Historical Materialism | Sydney | Call for Papers
Riki Scanlan | September 3, 2026
Historical Materialism | Sydney | Liberation, Now: The Death of Liberal Order and the Fight for Another World | 11-12 February 2027 | Call for Papers
057
All posts by Riki Scanlan
Settler Space: a spatial history of nineteenth-century Sydney
Riki Scanlan | February 13, 2024
The critique of settler space is a pressing task in the context of movements for Indigenous justice in settler-colonial societies across the world. My recently awarded PhD thesis contributes to this critique by investigating the historical production of settler space, on the premise that [...]
0731
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 [...]
11202
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 [...]
01287
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 [...]
03274
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 [...]
0978
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 [...]
02528
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 [...]
0979
