Sam Hind

lecturer in digital media and culture at the University of Manchester, UK.

sam.hind@manchester.ac.uk

  • Some notes for Assange, Galloway et al.

    They might want to have a quick skim read of David Allen Green’s post on the ‘legal myths’ of Assange’s extradition case, over at the New Statesman. Assange has nobody but himself (and presumably his instructed legal team) to blame for such a cowardly, and moreover, public, misuse of extraterritorial diplomatic immunity.

  • The fetishizing of physical occupation

    Probably one of the foremost criticisms of the US Occupy movement.

    Too much in-camp micro-organisation, as Jason Hickel points out in his review of Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America (Verso) here, and too few attempts to make broader links with  the labour movement (says Nikil Saval, one of the book’s contributors), or lower class occupants of the city and immigrants (says Audrea Lim).

    Only a short read but it’s worth considering the main point; the fetishizing of political protest and failure to consider the millions of others outside of and beyond the confines of Zuccotti Park in New York and many other centres of the movement across the USA and the wider Western world. Grasping these kinds of actions less as coherent, long-run ‘movements’ and more as socio-political ‘events’ might go some way to understanding how they can often appear to fail. Especially in the face of widespread opposition in the media, across the political spectrum and in the general public. What we see there  (‘direct democracy’) – singular, unique, specific – doesn’t fit in with what we see here  (‘delegative democracy’) – routine, general, oblique. It requires action of a different kind, or simply a downgrading of the ‘pivotal’ nature of these events.

  • ‘Dark Nazi Geographies’

    I’m reading through Trevor Barnes’ and Claudio Minca’s new paper in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers on Carl Schmitt and Walter Christaller at the moment (available – only through subscription – here). Carl Schmitt’s received a lot of attention from political geographers over the last few years mainly due to Giorgio Agamben. Christaller on the other hand has mainly escaped popular attention. That is unless you’ve considered his ‘central place theory’ of human settlement recently. He also happened to be a member of the Nazi Party and served in Konrad Meyer’s Planning and Soil Department. Both formed, say Barnes and Minca, either side of a darkly geographical coin. Schmitt central in ‘deterritorializing’ German invaded lands (Poland, Czechoslovakia etc.) and removing peoples of ‘impure’ origin; and Christaller in ‘reterritorializing’ these lands with ‘legitimate’ German peoples.

    What makes this paper a little darker for myself was that I was taught Christaller’s Central Place Theory in A Level Geography, and I don’t recall us being given a lowdown on his murky connections. In fact, I even loosely based my final coursework on his work, albeit in the rather anodyne context (declining service provision in rural North Yorkshire).

    This might give me an incentive to re-read a little Agamben, or, more to the point, address the state of the A Level Geography curricula!

  • Nowhereisland

    First sighting of nowhereisland: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-18894755. For more, click here.

  • Blade Runner

    A magazine article by the BBC on the technologies of Blade Runner and Minority Report; 20 and 10 years old today. Available here. Sam Kinsley – a research fellow at DCRC – speaks on ‘anticipatory futures’ here too. Both talk of Spielberg’s use of ‘futurologists’ to integrate possible future technologies into the film.