Migration,the Urban Periphery,and the Politics of Migrant Lives

This paper explores the politics of migration through a focus on labor migration regimes and the urban lives of migrants in the Seoul Metropolitan Region of South Korea. In particular, it draws attention to the ways in which migrant lives highlight the limits of the contemporary emphasis on control in migration management regimes. The paper contends that while migration management certainly reworks the socio‐legal status of migrants, the desire for control is often displaced in the everyday presence and practices of migrants as urban residents. In order to develop this argument I focus on the notion of the urban periphery as a spatio‐temporal configuration that manifests marginalization but is also potentially generative, innovative and destabilizing. The paper proceeds by exploring three dimensions of the periphery: (1) the mobile commons that emerges in everyday life; (2) the process of becoming undocumented and the subversion of control; and (3) the tactics of recognition that challenge the peripheral location of migrants. In each case the focus on the urban periphery draws attention to the importance of visibility and invisibility in migration, to the uneven spatio‐temporal configuration of migrant lives in the city, and to the ways in which migrant desires constitute a politics that exceeds what is normatively expected of them.     

Feminist Forays in the City: Imbalance and Intervention in Urban Research Methods

In this paper I argue that imbalances and silences persist in urban research. In particular, there is insufficient attention to anti‐racist and feminist theoretical, methodological, and empirical insights. Intersectional and materialist urban analyses that take difference seriously are under‐represented, while patriarchy, privilege, and positivism still linger. As a partial and aspirational remedy, I propose a “Feminist Partial Political Economy of Place” (FPEP) approach to urban research. FPEP is characterized by: (1) attention to gendered, raced, and intersectional power relations, including affinities and alliances; (2) reliance on partial, place‐based, materialist research that attends to power in knowledge production; (3) emphasis on feminist concepts of relationality to examine connections among sites, scales, and subjects, and to emphasize “life” and possibility; and (4) the use of theoretical toolkits to observe, interpret and challenge material‐discursive power relations. My own critique and research centers on North American cities, but FPEP approaches might help produce more robust, inclusive, and explanatory urban research in varied geographic contexts.     

Pursuing Urban Commons: Politics and Alliances in Community Land Trust Activism in East London

Community land trust (CLT) practices contribute to analyses of the commons in both conceptual and on‐the‐ground ways. As collective action organizations, CLTs emphasize common land stewardship and resist traditional land speculation and development practices through the mitigation or halting of land value inflation. This paper traces the activist efforts of the East London CLT organization, one of Britain's first urban CLTs, in securing common land in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets, and examines their navigation of political decisions and creation of alliances. Although this process has been challenging as a result of neoliberal governance and private development interests, the East London CLT's trajectory demonstrates the frustrations of activism within these contexts but also the small successes in the pursuit and establishment of urban commons.     

The Last of Australian Imperial Dreams for the Southwest Pacific: Paul Hasluck,the Department of Territories and a Greater Melanesia in 1960

This paper is a study of the vision held at the beginning of the 1960s by Paul Hasluck, the minister for external territories, and his department of the path to decolonisation for Melanesia. Faced by the ongoing West New Guinea crisis, Hasluck and his officials proposed to keep the western part of New Guinea out of Indonesian hands by expanding Australia’s empire, step by step, to include most of Melanesia. This greater Melanesian empire would eventually be guided to self-government. The proposal stood in a long line of ideas by Pacific-minded Australians going back for 100 years for an expanded Australian empire in the southwest Pacific. Consequently the Menzies cabinet’s rejection of Hasluck’s proposal was not just an important step towards changing its policy towards WNG; it marked the end to a century of Australian dreams and designs of a greater formal empire in the southwest Pacific.     

Doxographical or Philosophical History of Philosophy: On Michael Frede's Precepts for Writing the History of Philosophy

Summary

In a series of articles from the 1980s and 1990s, Michael Frede analysed the history of histories of philosophy written over the last three hundred years. According to Frede, modern scholars have degenerated into what he calls a ‘doxographical’ mode of writing the history of philosophy. Instead, he argued, these scholars should write what he called ‘philosophical’ history of philosophy, first established in the last decades of the seventeenth century but since abandoned. In the present article it is argued that Frede's reconstruction of the history of histories of philosophy is historically problematic.     

Crossing the Great Divides: Hans Aarsleff's Lessons for Nineteenth-Century Intellectual Historians

SUMMARY

This essay discusses Hans Aarsleff's long battle to demonstrate the importance of the French and British thinkers of the mid-eighteenth century to the development of modern linguistic thought. Contesting claims that German scholars were the first to develop historicised theories of language, Aarsleff, along with his Princeton colleagues Lionel Gossman and Anthony Grafton, helped pioneer longue durée studies of the history of philology and of historiography that cross national boundaries as well as the so-called Sattelzeit (stretching from about 1780 until 1820). Although the importance of his work was, for a long time, little appreciated by modern intellectual historians, this essay argues that it is time that we fully learned Aarsleff's lessons.     

A Great American Scholar of the Royal Navy? The Disputed Legacy of Arthur Marder Revisited

This article examines the scholarly reputation of the late Professor Arthur J. Marder. Once universally acclaimed as the doyen of historians of the Royal Navy in the First World War era, in recent times his work has come in for sustained criticism from a small group of revisionist historians, who not only dispute his conclusions, but argue that his entire methodology and approach were fundamentally flawed. This article assesses the specific charges of inadequate scholarship levelled against Marder by these revisionist historians and concludes that, while aspects of Marder's analysis may well be open to dispute, there are no grounds for attacking his scholarly integrity. On the contrary, he thoroughly deserves his reputation as a pioneering and painstaking scholar.