Diverse Economies

2004-08-11T16:24:00.000Z

Hello to the other silent bloggers:

This is a quick note to ask if anyone has begun any preparation for diverse economies sessions at the upcoming Denver AAG meeting-- I know I'm a bit ahead of the game, but I am trying to get myself organized before the academic year starts.

Also, if Julie (or anyone else who participated) is on this-- is there a good link to find info about the Boston Social Forum? Any thoughts/reflects that might be particularly interesting for this group?

Hope all are well.

Jon Lepofsky

PS- Hardt & Negri just published the sequel to Empire, which focuses directly on the question of "the multitude"-- folks out there might be interested in its discussions of immaterial labor and biopolitical production of subjectivity as well as their take on the relationship between forms of labor and global democracy...

2004-05-13T15:45:00.000Z

Hmmmm. Silence reigns in the diverse economies weblog.
Never mind, here is something that will entertain and/or horrify you. In my occasonal searches for examples of active, functional blogs I found this. This is a very busy blog. A problematic conclusion one might draw from it, however, is that maybe successful blogs are run by right-wing neo-liberal loonies. Then again, I suppose they constitute an alternative economy too....

Angus

2004-04-30T13:41:00.000Z

2004-04-26T15:16:00.000Z

From Andy Jonas:

I am proud to say that I did not go to the AAG this year so missed all the soul-searching - so what's new? isn't there always soul-searching at the AAG? (there has been in the last 15 or 20 years I have been attending!). But I am sure I would have enjoyed the diverse economies sessions.

For me, the 'diverse economies' debate/movement helps to move economic geography into realms away from debates about clusters, agglomerations, etc. and enables us to recapture the essence of the geographical: that is to say, places, people and their differences matter. It also helps us to think more holisticaly about 'economies' as being simultaneously economic, social, cultural and spatial.

I suppose the one nagging concern I have is a point made (I think) by John Allen at the diverse economies AAG session last year (New Orleans): do we now reject the single 'economy' for the plural 'economies'? And when we talk about the 'economy' does that necessarily equate to 'capitalism'. Another (!) concern I have is about the 'neoliberalisation of space' issue, which for me inappropriately collapses all forms of 'capitalism' onto one globally hegemonic form. Does an interest in diverse economies necessarily equate to a critique of neoliberalism - or is there not diversity within capitalism and its (neoliberal and other) forms?

Trying to be serious for once in my life...

Andy

PS. Thanks Angus

2004-04-19T18:05:00.000Z

Here's one that might interest those of you of the leftie cultural turn persuasion: http://www.newpartisan.com/.

Angus Cameron

2004-04-19T15:14:00.000Z

Like the others, I'd like to say thanks to Angus for setting this up. I do hope/plan to make more substantive comments in the future but for now can I just ask that people identify themselves clearly - if everyone's signing off with just their first name it might get a little confusing.

Thanks,
Alison (Stenning)

2004-04-19T11:55:00.000Z

Dear all,

Of course, having found a few interesting weblogs the other day, I can't for life of me remember what they were. If I find them again, I will note down the addresses. Anyway, lots of very bad examples can be found through http://www.blogarama.com which lists thousands of awful, self-indulgent weblogs published by (and for) grad students and bored academics. That said, if you search around the lists there are some more interesting examples. A quick google search tuns up other weblog directories that you can peruse. Unfortunately weblog purists seem to spurn the directories and so there are probably interesting sites out there that are harder to find. One of the more business-like examples I have managed to find is http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html which used used by 'open-source' computer types to discuss...er...computers. By coincidence, today's Guardian has a section debating the value of weblogs. You can find it through their website: http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk.
There is no model out there that I have in mind, however, since ultimately it is up to us to decide what this can be used for (the same, of course, is true of an email list). The main advantage to this is that once I can figure out the html script we can add in links, working papers and other functional stuff that will allow it to be a more multi-purpose resource as well as a creative meeting place.

In reply to Andrew's final question about who has been approached about the weblog (if I interpret that question correctly) my starting list has been everyone on Julie's email. There are no doubt others out there that we could bring on board and if you have any names, please email them to me with their email address so that I can invite them on board. Perhaps once we have figured out what we want the blog to do, we can publicise it around the discipline to bring in more people.

Regarding the AAG, my impression was varied. There was a lot of soul-searching, but mainly in those sessions that were set up linked to the centennial theme and so were rather inviting people to navel-gaze. That said, some of these sessions were quite upbeat too. The Diverse Economies sessions were indeed very good, but not the only ones. Stuart Elden, for example, had organised a couple of sessions on calculability which brought together some really interesting work from historical geographers, theorists and others, and which had a fair degree of cross-over with our own papers.

If the cultural turn was muted in the Past, Present, Future sessions then it was perhaps more apparent in the more research-led sessions (as differentiated from 'discipline-led'), but in interesting ways. What I thought striking in these was the degree to which empirical research was much more the fore; but a much more culturalised empiricism. Some of the worst excesses of the cultural turn seem to have given way to a more balanced set of empirical and theoretical methodologies which are producing some very rich work. The one book I heard cited in several very different papers, for example, was Timothy Mitchell's 'Rule of Experts' (which, if you don't know it, is a tour-de-force exercise in the historical anthropology of modern Egypt). This is notable because it was being enthusiatically cited in the more theoretically sophisticated papers despite the fact that Mitchell explicitly sets him self up as a critic of the cultural turn.

Overall, my impression was of two, overlapping conferences. One in which the discipline stared at itself and asked (pointless?) questions about 'whither Geography?', and another where a bunch of people were very effectively answering (and/or dismissing) these same questions by just getting on and doing it.

Anyway, like Andrew, I would be interested in others' impressions.

Cheers

Angus

2004-04-18T22:12:00.000Z

Angus,

Thanks for setting this up. Could you give us some idea of the blogs you have in mind? The ones listed on the blog home page that I looked at seem to be concerned with baseball, palm pilots and the like! However, even those blogs indicated how they can serve as central repositories for information on subjects of concern to particular interest groups.

More generally, I was interested in Julie’s e-mail that initiated this blog, and her observation about the AAG that there seemed to be a lot of soul searching at the Economic Geography sessions but more general enthusiasm at the Diverse Economies sessions. As I didn’t attend this year, it would be useful to get further comments and reflections on this. From looking at the programme at a distance, it seemed to me that the line-up of the Past, Present and Future was constructed as if the cultural turn in economic geography had never happened, but I may be misreading things from afar.

A final point – is it possible to see the people who were approached about this? That way it would be possible to see if some obvious candidates have been omitted by oversight.

Andrew

2004-04-16T15:31:00.000Z

Thanks Kevin. I was beginning to wonder if anyone was ever going to send anything in! For those still unsure as to how this thing works, it is interesting to look around at some of the other blogs out there. Most are bored students and assorted geeks who have discovered that a weblog allows them to publish their rambling and random thoughts for all to see. This is not what I had in mind for this!! When they work, however, they act as meeting points for groups like ourselves to exchange ideas in a public forum. Some of the firm/industry team blogs are particularly interesting not least because in a few cases they are alternative (and thoroughly capitalist!) economic spaces in their own right.
What, if anything, you post is up to you, but I would rather it was more intellectually substantial than your average email list (i.e. little more than job ads, conference announcements and so on). It was striking to me in Philadelphia that so many people were working on disparate economic spaces/activities without us having a regular forum for discussing the cross-currents, contradictions and/or similarities between them. We had lots of case studies but relatively little 'bigger picture' stuff. This might provide us with a means of bringing some of the many stories of diverse economies together in ways that will stimulate that bigger picture thinking.

So, don't be shy, post!

Angus

2004-04-15T16:36:00.000Z

Angus,

Thanks for setting this up. I only see your initial message and am wondering if that is all so far... This is my initial message just to see if this works.

Best,
Kevin

2004-04-13T15:45:00.000Z

Welcome to the Diverse Economies weblog.

The primary purpose of the blog is to act as a discussion and exchange forum for a group of academic geographers sharing a common interest in the diversity of actual and potential economic practices. Whilst it often appears that there are only a very limited range of practical and legitimate economic practices - i.e. those associated with neo-liberal economics and western capitalism - in the real world out there the practices, spaces and forms of economic practice are much more diverse. To give just one very obvious example, not everything we do is for profit; sometimes we act economically just for the good of others, to make ourselves feel better or just for the sheer hell of it. Because this blog is concerned with real economic practices access to it is open to anyone with an interest in, or an interesting story about, these issues. It is expected that much of the content will be primarily aimed at an academic audience, but participants are asked to also consider a wider readership and not to descend into jargon. The blog has no pregiven political agenda, takes nothing for granted and takes the widest possible definition of what counts as 'economic'.
If you wish to contribute to or join the list of contributors send an email to me as administrator at awgc1@le.ac.uk.

Enjoy!

Angus Cameron