Round Table Conference Geographies explores a major international conference in 1930s London whic... more Round Table Conference Geographies explores a major international conference in 1930s London which determined India's constitutional future in the British Empire. Pre-dating the decolonising conferences of the 1950s-1960s, the Round Table Conference laid the blueprint for India's future federal constitution. Despite this the conference is unanimously read as a failure, for not having comprehensively reconciled the competing demands of liberal and Indian National Congress politicians, of Hindus and Muslims, and of British versus Princely India. This book argues that the conference's three sessions were vital sites of Indian and imperial politics that demand serious attention. It explores the spatial politics of the conference in terms of its imaginary geographies, infrastructures, host city and how the conference was contested and represented. The book concludes by asking who gained through representing the conference as a failure and explores it, instead, as a teeming political, social and material space.
This article explores a relatively rare archival account of female subjectivity, experience, mobi... more This article explores a relatively rare archival account of female subjectivity, experience, mobility, and voice within a carceral institution in late-colonial Delhi. The capital’s “Rescue Home” was created to house women and girls removed from the city’s brothels under new legislation. While no brothels were closed in the first year of the laws functioning, the home accepted 18 women and girls and detailed their circumstances and experiences in its 1940 report. It was able to forcibly detain girls and was run upon disciplinary and racial lines, like other colonial institutions. But its inhabitants were not subject to detailed surveillance. Rather, their lives were ones usually beyond recording or whose stories were actively silenced. The 1940 Rescue Home report provides us with rich details of the commonplace, quotidian struggles which women and girls faced in colonial Delhi. The 18 case geographies of the Home’s inhabitants help us understand how sexuality and motherhood, education and character, and race all shaped routes into the home and destinations when people left. The accounts tell us of a carceral governmentality with influence beyond the disciplinary institution’s walls, but also of female subjects who resisted, spoke back, and absconded. This relationship between forced immobility and willed mobility suggests that brothels and rescue homes were not just connected, through the intended transfer of inhabitants, but can be directly compared as carceral domesticities.
Exploring how modern internationalism emerged as a negotiated process through international confe... more Exploring how modern internationalism emerged as a negotiated process through international conferences, this edited collection studies the spaces and networks through which states, civil society institutions and anti-colonial political networks used these events to realise their visions of the international.
Taking an interdisciplinary approach, contributors explore the spatial paradox of two fundamental features of modern internationalism. First, internationalism demanded the overcoming of space, transcending the nation-state in search of the shared interests of humankind. Second, internationalism was geographically contingent on the places in which people came together to conceive and enact their internationalist ideas. From Paris 1919 to Bandung 1955 and beyond, this book explores international conferences as the sites in which different forms of internationalism assumed material and social form. While international 'permanent institutions' such as the League of Nations, UN and Institute of Pacific Relations constantly negotiated national and imperial politics, lesser-resourced political networks also used international conferences to forward their more radical demands.
Taken together these conferences radically expand our conception of where and how modern internationalism emerged, and make the case for focusing on internationalism in a contemporary moment when its merits are being called into question.
Subaltern Geographies is the first book-length discussion addressing the relationship between the... more Subaltern Geographies is the first book-length discussion addressing the relationship between the historical innovations of subaltern studies and the critical intellectual practices and methodologies of cultural, urban, historical, and political geography. This edited volume explores this relationship by attempting to think critically about space and spatial categorizations.
Editors Tariq Jazeel and Stephen Legg ask, What methodological-philosophical potential does a rigorously geographical engagement with the concept of subalternity pose for geographical thought, whether in historical or contemporary contexts? And what types of craft are necessary for us to seek out subaltern perspectives both from the past and in the present? In so doing, Subaltern Geographies engages with the implications for and impact on disciplinary geographical thought of subaltern studies scholarship, as well as the potential for such thought. In the process, it probes new spatial ideas and forms of learning in an attempt to bypass the spatial categorizations of methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism.
This volume analyses the ways in which the works of one of the most influential philosophers of t... more This volume analyses the ways in which the works of one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Michel Foucault, have been received and re-worked by scholars of South Asia. South Asian Governmentalities surveys the past, present, and future lives of the mutually constitutive disciplinary fields of governmentality - a concept introduced by Foucault himself - and South Asian studies. It aims to chart the intersection of post-structuralism and postcolonialism that has seen the latter Foucault being used to ask new questions in and of South Asia, and the experiences of post-colonies used to tease and test the utility of European philosophy beyond Europe. But it also seeks to contribute to the rich body of work on South Asian governmentalities through a critical engagement with the lecture series delivered by Foucault at the Collège de France from 1971 until his death in 1984, which have now become available in English.
Officially confined to red-light districts, brothels in British India were tolerated until the 19... more Officially confined to red-light districts, brothels in British India were tolerated until the 1920s. Yet, by this time, prostitution reform campaigns led by Indian, imperial, and international bodies were combining the social scientific insights of sexology and hygiene with the moral condemnations of sexual slavery and human trafficking. These reformers identified the brothel as exacerbating rather than containing "corrupting prostitutes" and the threat of venereal diseases, and therefore encouraged the suppression of brothels rather than their urban segregation. In this book, Stephen Legg tracks the complex spatial politics surrounding brothels in the interwar period at multiple scales, including the local, regional, national, imperial, and global. Campaigns and state policies against brothels did not just operate at different scales but made scales themselves, forging new urban, provincial, colonial, and international formations. In so doing, they also remade the boundary between the state and the social, through which the prostitute was, Legg concludes, "civilly abandoned."
Examines the residential, policed, and infrastructural landscapes of New and Old Delhi under Brit... more Examines the residential, policed, and infrastructural landscapes of New and Old Delhi under British Rule. The first book of its kind to present a comparative history of New and Old Delhi. It:
Draws on the governmentality theories and methodologies presented in Michel Foucault's lecture courses
Looks at problems of social and racial segregation, the policing of the cities, and biopolitical needs in urban settings
Undertakes a critique of colonial governmentality on the basis of the lived spaces of everyday life
The writings of Carl Schmitt are now indissociable from both an historical period and a contempor... more The writings of Carl Schmitt are now indissociable from both an historical period and a contemporary moment. He will forever be remembered for his association with the National Socialists of 1930s Germany, and as the figure whose writings on sovereignty, politics, and the law provided justification for authoritarian, decisional states. Yet at the same time, the post-September 11th 2001 world is one in which a wide range of scholars have increasingly turned to Schmitt to understand a world of "with us or against us" Manichaeism, spaces of exception which seem to be placed outside the law by legal mechanisms themselves, and the contestation of a uni-polar, post-1989 world. This attention marks out Schmitt as one of the foremost emerging theorists in critical theory and assures his work a large and growing audience.
This work brings together geographers, and Schmitt experts who are attuned to the spatial dimensions of his work, to discuss his 1950 work The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. Explaining the growing audience for Schmitt’s work, a broad range of contributors also examine the Nomos in relation to broader debates about enmity and war, the production of space, the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, and the recuperability of such an intellect tainted by its anti-Semitism and links to the Nazi party.
This work will be of great interest to researchers in political theory, socio-legal studies, geopolitics and critical IR theory
This paper argues that more explicitly geographical methodologies are required to study twentieth... more This paper argues that more explicitly geographical methodologies are required to study twentiethcentury internationalism, which invite different conversations between international historians and historical geographers. We show how the form and location of international archival records is itself evidence of multiple, interlocking modes of internationalism which unevenly intersected with national, imperial, and pan-national pasts. This is explored through three case studies: the archive of the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC), located in the UNESCO headquarters in Paris; the Maharaja Ganga Singh Archive in the Indian city of Bikaner; and the papers of Lydia Brown in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a translator and interpreter at the Second Pan-African Congress. We argue that bringing the archives of large international organisations into dialogue with a wider overlooked field of international archival evidence offers new perspectives on what internationalism was, where it happened, and to whom it mattered.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2025
This special collection consists of short papers written by nine plenary speakers at the 2024 Ann... more This special collection consists of short papers written by nine plenary speakers at the 2024 Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers plus a paper by the Society’s Cartographic Collections Manager. In this introduction I explain why I chose mapping as the conference Chair’s theme. I give a sense of how the relationship between geography and mapping has been addressed through previous conference addresses and themes. I then explore three types of cartographic genealogies. The first shows how histories of cartography traditionally took the form of family trees. The second explores disjunctures between previous phases of cartography and brings us to current definitions of mapping. The third genealogy is that of previously subjugated forms of mapping knowledge and practice which are now defining features of the field (critical quantitative; empire, race and Indigenous; counter-; representational and more-than-representational).
In this 'Historical Geography at Large' review I recount my participation in an August 2023 summe... more In this 'Historical Geography at Large' review I recount my participation in an August 2023 summer school led by Professor Alan Lester at the University of Sussex, entitled 'How to talk about British colonialism in the middle of a culture war'. The workshop encouraged the participation of nonacademics who desired greater knowledge of the British empire and its legacies, to help them negotiate contemporary debates over race, slavery, colonialism, and national identity. I recount the two days of lectures and debate led by Lester, as well as a day-long walking tour of London, where we discussed contentious statues and the even more contentious interior of the government's Commonwealth, Foreign and Development Office building. These generative encounters present an activist and participatory form of historical geography at large.
This article explores globalisation’s historical geographies,
using the example of visiting India... more This article explores globalisation’s historical geographies, using the example of visiting Indians in 1930s London to decolonise our presumptions about who helped craft the globe
Recent years have seen questions of race and the legacies of racial violence taken up by social m... more Recent years have seen questions of race and the legacies of racial violence taken up by social movements and social media campaigns across the globe. The representation of colonialism and colonisers is being debated in comparable but very different ways in what were colonial "peripheries" and what may still be imperial "cores", and in parts of both larger and smaller empires. The Danish empire was one of Europe's smaller imperial networks, but this thesis makes clear that it was no less violent, and that its histories and geographies are no less deserving of critical scrutiny than those of the British, French, Portuguese or Spanish empires. 1 The means of applying that scrutiny vary by discipline, the means vary also by theoretical basis, from contemporary interests in the coloniality of the Anthropocene or of morethan-human relations, to older liberal or Marxist critiques of empire. Sitting between, and in some ways bridging, the two is a substantial body of work that has used French philosopher Michel Foucault to think about colonialism as a discourse. This endeavour is as old as, and at the heart of, postcolonial studies. Edward Said famously, if ultimately unsuccessfully, hybridised the discourse analysis of Foucault with the cultural hegemony approach of Antonio Gramsci in his study of western conceptions of its colonial east, Orientalism. 2 Said, however, relied solely on Foucault's "archaeological" analysis of discourse as a largely representational affair. In his "genealogical" work....
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2008
Ordinary urban spaces: between postcolonialism and development Introduction This theme issue on t... more Ordinary urban spaces: between postcolonialism and development Introduction This theme issue on the``Ordinary spaces of modernity'' arose from a conference event that sought to bring together scholars interested in how the contingencies and ambivalences of urban space mattered for how different actors engaged in`improving' or developing others'. Our rationale for this event was motivated in part by a double notion of parochialism. On the one hand, we sought to emphasise the importance of the parochial, of the tensions and ambivalences of municipal officials, and of the role of everyday materialities of construction or infrastructure, for the nature and contestation of improvement and development. On the other hand, we sought to do this by disrupting what has come to be criticised as a certain parochialism in urban studies, and in particular the tendency to make generalisations of`non-Western' urban forms, or to conceptually separate the`Western city' from the`Third World city' (cf Bishop et al, 2003; King, 2004; McFarlane, 2006a; Robinson, 2006). We sought papers that illustrated the importance of connections and comparisons temporally, between colonialism and development, and spatially, between`Western' and`Southern' urbanism. We hope that, in tracing a range of contextual tensions and translations, the collection charts a diversity of temporal and spatial continuities and discontinuities. Legg, Perera, and Harris focus on colonial contexts in India, Sri Lanka, and a variety of African contexts, and Gandy, McFarlane, and Robinson are concerned with contemporary urban spaces in India and South Africa. At a general level, the collection illustrates the possibilities of comparative urban research. In particular, it demonstrates how attentiveness to the connections between ordinary urban spaces across time and space demands that postcolonial and development scholarshipöso often divergent in their objects and forms of analysis (
The 90th anniversary of the Round Table Conference is an opportunity to revisit the landmark even... more The 90th anniversary of the Round Table Conference is an opportunity to revisit the landmark event that delivered provincial autonomy, a plan for legislative assemblies and a blueprint for the framework of the Constitution. Most of all, it gave us the first glimpse of the various strands that would come together to form India
This paper recounts the Hate Crime Commission carried out in 2014 by
Nottingham Citizens, a chari... more This paper recounts the Hate Crime Commission carried out in 2014 by Nottingham Citizens, a charity and community organiser. It provides an insider account of a piece of community led and co-produced research into the experiences of and under-reporting of hate crime in the city, and the relative success of the commission in forcing policy changes and inspiring future leaders and campaigns. It details a responsive methodology that evolved over the yearlong campaign, which collated over 1000 survey responses. It explores the spaces in which mobilisation took place (religious, educational, civic) and the pressure points (private and public) that were used to create change. It concludes by weighing up the successes and critiques of the commission, especially regarding the successful campaign to have misogyny recognised as a hate crime, and relates this work to ongoing attempts to conceptualise non-radical geographies of activism and community organising.
This paper argues that more explicitly geographical methodologies are required to study twentieth... more This paper argues that more explicitly geographical methodologies are required to study twentieth-century internationalism, which invite different conversations between international historians and historical geographers. We show how the form and location of international archival records is itself evidence of multiple, interlocking modes of internationalism which unevenly intersected with national, imperial, and pan-national pasts. This is explored through three case studies: the archive of the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC), located in the UNESCO headquarters in Paris; the Maharaja Ganga Singh Archive in the Indian city of Bikaner; and the papers of Lydia Brown in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a translator and interpreter at the Second Pan-African Congress. We argue that bringing the archives of large international organisations into dialogue with a wider overlooked field of international archival evidence offers new perspectives on what internationalism was, where it happened, and to whom it mattered.
Epidemiological moments are thus invaluable for understanding the extreme times and spaces of the colonial state. If we study these moments alone, however, we neglect a much broader history of the ways in which “social distancing” was hardwired into the politics and geography of the colonial state (not to mention the caste structures of Indian society which the state helped harden). In my research on twentieth-century colonial Delhi I have explored spaces that bridged exceptional moments of epidemiological, social, cultural and political risk with more everyday forms of exclusion. Drawing upon this work, here I give two examples of targeted populations for whom the experience of being distanced was neither optional nor new. These examples relay alternative genealogies of social distancing.
Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 2020
The India Round Table Conference (London, 1930-32) is presented here as a site of imperial intern... more The India Round Table Conference (London, 1930-32) is presented here as a site of imperial internationalism, at which radical anti-colonialism was subsumed within the liberal technology of the conference. First, the influence of the League of Nations on the conference is examined, through exploring its role as model, precedent, potential arbiter and training ground. Second the paper explores the influence of other (Pan-Islamic, labour and spiritual) forms of internationalism at the London conference. New theorisations of the international are brought to bear on significant new archival and prosopographical material, making an original contribution through revisiting a founding moment in Indian political history.
Round Table Conference Geographies explores a major international conference in 1930s London whic... more Round Table Conference Geographies explores a major international conference in 1930s London which determined India's constitutional future in the British Empire. Pre-dating the decolonising conferences of the 1950s-1960s, the Round Table Conference laid the blueprint for India's future federal constitution. Despite this the conference is unanimously read as a failure, for not having comprehensively reconciled the competing demands of liberal and Indian National Congress politicians, of Hindus and Muslims, and of British versus Princely India. This book argues that the conference's three sessions were vital sites of Indian and imperial politics that demand serious attention. It explores the spatial politics of the conference in terms of its imaginary geographies, infrastructures, host city and how the conference was contested and represented. The book concludes by asking who gained through representing the conference as a failure and explores it, instead, as a teeming political, social and material space.
This article explores a relatively rare archival account of female subjectivity, experience, mobi... more This article explores a relatively rare archival account of female subjectivity, experience, mobility, and voice within a carceral institution in late-colonial Delhi. The capital’s “Rescue Home” was created to house women and girls removed from the city’s brothels under new legislation. While no brothels were closed in the first year of the laws functioning, the home accepted 18 women and girls and detailed their circumstances and experiences in its 1940 report. It was able to forcibly detain girls and was run upon disciplinary and racial lines, like other colonial institutions. But its inhabitants were not subject to detailed surveillance. Rather, their lives were ones usually beyond recording or whose stories were actively silenced. The 1940 Rescue Home report provides us with rich details of the commonplace, quotidian struggles which women and girls faced in colonial Delhi. The 18 case geographies of the Home’s inhabitants help us understand how sexuality and motherhood, education and character, and race all shaped routes into the home and destinations when people left. The accounts tell us of a carceral governmentality with influence beyond the disciplinary institution’s walls, but also of female subjects who resisted, spoke back, and absconded. This relationship between forced immobility and willed mobility suggests that brothels and rescue homes were not just connected, through the intended transfer of inhabitants, but can be directly compared as carceral domesticities.
Exploring how modern internationalism emerged as a negotiated process through international confe... more Exploring how modern internationalism emerged as a negotiated process through international conferences, this edited collection studies the spaces and networks through which states, civil society institutions and anti-colonial political networks used these events to realise their visions of the international.
Taking an interdisciplinary approach, contributors explore the spatial paradox of two fundamental features of modern internationalism. First, internationalism demanded the overcoming of space, transcending the nation-state in search of the shared interests of humankind. Second, internationalism was geographically contingent on the places in which people came together to conceive and enact their internationalist ideas. From Paris 1919 to Bandung 1955 and beyond, this book explores international conferences as the sites in which different forms of internationalism assumed material and social form. While international 'permanent institutions' such as the League of Nations, UN and Institute of Pacific Relations constantly negotiated national and imperial politics, lesser-resourced political networks also used international conferences to forward their more radical demands.
Taken together these conferences radically expand our conception of where and how modern internationalism emerged, and make the case for focusing on internationalism in a contemporary moment when its merits are being called into question.
Subaltern Geographies is the first book-length discussion addressing the relationship between the... more Subaltern Geographies is the first book-length discussion addressing the relationship between the historical innovations of subaltern studies and the critical intellectual practices and methodologies of cultural, urban, historical, and political geography. This edited volume explores this relationship by attempting to think critically about space and spatial categorizations.
Editors Tariq Jazeel and Stephen Legg ask, What methodological-philosophical potential does a rigorously geographical engagement with the concept of subalternity pose for geographical thought, whether in historical or contemporary contexts? And what types of craft are necessary for us to seek out subaltern perspectives both from the past and in the present? In so doing, Subaltern Geographies engages with the implications for and impact on disciplinary geographical thought of subaltern studies scholarship, as well as the potential for such thought. In the process, it probes new spatial ideas and forms of learning in an attempt to bypass the spatial categorizations of methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism.
This volume analyses the ways in which the works of one of the most influential philosophers of t... more This volume analyses the ways in which the works of one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Michel Foucault, have been received and re-worked by scholars of South Asia. South Asian Governmentalities surveys the past, present, and future lives of the mutually constitutive disciplinary fields of governmentality - a concept introduced by Foucault himself - and South Asian studies. It aims to chart the intersection of post-structuralism and postcolonialism that has seen the latter Foucault being used to ask new questions in and of South Asia, and the experiences of post-colonies used to tease and test the utility of European philosophy beyond Europe. But it also seeks to contribute to the rich body of work on South Asian governmentalities through a critical engagement with the lecture series delivered by Foucault at the Collège de France from 1971 until his death in 1984, which have now become available in English.
Officially confined to red-light districts, brothels in British India were tolerated until the 19... more Officially confined to red-light districts, brothels in British India were tolerated until the 1920s. Yet, by this time, prostitution reform campaigns led by Indian, imperial, and international bodies were combining the social scientific insights of sexology and hygiene with the moral condemnations of sexual slavery and human trafficking. These reformers identified the brothel as exacerbating rather than containing "corrupting prostitutes" and the threat of venereal diseases, and therefore encouraged the suppression of brothels rather than their urban segregation. In this book, Stephen Legg tracks the complex spatial politics surrounding brothels in the interwar period at multiple scales, including the local, regional, national, imperial, and global. Campaigns and state policies against brothels did not just operate at different scales but made scales themselves, forging new urban, provincial, colonial, and international formations. In so doing, they also remade the boundary between the state and the social, through which the prostitute was, Legg concludes, "civilly abandoned."
Examines the residential, policed, and infrastructural landscapes of New and Old Delhi under Brit... more Examines the residential, policed, and infrastructural landscapes of New and Old Delhi under British Rule. The first book of its kind to present a comparative history of New and Old Delhi. It:
Draws on the governmentality theories and methodologies presented in Michel Foucault's lecture courses
Looks at problems of social and racial segregation, the policing of the cities, and biopolitical needs in urban settings
Undertakes a critique of colonial governmentality on the basis of the lived spaces of everyday life
The writings of Carl Schmitt are now indissociable from both an historical period and a contempor... more The writings of Carl Schmitt are now indissociable from both an historical period and a contemporary moment. He will forever be remembered for his association with the National Socialists of 1930s Germany, and as the figure whose writings on sovereignty, politics, and the law provided justification for authoritarian, decisional states. Yet at the same time, the post-September 11th 2001 world is one in which a wide range of scholars have increasingly turned to Schmitt to understand a world of "with us or against us" Manichaeism, spaces of exception which seem to be placed outside the law by legal mechanisms themselves, and the contestation of a uni-polar, post-1989 world. This attention marks out Schmitt as one of the foremost emerging theorists in critical theory and assures his work a large and growing audience.
This work brings together geographers, and Schmitt experts who are attuned to the spatial dimensions of his work, to discuss his 1950 work The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. Explaining the growing audience for Schmitt’s work, a broad range of contributors also examine the Nomos in relation to broader debates about enmity and war, the production of space, the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, and the recuperability of such an intellect tainted by its anti-Semitism and links to the Nazi party.
This work will be of great interest to researchers in political theory, socio-legal studies, geopolitics and critical IR theory
This paper argues that more explicitly geographical methodologies are required to study twentieth... more This paper argues that more explicitly geographical methodologies are required to study twentiethcentury internationalism, which invite different conversations between international historians and historical geographers. We show how the form and location of international archival records is itself evidence of multiple, interlocking modes of internationalism which unevenly intersected with national, imperial, and pan-national pasts. This is explored through three case studies: the archive of the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC), located in the UNESCO headquarters in Paris; the Maharaja Ganga Singh Archive in the Indian city of Bikaner; and the papers of Lydia Brown in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a translator and interpreter at the Second Pan-African Congress. We argue that bringing the archives of large international organisations into dialogue with a wider overlooked field of international archival evidence offers new perspectives on what internationalism was, where it happened, and to whom it mattered.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2025
This special collection consists of short papers written by nine plenary speakers at the 2024 Ann... more This special collection consists of short papers written by nine plenary speakers at the 2024 Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers plus a paper by the Society’s Cartographic Collections Manager. In this introduction I explain why I chose mapping as the conference Chair’s theme. I give a sense of how the relationship between geography and mapping has been addressed through previous conference addresses and themes. I then explore three types of cartographic genealogies. The first shows how histories of cartography traditionally took the form of family trees. The second explores disjunctures between previous phases of cartography and brings us to current definitions of mapping. The third genealogy is that of previously subjugated forms of mapping knowledge and practice which are now defining features of the field (critical quantitative; empire, race and Indigenous; counter-; representational and more-than-representational).
In this 'Historical Geography at Large' review I recount my participation in an August 2023 summe... more In this 'Historical Geography at Large' review I recount my participation in an August 2023 summer school led by Professor Alan Lester at the University of Sussex, entitled 'How to talk about British colonialism in the middle of a culture war'. The workshop encouraged the participation of nonacademics who desired greater knowledge of the British empire and its legacies, to help them negotiate contemporary debates over race, slavery, colonialism, and national identity. I recount the two days of lectures and debate led by Lester, as well as a day-long walking tour of London, where we discussed contentious statues and the even more contentious interior of the government's Commonwealth, Foreign and Development Office building. These generative encounters present an activist and participatory form of historical geography at large.
This article explores globalisation’s historical geographies,
using the example of visiting India... more This article explores globalisation’s historical geographies, using the example of visiting Indians in 1930s London to decolonise our presumptions about who helped craft the globe
Recent years have seen questions of race and the legacies of racial violence taken up by social m... more Recent years have seen questions of race and the legacies of racial violence taken up by social movements and social media campaigns across the globe. The representation of colonialism and colonisers is being debated in comparable but very different ways in what were colonial "peripheries" and what may still be imperial "cores", and in parts of both larger and smaller empires. The Danish empire was one of Europe's smaller imperial networks, but this thesis makes clear that it was no less violent, and that its histories and geographies are no less deserving of critical scrutiny than those of the British, French, Portuguese or Spanish empires. 1 The means of applying that scrutiny vary by discipline, the means vary also by theoretical basis, from contemporary interests in the coloniality of the Anthropocene or of morethan-human relations, to older liberal or Marxist critiques of empire. Sitting between, and in some ways bridging, the two is a substantial body of work that has used French philosopher Michel Foucault to think about colonialism as a discourse. This endeavour is as old as, and at the heart of, postcolonial studies. Edward Said famously, if ultimately unsuccessfully, hybridised the discourse analysis of Foucault with the cultural hegemony approach of Antonio Gramsci in his study of western conceptions of its colonial east, Orientalism. 2 Said, however, relied solely on Foucault's "archaeological" analysis of discourse as a largely representational affair. In his "genealogical" work....
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2008
Ordinary urban spaces: between postcolonialism and development Introduction This theme issue on t... more Ordinary urban spaces: between postcolonialism and development Introduction This theme issue on the``Ordinary spaces of modernity'' arose from a conference event that sought to bring together scholars interested in how the contingencies and ambivalences of urban space mattered for how different actors engaged in`improving' or developing others'. Our rationale for this event was motivated in part by a double notion of parochialism. On the one hand, we sought to emphasise the importance of the parochial, of the tensions and ambivalences of municipal officials, and of the role of everyday materialities of construction or infrastructure, for the nature and contestation of improvement and development. On the other hand, we sought to do this by disrupting what has come to be criticised as a certain parochialism in urban studies, and in particular the tendency to make generalisations of`non-Western' urban forms, or to conceptually separate the`Western city' from the`Third World city' (cf Bishop et al, 2003; King, 2004; McFarlane, 2006a; Robinson, 2006). We sought papers that illustrated the importance of connections and comparisons temporally, between colonialism and development, and spatially, between`Western' and`Southern' urbanism. We hope that, in tracing a range of contextual tensions and translations, the collection charts a diversity of temporal and spatial continuities and discontinuities. Legg, Perera, and Harris focus on colonial contexts in India, Sri Lanka, and a variety of African contexts, and Gandy, McFarlane, and Robinson are concerned with contemporary urban spaces in India and South Africa. At a general level, the collection illustrates the possibilities of comparative urban research. In particular, it demonstrates how attentiveness to the connections between ordinary urban spaces across time and space demands that postcolonial and development scholarshipöso often divergent in their objects and forms of analysis (
The 90th anniversary of the Round Table Conference is an opportunity to revisit the landmark even... more The 90th anniversary of the Round Table Conference is an opportunity to revisit the landmark event that delivered provincial autonomy, a plan for legislative assemblies and a blueprint for the framework of the Constitution. Most of all, it gave us the first glimpse of the various strands that would come together to form India
This paper recounts the Hate Crime Commission carried out in 2014 by
Nottingham Citizens, a chari... more This paper recounts the Hate Crime Commission carried out in 2014 by Nottingham Citizens, a charity and community organiser. It provides an insider account of a piece of community led and co-produced research into the experiences of and under-reporting of hate crime in the city, and the relative success of the commission in forcing policy changes and inspiring future leaders and campaigns. It details a responsive methodology that evolved over the yearlong campaign, which collated over 1000 survey responses. It explores the spaces in which mobilisation took place (religious, educational, civic) and the pressure points (private and public) that were used to create change. It concludes by weighing up the successes and critiques of the commission, especially regarding the successful campaign to have misogyny recognised as a hate crime, and relates this work to ongoing attempts to conceptualise non-radical geographies of activism and community organising.
This paper argues that more explicitly geographical methodologies are required to study twentieth... more This paper argues that more explicitly geographical methodologies are required to study twentieth-century internationalism, which invite different conversations between international historians and historical geographers. We show how the form and location of international archival records is itself evidence of multiple, interlocking modes of internationalism which unevenly intersected with national, imperial, and pan-national pasts. This is explored through three case studies: the archive of the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC), located in the UNESCO headquarters in Paris; the Maharaja Ganga Singh Archive in the Indian city of Bikaner; and the papers of Lydia Brown in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a translator and interpreter at the Second Pan-African Congress. We argue that bringing the archives of large international organisations into dialogue with a wider overlooked field of international archival evidence offers new perspectives on what internationalism was, where it happened, and to whom it mattered.
Epidemiological moments are thus invaluable for understanding the extreme times and spaces of the colonial state. If we study these moments alone, however, we neglect a much broader history of the ways in which “social distancing” was hardwired into the politics and geography of the colonial state (not to mention the caste structures of Indian society which the state helped harden). In my research on twentieth-century colonial Delhi I have explored spaces that bridged exceptional moments of epidemiological, social, cultural and political risk with more everyday forms of exclusion. Drawing upon this work, here I give two examples of targeted populations for whom the experience of being distanced was neither optional nor new. These examples relay alternative genealogies of social distancing.
Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 2020
The India Round Table Conference (London, 1930-32) is presented here as a site of imperial intern... more The India Round Table Conference (London, 1930-32) is presented here as a site of imperial internationalism, at which radical anti-colonialism was subsumed within the liberal technology of the conference. First, the influence of the League of Nations on the conference is examined, through exploring its role as model, precedent, potential arbiter and training ground. Second the paper explores the influence of other (Pan-Islamic, labour and spiritual) forms of internationalism at the London conference. New theorisations of the international are brought to bear on significant new archival and prosopographical material, making an original contribution through revisiting a founding moment in Indian political history.
This paper presents new ways of thinking about both the spatial relationality of a political even... more This paper presents new ways of thinking about both the spatial relationality of a political event, and a mobile perspective on interwar imperialism, anti-colonialism and Indian nationalism. Between 1930 and 1932 over one hundred delegates from India visited London to participate in the three sessions of the Round Table Conference, which determined India's constitutional future within the British Empire. This conference informally began, and continued, at sea, during the two to three week journey between India and Britain. The steamships that the delegates travelled in are portrayed here as places of work, drawing especially on the diaries of the Hindu nationalist Dr B.S. Moonje, but also of social observation and tension, illustrated through the coverage of M.K. Gandhi's spiritual journey. Through these seaborne political lives the conference itself was anticipated and digested across the watery expanses between Europe and India.
Annals of the American Association of Geographers , 2020
Between 1930 and 1932 the three sessions of the Round Table Conference in London drew more than s... more Between 1930 and 1932 the three sessions of the Round Table Conference in London drew more than seventy Indian delegates to the city, for up to three months, to debate India’s constitutional future within the British Empire. This article argues that the atmosphere of the conference was central to its successes and failures and that studying atmospheres can help us think about the co-constitution of place, bodies, and politics more broadly. It approaches atmospheres from three interrelated perspectives. First, the atmospheric environment of the conference is set, in terms of both the physical geography of the weather and the human geography of the conference venue. Second, it traces conference bodies, which endured the weather, used it as metaphor, and attuned their politics to the affective atmosphere. The article concludes with reflections on representing non-representational atmospheres. It argues that the current atmospheres literature is oddly deraced, while debates about weather and bodies’ reactions to social and political atmospheres are inherently and always racialized. Analyzing the reactions of and to diverse Indian delegates in 1930s London gives us insights into an interwar colonial geographical imagination and demonstrates the potential for thinking about meteorological and affective atmospheres together. Key Words: atmospheres, conferences, imperialism, India, race.
In this paper I argue that two core components of contemporary British human geography curricula ... more In this paper I argue that two core components of contemporary British human geography curricula (global governance and place making) can and should be taught together. I also argue that materials from the past provide valuable teaching tools in the present. As such, this paper also makes the case for historical geography. It does this through examining historical phases of what is now called globalisation. It introduces geographical perspectives on imperialism and internationalism, two variants of interwar, modern globalisation. It introduces India as a key site in British history, but argues that we can understand large scale processes like globalisation through small sites of place
This introduction frames a selection of papers that encourage a richer spatial understanding of t... more This introduction frames a selection of papers that encourage a richer spatial understanding of the years before the partition of India. The papers respond to two types of question. One type is spatial (at what scale to do we approach partition? Through which spaces should we attempt to understand both micro and macro processes? Movements across what distances constituted partition?). The second type is temporal (what timescales do we invoke when approaching partition? Of what was it the endpoint? What sort of memories were invoked and made during India's multiple partitions?). This introduction establishes the main trends in partition historiography, tracked through the last two decennial anniversaries. It sketches out spatial analyses of partition to date, regarding territory and displacement especially, but shows that much of this geographical interpretation has been implicit rather than explicit, and that most have begun with partition. Whilst framing many of their arguments in twentieth-century colonial practice, and occasionally straying into the post-colonial, the papers in this special issue mostly focus on the 1930s-40s at a range of scales (from the international, through the nation-state, to cities, mohallas, and courtrooms). Collectively they make the argument that if partition has a history, then it also has an historical geography. We hope these papers will help people read these histories and geographies with a finer spatial eye.
This paper explores the mohallas of Delhi, sub-communities within the city, and asks whether Delh... more This paper explores the mohallas of Delhi, sub-communities within the city, and asks whether Delhi was pre-partitioning before August 1947. It suggests that the mohalla was a site of political mobilisation that was systematically used by Congress from the Civil Disobedience movement of 1930 onwards. During the early 1940s communal voluntary associations like the Muslim League's National Guard and the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) attempted to establish representatives and training practices within mohallas. The paper concludes that the mohalla provides a space and a scale at which to view communal violence afresh, as one of the many 'spaces before partition' that were reshaping (in) the 1940s.
Responding to ongoing concerns that Michel Foucault's influential governmentality analytics fail ... more Responding to ongoing concerns that Michel Foucault's influential governmentality analytics fail to enable the study of " resistance " , this paper analyses his last two lecture courses on " parrhesia " (risky and courageous speech). While Foucault resisted resistance as an analytical category, he increasingly pointed us towards militant, alternative, and insolent forms of counter-conduct. The paper comparatively analyses Foucault's reading of Plato, Socrates and the Cynics, exploring parrhesia's episteme (its truth-knowledge relations), techne (its practice and geographies), identities (its souls and its bodies) and its possible relations to the present. It concludes that Foucault viewed resistance as power, which problematized governmentalities but could also be analysed as a governmentality itself.. In pursuing parrhesia Foucault reaffirmed his commitment to studying discourse as always emplaced and enacted, whilst sketching out the geographies (from the royal court and the democratic Assembly to the public square and the street) that staged the risk of truth-talking. This suggests new subjects and spaces to open up political possibilities when exploring the geographies of governmentalities.
A co-authored and co-curated series of reflections on the 2018 UCU strikes in British Universitie... more A co-authored and co-curated series of reflections on the 2018 UCU strikes in British Universities, protesting against proposed pension reforms.
A co-authored and co-curated series of reflections on the 2018 UCU strikes in British Universitie... more A co-authored and co-curated series of reflections on the 2018 UCU strikes in British Universities, protesting against proposed pension reforms
The workshop on the first day of this two-day event considered diverse cartographic approaches to... more The workshop on the first day of this two-day event considered diverse cartographic approaches to understanding and representing urban space. Through the interdisciplinary composition of the three panels, it set out to establish and sustain dialogues across the arts, humanities, social sciences and engineering. The presentations addressed: (i) maps as sources for analysing and conceptualising urban space, both historical and contemporary (in research) and for visualising and communicating new spatial understandings (in teaching and public engagement); (ii) the craft, method and performance of urban mapping, especially, but not only, with regard to new cartographic technologies; and (iii) the cultural role and significance of urban maps, atlases, and cartographic models.
The workshop was targeted at scholars from various backgrounds, and promoted the diffusion of both the latest cartographic know-how and new critical perspectives on mapping across traditional disciplinary boundaries. To scholars from the arts, humanities and social sciences it showcased the technological prospects, possibilities and limits of urban mapping. To scholars from the sciences and engineering it promoted critical reflection on the purpose and potential of visualising urban data.
In this exceptional piece of historical scholarship, Rotem Geva walks the reader through a harrow... more In this exceptional piece of historical scholarship, Rotem Geva walks the reader through a harrowing Indian landscape. The five substantive chapters take us from the dreams about, and campaigns for, independence in India’s colonial capital, to the violence that shattered many of these dreams in August 1947, when Pakistan was partitioned out of India and hundreds of thousands of refugees migrated to new countries, and cities. New arrivals in Delhi sparked riots and disturbances, but these sporadic acts were transmuted into longer standing geographies of violence through Muslims being forced out of their historic communities and into newly designated ‘Muslim zones’. Intended to protect these newly minoritized communities, they eventually became ghettos, and mixed areas became anomalies. Chapter Four shows us how the local Urdu language press reflected and commented on these divisions, providing fora not just for Muslims who stayed in Delhi but also for Hindu and Sikh migrants who also published in Urdu. The fifth chapter demonstrates how reluctant the new national government was to give up the authoritarian and surveillance mechanisms of the colonial state, although the influence of the Hindu right within the first Congress government meant that communists and socialists were more harshly policed than the militant Hindu RSS. This was even after the latter had been banned over its connections to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in the city in January 1948.
At the time of writing, the British government is attempting to explain its treatment of “Windrus... more At the time of writing, the British government is attempting to explain its treatment of “Windrush generation” migrants to the United Kingdom and their descendants. Encouraged to move to the UK in the 1940-50s from the West Indies, to fill labour shortages, the Windrush migrants secured citizenship under the British Nationality Act of 1948. The recent Conservative government has, however, been threatening the children of these migrants with deportation if they could not prove their right to remain in the UK. In May of 2018 it was estimated that 60 British citizens can have been falsely deported and it has been reported that the landing cards which could have bolstered challenges to these deportations had been destroyed by the Home Office in 2010. Migration, race, nationalism and paper are key to this debate, lodging in the present a traumatic trace of the post-war, not yet post-colonial, world. In the mid-twentieth century, partitioning was used to solve a series of ethnic and geographical conundrums thrown up by the geopolitics of empire and conflict. Korea, Germany (and Berlin), Ireland and Israel-Palestine were all divided up and democracy (re)introduced tentatively. The partitioning of India, creating Pakistan, was the largest of the mid-century divisions and it created the world’s largest democracy. This was, Ornit Shani argues, a “stark act of decolonisation” (p.1) and her marvellous book charts, in exquisite detail, the transformations of material, bureaucracy, and imagination through which an autocratic colonial state transitioned to a democratic republican nation-state.
This chapter gives a sense of how geographers have worked with Foucault's spatial research, and h... more This chapter gives a sense of how geographers have worked with Foucault's spatial research, and how they have taken his philosophical works more broadly and applied them to geographical questions. First, it reviews engagements since the 1990s with Foucault's work on discipline and governmentality, all framed through older engagements with his works on discourse and episteme. Second, it explores how geographers have engaged with new publications of Foucault's works over the last ten years, where spatial analysis is less explicit but the geographical potential rich. It concludes by indicating some of the exciting new directions in which geographers are applying Foucault's work.
South Asia Unbound: New International Histories of the Subcontinent, 2023
This chapter considers the expanded geographies of the India Round Table Conference. This politic... more This chapter considers the expanded geographies of the India Round Table Conference. This political event took place in London over three sittings between 1930-2 and was designed to inform the next stage of constitutional progress for colonial India. It involved assembling more than 100 delegates in the imperial capital, most of whom were political or social leaders from India. This chapter compliments recent works that have explored the experience of Asian conference delegates in travel, at sea, and in the air (Legg, 2020, Lewis, in press, Thakur, 2021), in two ways. It appeals to a longer tradition of scholarship on travel writing (Pratt, 1992), but also uses this to explore Indian writing on travel in Europe (Majeed, 2007). Secondly it appeals to literature on colonial (Lambert and Lester, 2006) and post-colonial (Craggs and Neate, 2017) “careering” as a way of studying how political lives were made through being mobile across imperial geographies of core and periphery. The main foci is the experiences of Hindu nationalist delegate Dr. B.S. Moonje in Europe where he experienced admiration for colonial modernity, repulsion at European cosmopolitanism, anxiety over Hindu political unity, and inspiration for a militarised future Hindu biopolitics.
This chapter opens by introducing three recurring characteristics of contemporary debates regardi... more This chapter opens by introducing three recurring characteristics of contemporary debates regarding sovereignty in colonial India. The first concerns scale; the way in which the sovereignty of the Government of India was positioned between that of the Indian village and the imperial capital in London. The second concerns spectacle; the accentuated role of the visual and of violence in the Raj. The third debate emerges from subaltern studies and regards the popular sovereignty of the Indian non-elite. These three types of sovereignty will be shown to have been renegotiated at the Round Table Conference which took place over three sittings in London between 1930 and 1932. A new federal hybrid of autocracy and democracy was devised, a new spectacle of interwar colonial sovereignty was manufactured, and vying claims were made to speak not only of but for Indian subalterns.
Placing Internationalism: International Conferences and the Making of the Modern World, 2021
As a recent wave of scholarship has rightly attested, the story of the twentieth century cannot b... more As a recent wave of scholarship has rightly attested, the story of the twentieth century cannot be told without reckoning with the explosion in internationalism in both thought and action. This internationalism was premised on the overcoming of space, transcending the geography of the nation-state in search of the shared interests of humankind. Paradoxically however, it was also dependent on the coming together of people in certain places, and the carving of spaces in which they could make manifest and jointly dream their internationalism. This chapter introduces the contention that the primary space at which this paradox played out was that of the international conference, and that by taking conferences as the primary lens of analysis we can open up a range of new ways in which to think about the spatialities of internationalism which transcend and cut across established categories of thought. It discusses the spatiotemporal framing of the volume from Versailles to Bandung: temporally, connecting interwar and postwar periods, and spatially, encompassing a broader constellation of conferences. And lastly, it looks at the methodological questions posed by this approach: that is, where we might locate the archival trace of international conferences.
Placing Internationalism: International Conferences and the Making of the Modern World, 2021
As a recent wave of scholarship has rightly attested, the story of the twentieth century cannot b... more As a recent wave of scholarship has rightly attested, the story of the twentieth century cannot be told without reckoning with the explosion in internationalism in both thought and action. This internationalism was premised on the overcoming of space, transcending the geography of the nation-state in search of the shared interests of humankind. Paradoxically however, it was also dependent on the coming together of people in certain places, and the carving of spaces in which they could make manifest and jointly dream their internationalism. This chapter introduces the contention that the primary space at which this paradox played out was that of the international conference, and that by taking conferences as the primary lens of analysis we can open up a range of new ways in which to think about the spatialities of internationalism which transcend and cut across established categories of thought. It discusses the spatiotemporal framing of the volume from Versailles to Bandung: temporally, connecting interwar and postwar periods, and spatially, encompassing a broader constellation of conferences. And lastly, it looks at the methodological questions posed by this approach: that is, where we might locate the archival trace of international conferences.
This chapter opens by situating the study of moral regulation in historical geography in the cult... more This chapter opens by situating the study of moral regulation in historical geography in the cultural turn of the 1980-90s. After summarising the main features of this interest in improving the moral behaviour of subjects, it introduces two recent studies of moral regulation within historical geography (of mothering and of gay bars). It then turns to studies that have, more or less explicitly, considered the mobilities in and of moral regulation (of drink in the United Kingdom and of prostitutes in colonial India). It then turns to studies of populations in motion, which have prompted (or lacked) forms of control and oversight (of convict and indentured labour). In conclusion the chapter turns against the emphasis of these works, which privileges land and placement. In a counter-geographical concluding section the chapter turn to a hyper-mobile, amoral non-population; that of pirates. If, as suggested, the pirate historically acted as an anti-body to national populations –an opposite and external threat that triggered defensive violence—then the chapter concludes by suggesting that the refugee functions as contemporary Europe’s anti-body.
I write things which seem usable. In a word, usable in a different way, by different people, in d... more I write things which seem usable. In a word, usable in a different way, by different people, in different countries in certain cases. Thus, if I analyse something such as madness or power and that serves some purpose, then that's enough, that's why I write. If someone uses what I write differently then that's not disagreeable to me, and even if he [sic] uses it in another context for something else, then I am quite happy. (Foucault 1978(Foucault [2013, 111 emphasis added)
Reading Carl Schmitt demands an appreciation of context: that in which he wrote; the contexts thr... more Reading Carl Schmitt demands an appreciation of context: that in which he wrote; the contexts through which his work has travelled and been translated; and the contexts in which we now read and apply his work. Various authors have contextualised Schmitt in different ways, through his intellectual biography , his ongoing theoretical engagements and the international relations of Germany . This chapter will seek an alternative route into engaging and problematising Schmitt's writings on the nomos. Rather than taking as its focus a person, concept or interpretation related to Schmitt, it will seek insights into his thought through examining his treatment of an institution. The League of Nations recurred as a focus of ire throughout Schmitt's writings, culminating in the Nomos where it signified the decline of European world order, the rise of US economic imperialism and global interventionism, and a reign of 'spatial chaos' (Schmitt, 1950(Schmitt, [2003, 257). As such, the League of Nations has a synecdochical position in Schmitt's writings. It represents for him the granting of small nations parity with the great powers, the stifling of international politics (which had previously allowed friend-enemy relationships to be resolved by bracketed wars), the occlusion of American hegemony beneath the mask of ethicalhumanitarian intervention, and the ossification of European imperialist privilege through the defence of the 1919 status quo.
"The ambiguous phrase “violent memories” strikes at two of the key conceptual matters about which... more "The ambiguous phrase “violent memories” strikes at two of the key conceptual matters about which scholars of India have theorized: memories of violent acts and the violence that such recollections can do to those who remember them, those who are remembered, and those who are forgotten. The author seeks to provide an overview of the memory politics that has accompanied India’s struggle for freedom from colonialism, both during the Raj and since independence. The main events and processes that scholars of postcolonial and subaltern studies have investigated in India are reviewed, including anticolonial violence and nonviolence, the memory politics of the “Mutiny” of 1857, gendered and sexed politics and violence, the partition of 1947, communal riots, Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency,” and natural disasters. The author positions these reviews within relatively broad theoretical trends in postcolonial studies from which they have drawn and to which they have a great deal to contribute.
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The archive is anything of which a set of questions is asked and the nature of the archive is lar... more The archive is anything of which a set of questions is asked and the nature of the archive is largely, but not entirely, defined by the nature of questions asked of it. The problem therefore is not of sexuality and the archive per se, or of gaps in the archives. It is a question of playing one archive against another, of conversations within and outside of archives, of romancing the archives, of using parallel, alternative, official, and popular archives simultaneously. It is in such interplay that more interesting stories are revealed." i
It was the talk of the town. From afternoon teas at Buckingham Palace to lunches, dinners and dri... more It was the talk of the town. From afternoon teas at Buckingham Palace to lunches, dinners and drinks provided by London’s political hostesses. Between 1930 and 1932, India’s social and political leaders headed to London to negotiate the constitutional future of India in the British empire.
(GRANT) One of the largely forgotten legacies of the First World War was the belief that peace wo... more (GRANT) One of the largely forgotten legacies of the First World War was the belief that peace would result from connections between and across national borders, the fault lines of the war itself. After the centenaries of the War have concluded, we will argue that we should remember how hopes for peace were tied to hopes for connections across the earth; that is, for "the international".
Forging these connections and new worlds required new sites of interaction, meeting, learning and friendship making. These sites were the international "conferences" of the interwar period, the places in which internationalism was forged and politically debated, emerging through conversation, disagreement, dance, song, taste, and laughter. Through piecing together the records of these meetings, we will provide a rich history of the spaces through which the international was created and challenged, and in which it floundered.
Existing literature has shown that conferences had grown in popularity towards the end of the 19th century, connected to wider showcases such as world fairs and universal exhibitions (35 between 1900-1910) and to the explicitly internationalist claims of the socialist and communist left. But there is a dearth of research into modern international conferences that emerged specifically to take advantage of the opportunities the post-war world offered for peace. For some, peace was the stability of pre-existing colonial empires; for others, peace was "not-war"; while to others, peace required the destruction of the pre-war political landscape.
We will examine three sets of conferences that demonstrate these visions of peace and their forms of internationalism that were emerging through and in tension with specific nations (Britain, France and the USA): the Round Table conferences on the future of India in the British Empire (Legg), the International Studies conferences of the League of Nations's ICIC (Heffernan), and the Pan-African Congresses (Hodder). Each of these conferences provided a public commentary on the changes brought by the war and the prospects of a new international order which it was seen to make possible. It was the secret negotiations before and during World War I which exposed the urgent need for public political meetings, to which people would travel from around the globe; these meeting spaces are what international conferences provided.
We know very little about the internal spaces of these conferences. Internationalism wasn't centrally organised; it took place through specific, brief meetings of overlapping groups in particular locations. As a result, the archives of modern internationalism is fragmented and dispersed. This project will re-assemble and re-interpret these archives through an analysis of the infrastructures, materials and performances of the inter-war international conference: where people stayed; how their days were planned; how clothing and manners facilitated or hindered certain meetings; what they discussed, and how.
One hundred years after the First World War it is often claimed that modern digital technology and instantaneous communication will render the practice of conferencing obsolete. Yet our globalised world is still shaped by G20 meetings, Climate Change Summits and World Economic Forums, embedding locations like Davos and Kyoto in the international geographical imagination. This project will historically situate and explain how conferencing in our contemporary period remains as important as ever. We will communicate our research through a co-authored monograph and an edited volume resulting from a major international conference and exhibition at the Royal Geographical Society on international conferencing at the end of the award, as well as with smaller workshops that will bring together academics, conferencing professionals, and community groups with interests in the global cast that these meetings assembled.
A co-authored and co-curated series of reflections on the 2018 UCU strikes in British Universitie... more A co-authored and co-curated series of reflections on the 2018 UCU strikes in British Universities, protesting against proposed pension reforms
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Books by Stephen Legg
Taking an interdisciplinary approach, contributors explore the spatial paradox of two fundamental features of modern internationalism. First, internationalism demanded the overcoming of space, transcending the nation-state in search of the shared interests of humankind. Second, internationalism was geographically contingent on the places in which people came together to conceive and enact their internationalist ideas. From Paris 1919 to Bandung 1955 and beyond, this book explores international conferences as the sites in which different forms of internationalism assumed material and social form. While international 'permanent institutions' such as the League of Nations, UN and Institute of Pacific Relations constantly negotiated national and imperial politics, lesser-resourced political networks also used international conferences to forward their more radical demands.
Taken together these conferences radically expand our conception of where and how modern internationalism emerged, and make the case for focusing on internationalism in a contemporary moment when its merits are being called into question.
Editors Tariq Jazeel and Stephen Legg ask, What methodological-philosophical potential does a rigorously geographical engagement with the concept of subalternity pose for geographical thought, whether in historical or contemporary contexts? And what types of craft are necessary for us to seek out subaltern perspectives both from the past and in the present? In so doing, Subaltern Geographies engages with the implications for and impact on disciplinary geographical thought of subaltern studies scholarship, as well as the potential for such thought. In the process, it probes new spatial ideas and forms of learning in an attempt to bypass the spatial categorizations of methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism.
Draws on the governmentality theories and methodologies presented in Michel Foucault's lecture courses
Looks at problems of social and racial segregation, the policing of the cities, and biopolitical needs in urban settings
Undertakes a critique of colonial governmentality on the basis of the lived spaces of everyday life
This work brings together geographers, and Schmitt experts who are attuned to the spatial dimensions of his work, to discuss his 1950 work The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. Explaining the growing audience for Schmitt’s work, a broad range of contributors also examine the Nomos in relation to broader debates about enmity and war, the production of space, the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, and the recuperability of such an intellect tainted by its anti-Semitism and links to the Nazi party.
This work will be of great interest to researchers in political theory, socio-legal studies, geopolitics and critical IR theory
Papers by Stephen Legg
using the example of visiting Indians in 1930s London to
decolonise our presumptions about who helped craft the globe
Nottingham Citizens, a charity and community organiser. It provides an
insider account of a piece of community led and co-produced research
into the experiences of and under-reporting of hate crime in the city,
and the relative success of the commission in forcing policy changes
and inspiring future leaders and campaigns. It details a responsive
methodology that evolved over the yearlong campaign, which collated
over 1000 survey responses. It explores the spaces in which mobilisation took place (religious, educational, civic) and the pressure points (private and public) that were used to create change. It concludes by weighing up the successes and critiques of the commission, especially regarding the successful campaign to have misogyny recognised as a hate crime, and relates this work to ongoing attempts to conceptualise non-radical geographies of activism and community organising.
Epidemiological moments are thus invaluable for understanding the extreme times and spaces of the colonial state. If we study these moments alone, however, we neglect a much broader history of the ways in which “social distancing” was hardwired into the politics and geography of the colonial state (not to mention the caste structures of Indian society which the state helped harden). In my research on twentieth-century colonial Delhi I have explored spaces that bridged exceptional moments of epidemiological, social, cultural and political risk with more everyday forms of exclusion. Drawing upon this work, here I give two examples of targeted populations for whom the experience of being distanced was neither optional nor new. These examples relay alternative genealogies of social distancing.
Taking an interdisciplinary approach, contributors explore the spatial paradox of two fundamental features of modern internationalism. First, internationalism demanded the overcoming of space, transcending the nation-state in search of the shared interests of humankind. Second, internationalism was geographically contingent on the places in which people came together to conceive and enact their internationalist ideas. From Paris 1919 to Bandung 1955 and beyond, this book explores international conferences as the sites in which different forms of internationalism assumed material and social form. While international 'permanent institutions' such as the League of Nations, UN and Institute of Pacific Relations constantly negotiated national and imperial politics, lesser-resourced political networks also used international conferences to forward their more radical demands.
Taken together these conferences radically expand our conception of where and how modern internationalism emerged, and make the case for focusing on internationalism in a contemporary moment when its merits are being called into question.
Editors Tariq Jazeel and Stephen Legg ask, What methodological-philosophical potential does a rigorously geographical engagement with the concept of subalternity pose for geographical thought, whether in historical or contemporary contexts? And what types of craft are necessary for us to seek out subaltern perspectives both from the past and in the present? In so doing, Subaltern Geographies engages with the implications for and impact on disciplinary geographical thought of subaltern studies scholarship, as well as the potential for such thought. In the process, it probes new spatial ideas and forms of learning in an attempt to bypass the spatial categorizations of methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism.
Draws on the governmentality theories and methodologies presented in Michel Foucault's lecture courses
Looks at problems of social and racial segregation, the policing of the cities, and biopolitical needs in urban settings
Undertakes a critique of colonial governmentality on the basis of the lived spaces of everyday life
This work brings together geographers, and Schmitt experts who are attuned to the spatial dimensions of his work, to discuss his 1950 work The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. Explaining the growing audience for Schmitt’s work, a broad range of contributors also examine the Nomos in relation to broader debates about enmity and war, the production of space, the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, and the recuperability of such an intellect tainted by its anti-Semitism and links to the Nazi party.
This work will be of great interest to researchers in political theory, socio-legal studies, geopolitics and critical IR theory
using the example of visiting Indians in 1930s London to
decolonise our presumptions about who helped craft the globe
Nottingham Citizens, a charity and community organiser. It provides an
insider account of a piece of community led and co-produced research
into the experiences of and under-reporting of hate crime in the city,
and the relative success of the commission in forcing policy changes
and inspiring future leaders and campaigns. It details a responsive
methodology that evolved over the yearlong campaign, which collated
over 1000 survey responses. It explores the spaces in which mobilisation took place (religious, educational, civic) and the pressure points (private and public) that were used to create change. It concludes by weighing up the successes and critiques of the commission, especially regarding the successful campaign to have misogyny recognised as a hate crime, and relates this work to ongoing attempts to conceptualise non-radical geographies of activism and community organising.
Epidemiological moments are thus invaluable for understanding the extreme times and spaces of the colonial state. If we study these moments alone, however, we neglect a much broader history of the ways in which “social distancing” was hardwired into the politics and geography of the colonial state (not to mention the caste structures of Indian society which the state helped harden). In my research on twentieth-century colonial Delhi I have explored spaces that bridged exceptional moments of epidemiological, social, cultural and political risk with more everyday forms of exclusion. Drawing upon this work, here I give two examples of targeted populations for whom the experience of being distanced was neither optional nor new. These examples relay alternative genealogies of social distancing.
The workshop was targeted at scholars from various backgrounds, and promoted the diffusion of both the latest cartographic know-how and new critical perspectives on mapping across traditional disciplinary boundaries. To scholars from the arts, humanities and social sciences it showcased the technological prospects, possibilities and limits of urban mapping. To scholars from the sciences and engineering it promoted critical reflection on the purpose and potential of visualising urban data.
Migration, race, nationalism and paper are key to this debate, lodging in the present a traumatic trace of the post-war, not yet post-colonial, world. In the mid-twentieth century, partitioning was used to solve a series of ethnic and geographical conundrums thrown up by the geopolitics of empire and conflict. Korea, Germany (and Berlin), Ireland and Israel-Palestine were all divided up and democracy (re)introduced tentatively. The partitioning of India, creating Pakistan, was the largest of the mid-century divisions and it created the world’s largest democracy. This was, Ornit Shani argues, a “stark act of decolonisation” (p.1) and her marvellous book charts, in exquisite detail, the transformations of material, bureaucracy, and imagination through which an autocratic colonial state transitioned to a democratic republican nation-state.
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Forging these connections and new worlds required new sites of interaction, meeting, learning and friendship making. These sites were the international "conferences" of the interwar period, the places in which internationalism was forged and politically debated, emerging through conversation, disagreement, dance, song, taste, and laughter. Through piecing together the records of these meetings, we will provide a rich history of the spaces through which the international was created and challenged, and in which it floundered.
Existing literature has shown that conferences had grown in popularity towards the end of the 19th century, connected to wider showcases such as world fairs and universal exhibitions (35 between 1900-1910) and to the explicitly internationalist claims of the socialist and communist left. But there is a dearth of research into modern international conferences that emerged specifically to take advantage of the opportunities the post-war world offered for peace. For some, peace was the stability of pre-existing colonial empires; for others, peace was "not-war"; while to others, peace required the destruction of the pre-war political landscape.
We will examine three sets of conferences that demonstrate these visions of peace and their forms of internationalism that were emerging through and in tension with specific nations (Britain, France and the USA): the Round Table conferences on the future of India in the British Empire (Legg), the International Studies conferences of the League of Nations's ICIC (Heffernan), and the Pan-African Congresses (Hodder). Each of these conferences provided a public commentary on the changes brought by the war and the prospects of a new international order which it was seen to make possible. It was the secret negotiations before and during World War I which exposed the urgent need for public political meetings, to which people would travel from around the globe; these meeting spaces are what international conferences provided.
We know very little about the internal spaces of these conferences. Internationalism wasn't centrally organised; it took place through specific, brief meetings of overlapping groups in particular locations. As a result, the archives of modern internationalism is fragmented and dispersed. This project will re-assemble and re-interpret these archives through an analysis of the infrastructures, materials and performances of the inter-war international conference: where people stayed; how their days were planned; how clothing and manners facilitated or hindered certain meetings; what they discussed, and how.
One hundred years after the First World War it is often claimed that modern digital technology and instantaneous communication will render the practice of conferencing obsolete. Yet our globalised world is still shaped by G20 meetings, Climate Change Summits and World Economic Forums, embedding locations like Davos and Kyoto in the international geographical imagination. This project will historically situate and explain how conferencing in our contemporary period remains as important as ever. We will communicate our research through a co-authored monograph and an edited volume resulting from a major international conference and exhibition at the Royal Geographical Society on international conferencing at the end of the award, as well as with smaller workshops that will bring together academics, conferencing professionals, and community groups with interests in the global cast that these meetings assembled.