Toward collective intellectual labour; or, How seven critical scholars got along with each other and co-authored a journal article

Sirma Altun | Christian Caiconte | Madelaine Moore | Adam David Morton | Matthew Ryan | Riki Scanlan | Austin Smidt | June 7, 2022

Through the Past & Present Reading Group we have experienced an organic, collective strategy of reading and writing that makes collective intellectual labour a little easier, and much more fun. This has come to the fore most recently in both our collective reading of György Lukács’ History and [...]

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Travelling with Lukács

Sirma Altun | Christian Caiconte | Madelaine Moore | Adam David Morton | Matthew Ryan | Riki Scanlan | Austin Smidt | May 31, 2022

We have travelled with Lukács. Despite the global pandemic conditions of lockdown induced by Covid-19, as a group of scholars forged through collective intellectual labour, we each picked up György Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness and travelled, at least intellectually. Based in [...]

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Ten Questions on Negative Totality

Chris O'Kane | Riki Scanlan | Anna Sturman | January 18, 2022

The Past & Present Reading Group recently held a workshop on ‘negative totality,’ read through the work of Chris O’Kane, who has developed and defended that concept within contemporary critical theory. In lieu of his attendance (due to our failure to achieve space-time compression), we have [...]

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Special Workshop on ‘Negative Ontology’

Riki Scanlan | Anna Sturman | September 9, 2021

During the Past & Present Reading Group's progress through Kohei Saito's volume Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (Monthly Review Press, 2017), we noticed a lurking, recurring reference to 'negative ontology'. This workshop is an [...]

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Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development

Riki Scanlan | August 21, 2019

Over the last year, the Past & Present Reading Group has taken a spatial turn, with a triad of three books of spatial theory from different disciplinary and theoretical frameworks: Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, Doreen Massey’s Spatial Divisions of Labour, and most [...]

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Review of Doreen Massey: Critical Dialogues

Riki Scanlan | December 4, 2018

Doreen Massey: Critical Dialogues recognises that just as there is no point of departure for a dialogue, there is no point of conclusion. Dialogues with Massey continue even in her absence. The book spans twenty-six chapters, along with a variant on the introduction to the companion The [...]

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Reflections from Honours in Political Economy

Riki Scanlan | June 26, 2018

This set of reflections concludes this series of “five minute honours theses” produced by members of the 2017 Political Economy Honours cohort. The motivation for running this series emerged from the desire to see our research and ideas reach a broader audience than a couple of markers and [...]

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A Fair Go For The West? Capital accumulation, urban planning, and the Greater Sydney Commission

Riki Scanlan | March 22, 2018

How can we best account for the recent formation of Sydney’s metropolitan planning authority, the Greater Sydney Commission (GSC)?

This question guided my Honours research last year into the latest evolution of Sydney’s planning regime. My argument situates the Greater Sydney [...]

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