Please join us on February 10 from 4pm-5:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Society Despite the State: Reimagining Geographies of Order, by Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre, Assistant Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley, and Anthony Ince, Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Human Geography at Cardiff University and British Academy Mid-Career Fellow.
Professor Barrera de la Torre will be in-person to introduce the book, and Professor Ince will present remotely. The authors will be joined in conversation by Dylan John Riley, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley; and Anna Stilz, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. Jake Kosek, Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley, will moderate.
The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public.
Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, and the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry.
About the Book
The logic of the state has come to define social and spatial relations, embedding itself into our understandings of the world and our place in it. Anthony Ince and Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre challenge this logic as the central pivot around which knowledge and life orbit, by exposing its vulnerabilities, contradictions and, crucially, alternatives.
Society Despite the State disrupts the dominance of state-centred ways of thinking by presenting a radical political geography approach inspired by anarchist thought and practice. The book draws on a broad range of voices that have affinities with Western anarchism but also exceed it.
This book challenges radicals and scholars to confront and understand the state through a way of seeing and a set of intellectual tools that the authors call ‘post-statism’ In de-centring the state’s logics and ways of operating, the authors incorporate a variety of threads to identify alternative ways to understand and challenge statism’s effects on our political imaginations.
Panelists
Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre is an Assistant Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley. His interests are at the intersections of political and historical geographies, political ecologies, and critical cartographies. Professor Barrera de la Torre’s work focuses on peoples’ relation to their land/territory/landscape while engaging wide-reaching environmental policies, colonialism, and statism. His research is grounded on collaborative methods, mainly social mapping, and videography, highlighting the multiple geographies and ways of knowing that can inform epistemic and social justice efforts. Professor Barrera de la Torre has worked closely with communities in Oaxaca for over a decade on a range of issues, such as forest conservation, agrarian change, social mapping, and local knowledges. Currently, he is in the final stage of a feature documentary film exploring the consequences of and experiences around the international carbon offset market in Indigenous and campesino communities in Mexico.
Anthony Ince is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Human Geography at Cardiff University and British Academy Mid-Career Fellow. He is a political and social geographer with a particular interest in agency, social movements, and migration. His current research explores the role of civic virtue and citizenship in the dynamics of European far-right and anti-fascist struggles. Professor Ince has been central in developing the field of anarchist geographies and serves as the co-lead of Cardiff Interdisciplinary Research on Anti-Fascism and the Far-Right (CIRAF).
Dylan John Riley is a Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Professor Riley studies capitalism, socialism, democracy, authoritarianism, and knowledge regimes in a broad comparative and historical perspective. His first book, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania 1870-1945 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), argues that fascist regimes arose paradoxically on the basis of strong civil societies in the pre-fascist period. A second book, How Societies and States Count: A Comparative Genealogy of Censuses, argues against state centered accounts of official information that censuses work best where there is intense interaction between state and society.
Anna Stilz is a Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State (Princeton, 2009), which dealt with questions about the moral importance of political citizenship and state authority. Her second book, Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford, 2019), investigates whether there is a good ethical justification for organizing our world as a system of sovereign territorial states, and explores the limits to a state’s justified power over its territorial boundaries. Professor Stilz is working on a new book project on the challenges that climate change poses to the territorial states-system, including climate displacement and the large-scale changes in land use and global governance that may be necessary to adapt to a warming climate.
Jake Kosek is an Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley. He is coauthor of Race, Nature and the Politics of Difference (Duke University Press, 2003), which explores the intersections of critical theories of race and nature, and author of Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico (Duke University Press, 2006), an ethnography that examines the cultural politics of nature, race, and nation amid violent struggles over forests in northern New Mexico. Professor Kosek’s current research builds on his past work on nature, politics, and difference, using conceptual insights not only from geography but also anthropology, science studies, and theories of history to develop new approaches to natural history as both an object of critical inquiry and a conceptual tool.