Uninhabited Spaces

In her provocative paper "A Pornography of Birth: Crossing the Moral Boundaries", New Zealand geography professor Robyn Longhurst asserts that "The moral boundary between what is considered ‘normal’ and what is considered ‘perverse’ is constantly struggled over and is temporally and spatially specific. [U]nderstanding sexualized acts and spaces is multifaceted and contradictory since (hetero)sexuality does not stand alone but is entangled with gender, race, ethnicity, social class, age and so on." I am intrigued by philosophy and geography intersecting in a converation about the role of space in our epistemologies, and the impact that very understanding may have on our moral claims and subsequent (un)ethical behaviour. We often talk about "Other" as a conceptual term, but it appears that we really see "Other" as a physicality as well. I think this helps explain how it is that our control of our behaviour in our day-to-day spaces becomes affected...

In June 2002, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield delivered the following speech to a crowd of reporters who were asking about the progress of the war on terrorism: "The message is that there are no 'knowns'. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also known unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that's basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of these known unknowns...There's another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". History now affords us the truth behind Rumsfield's sophistry; that the WMDs of Iraq were imagined and that the so-called "war on terror" is a fu...

March 9 marks the 20th anniversary of the release of U2's iconic album "The Joshua Tree". The album stood out among its peers for its imagery, lyrical allusions (hope remains yet in the moral, spiritual, and economic desert of America) and for its singular sound. Amidst the banality of 1980s synthezised pop this album yearned to mean something more. In a 2001 VH-1 poll of 40,000 voters, "The Joshua Tree" was named the top all-time greatest album, beating out some outstanding work from the usual competition such as The Beatles, Radiohead, Oasis, Stevie Wonder, and Nirvana. A lovely tribute to the staying power of what is for me a very special album. And just this week, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame released its list of 200 essential rock albums, and "The Joshua Tree" came in at #5 (after "Sgt Pepper", "Dark Side of the Moon", "Thriller", and "Led Zeppelin IV"). A longtime U2 fan, I do consider "The Joshua ...