The Parrhesia Project

A Collective publication project by Goldsmiths Geographies seminar on parrhesia, or ‘fearless speech', from Foucault to neoliberalism. 

Read  essay 'Parrhesia—then what?' (pdf)

  Publication website    

Faulkner in Sinai

A new essay revisiting older thoughts between Sinai and Faulkner

William Faulkner is not remembered as a geographer. Yet, his fiction relay a keen sense of geography, drawing maps with every story he wrote. There, the place is not a backdrop for the the story but the other way around: the story charts new territories where characters and events become signposts charting coordinates on the new topography. There, places become folds of knowledge that would disappear in their
present form once the configuration of knowledge changes. 

  Read essay (PDF)

Tourism, Space and Ideology

A new essay on Ibraaz, an online magazine on visual culture in the Middle East. The essay tackles the notion of ‘wilderness’ and the development in tourism in Sinai. The essay is part of the book project Go Down, Moses: a book on South Sinai. 

How to End a Revolution?

A conference at Harvard calls for an answer to the question.

My immediate response was: call for elections.

    ... read

On the Ethics of Grant-making  

Work by photographer Larissa Sansour has been removed from the 2011 Lacoste Elysée Prize shortlist. The removal has caused great raw in the art scene blatant act of censorship. According to the artist, the sponsor, Lacoste, regarded the photographs as too ‘pro-Palestinian’. In its official statement Lacoste defaulted to the safety net argument: the work does not conform to the theme of the exhibition, ‘Happiness’. But with such a catch-all theme, combined with the un-denotative nature of photography as we got to know it, it is impossible to vindicate the sponsor’s argument. In this regards, the proposition of being pro-Palestinian becomes a more plausible explanation for the act of censorship. Indeed one can see the work as politically-charged. Visions of Jerusalem as symbolic space for a lost utopia coupled with the evocative title ‘Nation Estate’, one can’t fail to regard the work as pro-Palestinianian.

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