Spaces of Politics

1
Spaces of Politics

• Hilary term 2009

2

• Why teach a course on political geography now?
• What is distinctive about this course?

3
Political Geography

• 1900s Halford Mackinder Political Geography
  as Geopolitics
• 20th century political geography as the study
  of the politics of regions
• 2000s Geography as micropolitics and the
  politics of spaces which are no longer regional

4
Political background

• Politicisation of everyday life situationism
  and feminism from 1960s onwards
• Post-colonial politics from 1950s
  onwards..(Algeria, Latin America)
• Environmental politics from 1970s onwards..
  (organics)
• Politics of globalisation and anti-globalisation
  from 1990s (fairtrade, corporate social
  responsibility)
• The Politics of security and technology from
  1980s (war on terror, Gaza)
• Politics of science and technology from 1970s
• Direct action.. (anti-road protests, anti-airport
  protests)
• .create new political spaces which are not
  defined by national boundaries or regions

5
What we are not concerned withparty and
governmental politics..

• centred in particular locations
• dominated by well-known political parties
• concerned with the control of political power
• about interests and ideologies..
• institutions of representative democracy..
• left vs right (during 20th century)

6
political geography of elections...
7
territorial geographies..
8

• Nonetheless there is a regional focus to this
  course
• On the UK
• On the Caucasus, the Middle East, North Africa
• Heathrow airport and Gaza - the importance of
  thinking theory through cases

9
(No Transcript)
10
Intellectual Background

• 1) New ways of thinking about space within Human
  Geography more broadly
• lived space
• Imagined space
• embodied space
• Technological space
• For an intro see P Hubbard et al (eds) Key
  Thinkers on Space and Place

11

• 2) Science and Technology Studies
• Critical importance of studying how knowledge is
  producedand its links to politics
• e.g. claim that Heathrow airport can be
  environmentally sustainable

12

• 3) Poststructuralist theory 1970s-
• Michel Foucault e.g. Discipline and Punish
  (1975)
• Gilles Deleuze e.g. Thousand Plateaus (1987)
• Bruno Latour Making things Public (2005)

13

• 3) Social Anthropology
• Critique of the idea of the primitive society and
  move towards study of euro-american societies
• Interrogation of the boundaries between the
  social and the material, the natural and the
  cultural

14

• David Harvey vs Nigel Thrift and Ash Amin
• Different understandings of politics and
  political geography
• Nigel Thrift, OUCE Departmental Seminar, 10th
  March

15
Class and identity politics the worker
16
(No Transcript)
17
Identity or Multiplicity?

• "If you were to zero in on the crowds of people
  making their way down the main thoroughfares of
  London or Washington or Paris or a host of other
  places, at one scale of resolution you would see
  that the crowds gave out the appearance of unity
  but then at smaller scales of resolution you
  would see that they were made up of all kinds
  groups of protestors, each with their own reasons
  for being there. Sometimes these reasons may have
  come from a grand analysis of American
  imperialism, but more often they the result of a
  host of different motivations including violated
  religious ideals or even a just a vague sense of
  something not quite right"
• Amin and Thrift, What's Left? Just the Future,
  Antipode, 2005, p.220