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Ici encore

« Ici encore la vérité doit pourrir, et quoi de plus exaltant ? Même si je la souhaite, qu’ai-je à faire d’une vérité qui ne doive pas pourrir ? »

Albert Camus

 

Animated Lands – Q&A

https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/blog/2022/03/07/andrea-mubi-brighenti-and-mattias-karrholm-animated-lands/
How did your book come together?

Animated Lands is a book that encompasses different case studies, but they are all strongly integrated into a single research programme. We got to know each other over a decade ago, and soon started collaborating around our shared interest for understanding social-spatial phenomena. We have since been organising seminars, attending conferences, lecturing together, and paying research visits to each other to bring the project to completion. We have not started from a single theory, a paradigm, or anything of that sort, but mostly from passion, as well as from an expanding curiosity for the topics we were stumbling upon along the way. A number of themes started resonating, took speed, and at some point we felt the book was just ripe.

What’s the central claim?

Over time, we increasingly realised that, in urban and architectural studies, territory – or if you want, more simply, land – was an underrated notion, yet one with a lot of potential. So we picked up an old word, ‘territoriology,’ and tried to use it in a new sense. Seeking to retrieve and revive a science that was born under positivistic auspices, and dealt with politically charged phenomena, we thought that we also needed to warn the reader against the possible regressive uses of these notions, and how easy it is to get trapped into a certain worldview. That’s why we have striven to promote a different take on the life of territories – what they are about, what they accomplish. To counter gloomy and regressive views, we sought to foreground aspects of vitality, spontaneity and unpredictability that are ever-present in territory-making.

What is your favorite book? Why?

We do not have a favourite book in the absolute sense, but there are some books to which it is always a pleasure to return to. One is, inevitably, Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. It’s a book that’s impossible to read from start to finish, simply because it is itself unfinished, and made only of fragments. Together with all the other urban essays by Benjamin (including masterpieces such as Berlin Childhood around 1900), returning to Arcades never fails to provide fresh inspiration, intuitions and emotions. It’s more than cultural theory and urban history – to our minds it is actually sustained, fully accomplished territoriology.

What book would you recommend right now?

The list could be quite long! We are constantly looking for inspiration across the domains of literature, philosophy, the humanities, as well as social and life sciences. But for one, Bruce Chatwin’s short-prose collections What Am I Doing Here? and Anatomy of Restlessness are colourful, charming explorations into how territorial life generates its own inherent deterritorialistions. Chatwin’s forays into what he called ‘the nomadic alternative’ encompass, stories, encounters, documentations, self-analyses… ‘Why – he famously asked – do I become restless after a month in a single place, unbearable after two? (I am, I admit, a bad case.)’ Questions like this one are the sort of powerful, provocative questions we like to engage with.

What’s next?

…more territoriology! Animated Lands is, above all, an invitation. Rather than launches and presentations, we envisage to put the book directly to use in practical workshops, where participants could experiment their own way into inquiring territories. Most rewarding for us would be to learn that some other scholars and readers are similarly using our book this way, as a possible blueprint for carrying out further fresh research into the many facets of social-spatial life.

 

The New Politics of Visibility — Edited Collection

UPDATE: Now on GoogleBooks – Preview of Introduction is available : https://www.google.it/books/edition/The_New_Politics_of_Visibility/_b_3zgEACAAJ

 

We’re at proofs stage. Due out later this year.

frontispiece

Table of Contents

Introduction: Issues in the Visible
Andrea Mubi Brighenti

1. The Political Geometries of Visibility: Ranks of Seeing in the Digital Age
Tali Hatuka

2. Coded Visions: Datafied Visibilities and the Production of Political Futures
Mikkel Flyverbom and Frederik Schade

3. Urban Information Environmentalism
Malcolm McCullough

4. Mediated Visibility and Recognition: A Taxonomy
João C. Magalhães and Jun Yu

5. The Democratization of Visibility Capital: Face in the Age of Its Automated Technical Reproducibility
Nathalie Heinich

6. Rewilding the City: Urban Life and Resistance across and beyond Visibility
AbdouMaliq Simone and Morten Nielsen

7. Strategies and Tactics of Visibility: The Micro- Politics of Vulnerable Migrant Groups during the Pandemic in Brussels
Mattias De Backer

8. Reframing Marginality in Trans Politics: Towards an Ethics of Differentiation
Caterina Nirta

9. Open Science as an Engine of Anxiety: How Scientists Promote and Defend the Visibility of Their Digital Selves, While Becoming Fatalistic about Academic Careers
Martin Reinhart

 

Imitation, metamorphosis, becoming: A comparative social-theoretical sketch

Happy to join Nidesh Lawtoo’s Mimetic Turn upcoming conference. Especially looking forward to hearing from the distinguished keynotes. On my turn, I’ll be contributing some reflections about

Imitation, metamorphosis, becoming: A comparative social-theoretical sketch

Abstract. In my talk, I would like to address the relation between three notions that share significant similarities, but also exhibit crucial differences: these are Gabriel Tarde’s imitation, Elias Canetti’s transformation (Verwandlung), and Gilles Deleuze’s becoming (devenir). Tarde, whose work spanned the 1890s, is famously associated with the idea that social life is essentially imitative in nature, and although imitation does not truly exhaust his whole conception, it is amply elaborated and variously illustrated throughout his work. Both Canetti, writing in the 1950s, and Deleuze, through the 1960s and 1970s, seem to have subsequently deployed mimetic-like notions in their respective research; at the same time, both have been careful to remark how their conceptions remained distinct from the notion of imitative behaviour. My aim here is thus to compare and analyse these three notions, so as to untangle a little bit their complex, dense relations.

 

+info | https://hiw.kuleuven.be/hua/events/conferences-workshops/mimetic-turn

Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dXJ_Lj9Umg

9781032051666

Territories, Environments, Politics: Explorations in Territoriology

Our new Edited Collection now announced :

Territories, Environments, Politics
Explorations in Territoriology

Edited by Andrea Mubi Brighenti Mattias Kärrholm
forthcoming in April 2022
9781032051666

Table of Contents

 

Introduction: The stake of territories

Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm

1. The state of territory under globalization: Empire and the politics of reterritorialization

Stuart Elden

2. How the non-human turn challenges the social sciences: The case of environmental struggles at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, France

Sylvaine Bulle

3. Commercial drones and the territorialisation of the air: Towards an aero-volumetric understanding of power and territory

Francisco Klauser

4. Inhabiting together: Manure contracts and other territorial compositions between pastoralism and agriculture in Western Burkina Faso

Alexis Gonin

5. Territory glimpsed through Lache Eyes: A tale of non-Euclidean and symbolically authentic excursions in liminal space

Les Roberts

6. Affirmatively reading deterritorialisation in urban space: An Aotearoa/New Zealand perspective 

Manfredo Manfredini

7. Rendering territory (in)visible: Approaching urban struggles through a socio-territorial lens

Anke Schwarz and Monika Streule

8. The territorialisation of the grocery shopper: Eco-ethical asceticism and environmental nostalgia

Mattias Kärrholm and Anna Petersson

9. The territories of music in public space: Scenes from Warsaw and Lisbon

Cláudia Casquilho, Pedro Gonçalves, Caio Mourão, Paula Nunes and Daniel Paiva

10. Passage territories: Reconstructing the domestic spatiality of an Indonesian urban kampung

Kristanti Dewi Paramita

11. Dodging rocks and baseball bats: Stories of territory, tourism and trespassing in Detroit neighborhoods

Paul Draus and Juliette Roddy

New Territoriology Seminar – Fall 2021

Co-organised with Carlo Brentari @unitn.

21/10/2021 h.15-18
Andreas Oberprantacher (U of Innsbruck) Political Territories and Borders

26/10/2021 h.15-18
Carlo Brentari (U of Trento) Konrad Lorenz e i fondamenti dell’etologia animale

04/11/2021 h.17-20
Shelley M. Alexander (U of Calgary, CA) Coyote Territories

11/11/2021 h.15-18
Anna Marson (U IUAV di Venezia) Il territorio nella pianificazione

 

Flyer with details here