Velcro City Tourist Board

velcro city tourist board

a blog by Paul Graham Raven

science fiction / social theory / climate futures / infrastructure / utopian narratology / sometimes cats

neither spectacular nor instantaneous but instead incremental

Medium-length essay here by Rob Nixon, whose “slow violence” concept was briefly introduced to me back in early March at a little symposium thing in Utrecht; I’ve acquired the book, obvs, but it’ll likely be a while before I get to it, and I wanted to put up a quick placeholder for it on the…
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Climate Change 🙜 Criticism 🙜 Infrastructural Theory 🙜 Social Theory

14 May 2020
canned applause

Pandemic humour, Polish style, via a UK colleague whose roots are in that country: Translation: “Doctors are clapping disease out of the patient. Firefighters are clapping the fire out of the forest. The teacher is clapping knowledge into pupils.” For all its ongoing troubles, Poland is apparently still a country capable of recognising performative bullshit…
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General

8 May 2020
unknowable differences populating an imagined horizon

Struggling to write on sociological topics (or indeed on anything that engages significantly with social dimensions, whether academically or otherwise)? David Beer is, too: … beyond the problems of the speed of change and a lack of focus, there is also a sense that the thing I’d normally be analysing – society – will not…
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Social Theory 🙜 Sociology 🙜 Writing

7 May 2020
06MAY20 / accessions

Some goodies from Meatspace Press.
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Accessions

6 May 2020
In search of a dialectical utopianism : Harvey (2000), Spaces of Hope

Harvey, D. (2000). Spaces of hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni. Press. Focussing here, for reasons presumably obvious to long-term readers of this site, on Chapters 8 (“The spaces of Utopia”, p133-81) and 9 (“Dialectical utopianism”, p182-95) of what is now a vintage part of the David Harvey canon. Reading these pieces really brought home just how…
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Politics 🙜 Reading Journal 🙜 Social Theory

1 May 2020

Who is Paul Graham Raven?

“… who, with raving lips uttering things mirthless, unbedizened, and unperfumed, reaches over a thousand years with [his] voice, thanks to the god in [him].”

Paul is consulting writer, researcher, theorist and foresight practitioner, as well as an author and critic of science fiction literature. More details can be found on the About page of this blog.