Authority and experience

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Exhausted futures

This experimental photo essay responds to a growing foreboding that the future has been occupied, colonized, or destroyed. It is a methodological experiment with attunement and futurity, aiming not to reattune to authentic forms of temporality or to rediscover lost forms of imagination and memory, but to make creative use of our temporal misattunements and disconnections. Drawing on research in a postindustrial neighbourhood of Cardiff, the essay dwells on the new temporalities that might emerge from an inertia of time

Form, genre, voice, and authority in human geography: A speculative genealogy

This speculative genealogy of trends in the written forms of geographical scholarship, 2020–2043, explores the dramatic transformations in the discipline that came with a ‘neo-formalist’ turn towards critical reflection on and experiment with the formal aspects of geographical writing, including structure, genre, voice, and style. At the start of the 2020s, the forms, genres, and styles of academic geographical writing in Anglophone research journals were still rather homogeneous in form. Experiments with form were mostly restricted to sub-disciplinary silos. Following a series of important scholarly interventions, the discipline started to reflect more earnestly on the different kinds of authority that are claimed through the use of particular written forms and authorial personas. Whereas in the early decades of the 21st century, authorial personas were mostly confident, self-assured, decisive, and expressing a ‘mastery’ of concepts, the turn towards greater critical analysis of geography's written forms led to a proliferation of authorial personas, often rejecting personas associated with ‘mastery’ and instead exploring hesitation, anxiety, indecision, passivity, improvisation, unreliability, plurality, failure, humour, and self-deprecation, as ways of claiming different, more egalitarian forms of epistemic authority. This genealogy concludes that despite the problem of eclecticism, this turn towards greater methodological reflection on geography's written forms has greatly enriched the discipline from the mid-2020s until today

Resisting with authority? Anarchist laughter and the violence of truth

How is it possible to resist with authority? This article explores the role of humour and laughter in contesting authoritative knowledge and discourse. Bringing Michel Foucault’s account of ‘parrhesia’, or courageous truth-telling, into conversation with geographies of humour, laughter, and authority, the paper explores affective, non-representational modes of truth telling in early anarchist spatial culture. Focusing on an anarchist cabaret in 1890s Paris which humorously parodied the forced labour camps to which anarchists had been deported after the 1871 Paris Commune, as well as on the grotesque laughter of an executed anarchist’s severed head, the paper develops a new theorisation of how satire, parody, irony and the grotesque were deployed in militant truth-telling to articulate a new aesthetics of revolutionary authority

Experimental authority in the lecture theatre

Authority is one of the most problematic and ambiguous concepts in social and educational theory. Authority is a relation that is based on disparities of knowledge, expertise or experience. Drawing on teaching observations and interviews with undergraduate students and lecturers about their experiences of large-group teaching, I argue that in contrast to lecturers’ focus on professional authority and expertise, many students respond most strongly to experiential forms of authority in lectures. In other words, there is a disparity between students’ and educators’ conceptions of pedagogic authority. Through a discussion of a teaching intervention aiming to playfully experiment with authority relations in the lecture theatre, the paper contributes to a conceptualization of an emancipatory and experimental politics of educational authority, one where students are challenged, not only to think independently, but to see their own existence – the grounds for their actions – as an important intellectual problem to engage with. This requires moving beyond the dominant Weberian ideal types of educational authority (traditional, rational-legal, charismatic, and charismatic-intellectual) towards a fuller understanding of experiential forms of authority

Occupy the future

A remarkable feature of the Occupy movement has been the widespread calls for protesters to ‘Occupy the Future’, reclaiming time as a form of commons: something that is collectively practised, shared, and distributed. In one striking poster (Figure 7.1), a faceless businessman, coloured in red and with an angel’s halo and a devil’s tail, walks towards a little girl holding a large banner saying ‘Occupy your future’. The girl stands in front of a crowd of protesters, and stands firm on the bottom edge of the image. The businessman, by contrast, despite his size, is lost in the middle of the image, anchorless in a sea of grey. The little girl, through her age and gender, embodies conventions of purity and reproductive futurity; the crowd behind her offer the strength to overcome the satanic corporate world. The image articulates a theological temporality of innocence, salvation, and fulfilment

Clinical measurement of dart throwing motion of the wrist: variability, accuracy and correction

Despite being functionally important, dart throwing motion is difficult to assess accurately through goniometry. The objectives of this study were to describe a method for reliably quantifying the dart throwing motion using goniometric measurements within a healthy population. Wrist kinematics of 24 healthy participants were assessed using goniometry and optical motion tracking. Three wrist angles were measured at the starting and ending points of the motion: flexion-extension, radial-ulnar deviation and dart throwing motion angle. The orientation of the dart throwing motionplane relative to the flexion-extension axis ranged between 28° and 57° among the tested population. Plane orientations derived from optical motion capture differed from those calculated through goniometry by 25°. An equation to correct the estimation of the plane from goniometry measurements was derived. This was applied and differences in the orientation of the plane were reduced to non-significant levels, enabling dart throwing motion to be measured using goniometry alone