Marginalia of a revolution: naming popular ethnography through William W. Bunge's Fitzgerald

Having recently been writing about the geographies of survival, here in this brief essay I extrapolate a methodological and ethico-political sensibility from the scattered fragments of my personal interactions with foundational radical geographer William W. Bunge. This essay is intended to reconcile the marginalization that Bunge experienced, and experiences today, within geography, with the methodological approach he pioneered, even as he is often not recognized for doing so. An exploration through a pile of notes, electronic voice files, and faxes helped me to think through lived forms of intellectual marginalia via the life and methods of William Bunge and possibilities that exist for recovering his method of ‘popular ethnography’.     

Postneoliberalism and its Malcontents

Abstract: The onset of the global financial crisis in 2008 has been widely interpreted as a fundamental challenge to, if not crisis of, neoliberal governance. Here, we explore some of the near‐term and longer‐run consequences of the economic crisis for processes of neoliberalization, asking whether we have been witnessing the terminal unraveling of neoliberalism as a form of social, political, and economic regulation. In many ways a creature of crisis, could neoliberalism now be falling to a crisis of its own making? Answering this question is impossible, we argue, without an adequate understanding of the nature of neoliberalization and its evolving sociospatial manifestations. These are more than definitional niceties. The prospects and potential of efforts to move genuinely beyond neoliberalism must also be considered in this light.     

Documentation of the Yazdi-Bandi Vault at the Plaza of Sadr-e-A’zam,Tehran

ABSTRACT

This article intends to document a previously unsighted sample of yazdi-bandi over an outlying structure in the old Bazaar fabric of Tehran, namely a plaza known as Timché-ye Sadre-A’zam. Recent renovations of the plaza have concealed the work under an austerely flat drop ceiling in gypsum. The old yazdi ceiling was only accidentally discovered by the authors following the trail of hearsay and local legends. The plaza is of late 19th century construction, a period that witnessed an evolutionary and aesthetic climax in all aspects of architectural geometry in the country, including the various branches of kaarbandi. With the limitations that the authors faced, basic tools were used in the scanning and surveillance of the ceiling. Photographs were collected using a wide-angle lens. They served as raw data for the reconstruction of the yazdi plan in AutoCAD, This article presents the findings, and for a better understanding of the entire premise by the reader, supplements them with preambles on the evolutionary history, geometrical analysis, a preview of the state of scholarship and a collection of relevant terms and concepts in the study of yazdi, in particular, and kaarbandi as a whole.