We’re pleased to announce a new event to highlight innovative scholarship by early-career political geographers at this year’s AAG: the Stanley D. Brunn Early Career Lecture.
This year’s inaugural lecture will be delivered by Dr. Md Azmeary Ferdoush (University of Eastern Finland). Dr. Ferdoush was the 2023 recipient of the Brunn Early Career Scholar Award, which recognizes a scholar within 10 years of their PhD whose contributions have generated new interest in political geography and/or opened up new areas of inquiry. His talk is titled “On the example: Giorgio Agamben, the exception, and the flip side of the coin.”
The lecture will take place on Tuesday, 4/16, from 1:20-2:40pm in 306A at the Convention Center. We also plan to stream and record the session via the AAG platform. Full details, including an abstract, are provided below.
This is the first event in what we hope will become a PGSG tradition. If you will be in Honolulu, please join us to celebrate and learn from the work of Dr. Ferdoush!
Session link: https://aag.secure-platform.com/aag2024/solicitations/57/sessiongallery/7116
Brunn Early Career Lecture in Political Geography
Date: 4/16/2024
Time: 1:20 PM – 2:40 PM
Room: 306A (Pālolo), Third Floor, Hawai’i Convention Center
Type: Panel
In-person modality: In-person streamed/hybrid
Recording Plan: This session is planning to be recorded.
Sponsor Group(s):
Political Geography Specialty Group
Organizer(s):
Meredith DeBoom University of South Carolina
Kate Coddington University at Albany (SUNY)
Chair(s):
Meredith DeBoom, University of South Carolina
Description:
This new lecture series highlights the research of the most recent recipient of the Political Geography Specialty Group’s annual Stanley D. Brunn Early Career Scholar Award (http://www.politicalgeography.org/awards/).
The 2024 lecture will be delivered by Md Azmeary Ferdoush, University of Eastern Finland.
Title: On the example: Giorgio Agamben, the exception, and the flip side of the coin.
Abstract:
Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of the exception marks a shift in geographical scholarship, especially in political geography. However, despite its equal significance, I argue that the example remains a surprisingly under-studied phenomenon, even though Agamben views it as the symmetrical opposite of the exception. In this paper, I engage with Agamben’s theorization of the sovereign not only through a reading of the exception but also through the example. The provocation of the paper is to step back from the point where Agamben positions these two as indistinguishable and to clearly differentiate between them. In doing so, I present three cases from Finland and Bangladesh that demonstrate how the exception is turned into an example by the same sovereign, how one sovereign’s exception may be depicted as an example by another, and finally, how both the exception and the example may coexist within the same sovereign rule. Ultimately, I call on geographers to examine the sovereign through the figures of both a homo sacer and a homo exemplar, as the sovereign’s power is manifested not only through the production of a state of exception but also equally through the creation of a state of example.
Keywords:
Giorgio Agamben, the example, the exception, the sovereign, exclusive inclusion, inclusive exclusion.