acted out,
in French, by Bruno Latour (Gabriel Tarde), Bruno Karsenti (Emile Durkheim), and
Simon Schaffer (The Dean), under the direction of Frédérique Touati, on 14 March
2008, at McCrum Lecture Theatre, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, UK, as part
of the conference Tarde/Durkheim: Trajectoires of the Social.

Sara Fregonese – Beyond the domino: Transnational (in)security and the 2011 protests

Back in October, Sara Fregonese wrote a commentary for this site on the Arab Spring. She recently gave a talk on the same topic. The audio is available here. Other talks from the same conference on “City/ State/ Resistance: Spaces of Protest in the Middle East and Mediterranean” are available here.

Kathryn Yusoff in Radical Philosophy

Society and Space editorial board member Kathryn Yusoff has a commentary in the new issue of Radical Philosophy on the valuation of nature. Html or pdf versions are open access. Kathryn’s paper “Excess, catastrophe, and climate change” appeared in Society and Space in 2009.

Mary E. Thomas, Multicultural Girlhood

Society and Space review editor, Mary Thomas, has a  book out. Entitled Multicultural Girlhood: Racism, Sexuality, and the Conflicted Spaces of American Education, it is published by Temple University Press, and available in both paper and cloth editions. More details can be found here, where you can also download an excerpt from the first chapter. Here’s one of the endorsements:

“Multicultural Girlhood is a totally outstanding book on several counts. It tackles head-on the problems and limits of facile discourses of multiculturalism. It refuses the deep, underlying tendency in Girlhood Studies to imagine that young women are somehow able to reach for and embody a feminist future. And it makes use of Butlerian psychoanalytic thinking to analyze a series of fascinating interviews with young, economically disadvantaged women, from different ethnic backgrounds, who are responding to the spatial dynamics of ethnic conflict in the Los Angeles school system.”
—Angela McRobbie , author of The Aftermath of Feminism

Mary’s paper ‘Pleasure and propriety: teen girls and the practice of straight space’ appeared in the journal in 2004.

New book – Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage

Colin McFarlane has an article in issue 4 of the current volume of Society and Space titled “The city as assemblage: dwelling and urban space.” The themes of this article are expanded in his new book, Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

From the publisher’s website:

Learning the City: Translocal Assemblage and Urban Politics critically examines the relationship between knowledge, learning, and urban politics, arguing both for the centrality of learning for political strategies and developing a progressive international urbanism.  

• Presents a distinct approach to conceptualising the city through the lens of urban learning
• Integrates fieldwork conducted in Mumbai’s informal settlements with debates on urban policy, political economy, and development
• Considers how knowledge and learning are conceived and created in cities
• Addresses the way knowledge travels and opportunities for learning about urbanism between North and South

‘I am an American’ project website and book

Society and Space editorial board member Cynthia (Cindy) Weber’s ‘I am an American’ project website is now launched, including the films. A book of the same title is also available. Here’s the publisher blurb:

From Samuel Huntington’s highly controversial Who Are We? to the urgent appeal of Naomi Wolf’s The End of America, Americans are increasingly reflecting on questions of democracy, multiculturalism, and national identity. Yet such debates take place largely at the level of elites, leaving out ordinary American citizens who have much to offer about the lived reality behind the phrase, ‘I am an American’.

Cynthia Weber set out on a journey across post-9/11 America in search of a deeper understanding of what it means to be an American today. The result is this brave and captivating memoir that gives a voice to ordinary citizens for whom the terrorist attacks of 2001 – and their lingering aftermath – live on in collective memory. Heartrending first-person testimonials reveal how the ongoing fear of terrorists and immigrants has betrayed America’s core values of fairness and equality, which have been further weakened by polarizing international and domestic responses. Considered together, these portraits also provide a sharp contrast to the idealized vision of Americanness frequently spun by media and politicians.

Far more than a mere remembrance book about September 11, I Am An American offers precisely the kind of ground level empathy needed to reignite a meaningful national debate about who we are and who we might become as a people and a nation.