Society and space

The first few weeks of 2015 have been busy on the Society & Space open site, and we look forward to bringing you much more content for the rest of the year. Here though, we take a quick look back to highlight our ten most visited pages of 2014.

Thanks to all of our contributors, and to those who have supported our efforts by reading and sharing this engaging open access work.

10. Review of David Harvey’s Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
Ståle Holgersen reviews Harvey’s latest book-length diagnosis of the crises of capitalism, and concludes that after reading this book, “one will definitely find it easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the world. In this sense, Harvey provides a great platform from where to start to make revolutionary demands.”

9. Interview with Adrian Johnston on transcendental materialism
Originally posted in 2013, Peter Gratton interviews Johnston, whom he credits with bringing “Lacanianism into the 21st century when many wrongly claimed it dead long before the end of the last.” Among other topics, they discuss his trilogy Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism.

8. Interview with Lauren Berlant
Another interview from a past year, this posting continued to pull readers in during 2014. Conducted by David Seitz, the discussion covered contemporary queer and austerity politics, and the political implications of Cruel Optimism. We are very pleased that Berlant will be delivering the Society and Space lecture at the Association of American Geographers meeting in April.

7. Interview with Łukasz Stanek about Henri Lefebvre, ‘Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment’ and the Use Value of Theory
Stuart Elden talks with Stanek about his longstanding work on Lefebvre, including his efforts to edit and publish the previously unknown manuscript Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment.

6. Laleh Khalili – A Habit of Destruction
This commentary analyzes the attacks on Gaza during summer 2015 not as part of an episodic cycle of violence, but as part of a ‘habit of destruction’ embedded in the ideology and practice of Israeli settler-colonialism. See also the related commentaries by Nadim Khoury and Rupal Oza.

5. Daniel P S Goh – The Little India Riot and the Spatiality of Migrant Labor in Singapore
The 2013 accidental death of a construction worker in Singapore’s Little India neighbourhood led to riots by hundreds of South Asian migrant workers in the city-state. In this commentary, Goh critically discusses the exploitative spatial politics that led to the riots, and reflects on possibilities for social justice in the Asian global city.

4. Interview with Dean Spade
Natalie Oswin talked with Dean Spade about his book Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law, as well as about his various subsequent activist and scholarly pursuits.

3. Review of Judith Butler’s Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism
Posted in the midst of the attacks on Gaza in summer 2014, Lisa Bhungalia situates Butler’s efforts in the book to develop a Jewish ethics of ‘cohabitation’ as an important addition to critical efforts to unmask the political project of devaluing Palestinian lives.

2. Craig Dalton and Jim Thatcher – What does a critical data studies look like, and why do we care? Seven points for a critical approach to ‘big data’
In this commentary, Dalton and Thatcher build on calls from critical geographers to develop a critical data studies by presenting seven points they see as necessary drivers of any critique of new regimes of data.

1. Interview with Elizabeth Povinelli
This wide-ranging discussion between Mat Coleman, Kathryn Yusoff and Povinelli covers her recent and future work on biopolitics, the Anthropocene and neoliberalism, with a particular focus on her 2011 book Economies of Abandonment.