Nonauthoritarian Authority: Cities, Materiality, and the Aesthetics of Power
About this ebook
Engaging with key philosophical debates around materiality, experience, feeling, agency, and landscape, Nonauthoritarian Authority stages a series of experiments with thinking, reading, researching, and writing nonauthoritarian authority. Dramatising a speculative search for barely sensed, dispersed authorities, Brigstocke’s experiments in thinking explore the intrinsically spatial nature of authority, through empirical studies of violent urban borders in Rio de Janeiro, colonial material infrastructures in Hong Kong, monumental architecture in Paris, and everyday spaces of encounter in the UK.
Offering an intricate and playful reflection on the relationship between authority, urban forms, and writing, each exercise in thinking links form and genre to a distinctive way of imagining authority. Each chapter simultaneously critiques a form of authoritarian authority and searches for a new, nonauthoritarian authority within the rubble of the old.
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About the author
Julian Brigstocke is a Reader in Human Geography at Cardiff University, UK. His interests focus on the spatialities of authority, power, and violence, through post- and decolonial, feminist, and nonrepresentational lenses. He is interested in experimental, embodied, and creative research methods, including experiments with the forms of academic writing.
