Gerry Kearns
Biographic Data
| ID | 75337 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gerry Kearns |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gerry |
| FAMILY NAME | Kearns |
| SIGNATURE | KEARNS G |
| AFFILIATIONS | National University of Ireland, Maynooth |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6461-7064 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 64 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 404 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 64 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Critical Geopolitics 2.0
In his Oceans Rise, Empires Fall , Gerard Toal reformulates Critical Geopolitics in order to better address our planetary ecological crisis. A renewed attention to some of the classic texts of geopolitics, particularly those of Halford Mackinder, recuperates themes somewhat neglected in readings that focus upon the racist and imperialist framings of those works. This comment suggests that Marx rather than Mackinder might be the better point of de…
The geopolitical economy of the original condition
Placed outside theory, the 'original condition' provides theory's unquestioned foundation. For the discourses explicated as geoeconomics by Mallin and Sidaway, the points of departure include a capitalist economy on a world scale, and a set of states constituted around the pursuit of profit for private enterprises in turn understood as comprising the national economy. In this commentary I highlight how this version of the original condition has b…
Anticolonial Irish History
McVeigh and Rolston's Ireland, Colonialism and the Unfinished Revolution puts colonialism at the heart of Ireland's social and economic history, but also as essential to understanding modern Irish politics. The subjugation of Catholics in Northern Ireland was a consequence of the failure to end British control over the island and a perpetuation of ethnic rule characteristic of other white dominions. The incomplete reckoning with colonialism has s…
Scientific hubris and a squeamish necropolitics
The geopolitics of queer solidarity
Responding to the parallel that Tucker draws between the divergent geopolitical accounts of the decline of British power from the late-nineteenth century and the focus he proposes for sexuality in accounts of the current decline of US power, this commentary reconsiders the geopolitics of the solidarities around sexuality that Tucker highlights. I find the geopolitics of aid too colonial in their intent and effects to be called a solidarity. I ext…
The Catholic Footprint in Victorian Dublin
Religions make their mark in cities already bearing the legacies of earlier spiritual encodings, decodings and re-codings.We might describe these marks as a sort of footprint.The Catholic footprint, then, would, in the manner of the urban figure-ground relation, include the churches, schools, hospitals or other edifices that comprise the mission of the Catholic Church. 1 It would extend to various street-and place-names that, for many people, hav…
Leading Change
This article examines how the Dublin Bay North (DBN) Repeal the 8th activist group, an independent women-led, grassroots movement in the largest constituency in Ireland, practiced a collectivist approach to forms of ‘power-with’ and ‘power-to’ (Allen, 2018) that enabled the group to create an activist community based upon a feminist ethics of ‘caring-with’ (Tronto, 1993). In 2018 in Dublin, what had been a narrow majority in 1983 against abortion…
Topple the racists 2
In this, the second of two linked articles, I move from efforts to address the colonial legacy of our public spaces to consider the colonial marking of the spaces and institutional memory of the discipline of geography. I use the work and legacy of Halford Mackinder as exemplary of some of these colonial affiliations. By the standards of his time, Mackinder was an enthusiastic imperialist and a resolute racist. He believed that humanity comprised…
Critical Geopolitics/critical geopolitics 25 years on
Cambridge History of Ireland - Volimes I-IV
Topple the racists 1
The activism around 'Black Lives Matter' following the killing of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 in Minneapolis, USA, has brought further attention to the racism inscribed into the space and institutional memory of universities and of the discipline of geography itself. This, the first of two linked articles, looks at the cases made for dishonouring the memory of Edward Colston (1636–1721) and that of Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902). Through their philanth…
Vegetative States
The potato has been critical to plant–human assemblages both in South America and in Europe. A study of the capacities, or affordances of this plant within diverse political economies highlights its mutability in some circumstances and vulnerability in others. The contrasts are stark. In South America, peasant agriculture took the potato across a large and diverse ecumene allowing its elaboration into many varieties and sustaining extensive state…
In Transit
The structure of feeling that has been called the absurd suggests a placeless and irrational world. Yet such a structure of feeling is sometimes produced in response to quite a specific context. This essay considers the way absurdity arises and is treated within Anna Seghers’s Transit, a novel about the plight of refugees from Nazi Germany trying to leave unoccupied France after the signing of the Armistice between France and Germany in June 1940…
An accumulated wrong
Ireland's Brexit Problem
included in text
The territory of colonialism
The territory of colonialism. Territory, Politics, Governance. Stuart Elden writes of territory as a specific form of sovereignty, and has provided its genealogy through a study of European texts. These texts drew upon a Roman legacy and engaged the practical issue of the relations between papal and monarchical powers. This paper argues that colonialism was at least as important a context for the elaboration of territory as a strategy of sovereig…
Often Doublin' in the Green
Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce. Robert Brazeau and Derek Gladwin, eds. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2014. 348 pp. €39, £35 cloth (ISBN 978-1-78205-072-8).I have sp
Governing Vitalities and the Security State
The techniques by which states regulate life are both spatial and geopolitical. Foucault wrote of a broad transition from a state concern with territory focused on regulating threats such as famine and epidemics, to a modern concern with population that prioritised instead a set of everyday dangers that were to be averted by continual action for and upon individuals. In this paper I argue that territoriality is more geopolitical in character and …
Geopolitical Regression and The American Empire
Beyond the Legacy of Mackinder
For the Geopolitics Lecture at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting 2010, the paper examines the core features of Mackinder's geopolitical imaginary, reviews contemporary challenges to those elements and develops an alternative conception of space for a Progressive Geopolitics
The Butler Affair and the Geopolitics of Identity
In the wake of the Global War on Terror, Judith Butler has written of the 'precarity' of life, of the inevitable vulnerability of one's life in the face of the actions of strangers. Refusing to accept this, the United States has developed a form of nationalism that claims invulnerability for its citizens while treating as expendable the lives of distant others who even unwittingly associate with those who threaten the US homeland. Butler has exte…
Neil Smith
Reading Gerry Kearns' Geopolitics and Empire
Selling places
Culture, History, Capital - a critical introduction to selling places (C. Philo, G. Kearns). Historical geographies of urban life and modem consumption (N. Thrift, P. Glennie). The city as spectacle - Paris and the bicentenary of the French Revolution (G. Kearns). Trading history, reclaiming the past - the Crystal Palace as icon (M. Billings). Revisioning place: de- and re-constructing the image of the industrial city (B. Holcomb). The city as co…
A Queer New York
People inhabit many temporalities. There is a “somatic time” (Danon 2018) framed by bodily develop ment and by elective surgical and pharmaceutical technologies; we live, we are changed, we die. There are also the social times of shared contexts, often flattened when understood as a singular history. Beyond these, some understand their own biography as containing such a weighty caesura that with hindsight there is the time before, and the differe…
Geopolitics and Empire
This book examines the relations between two phenomena that are central to modern conceptions of international relations. Geopolitics is the understanding of the inter-relations between empires, states, individuals, private companies, NGOs, and multilateral agencies as these are expressed and shaped spatially. This view of the world achieved notoriety as the scientific basis claimed by Nazi ideologists of global conquest. However, under this or a…
Vital Geographies
Life has been problematized anew by recent social change and scientific innovation. There are important and little studied geographical dimensions to any such understanding of “the politics of life itself,” however. A geographical perspective involves, first, highlighting the spatial aspects of both states and capital, two rather neglected dimensions of vital politics. Elaborating the geographical constitution of vital politics entails further de…
The Imperial Subject
How do places shape and interact with subjectivity? By exploring how a change of location had implications for the way the effects of imperialism were registered, this paper shows how imperialism shaped subjectivity both at home and abroad. It takes the travels and mountain climbing of Mary Kingsley and Halford Mackinder as case studies for a consideration of gender as an effect and as a part of these processes
The political pivot of geography
The paper examines the geographical work of Peter Kropotkin and Halford Mackinder, making clear the political choices behind their very different geographical imaginations. Both writers responded directly to Keltie's report on geographical education and the paper uses these manifestoes as the starting point for an analysis of their relations to geographical thought and geographical institutions
Critical Geopolitics/critical geopolitics 25 years on
Geography, geopolitics and Empire
Halford Mackinder’s work is drawn upon repeatedly by those who would promote imperialism. Mackinder argued that geography could find a new relevance after the Age of Explorations by serving instead the cause of the New Imperialism. Mackinder’s geography was not only a science of empire, it was also a way of promoting the cause of Empire. In the face of the revival of Mackinder’s work allied with the promotion of an American Empire, we can turn to…
Closed Space and Political Practice
Turner's frontier thesis and Mackinder's heartland thesis are examples of closed-space thinking, Closed-space theories were current at the beginning of this century when public debate was penetrated both by biology and by geography. This conjuncture allowed spatial concepts to form the basis for the theoretical arguments advanced for political positions. The internal structure of closed-space theories allowed them to promote political conclusions…
Progressive Geopolitics
Conservative geopolitics has assumed that the primary agents that matter in world affairs are states and, furthermore, that the primary relations that structure the world are those of force. Progressive geopolitics needs to question both assumptions. In this article, I explore some of the things that matter other than states and some of the relations that count other than force
Governing Vitalities and the Security State
The techniques by which states regulate life are both spatial and geopolitical. Foucault wrote of a broad transition from a state concern with territory focused on regulating threats such as famine and epidemics, to a modern concern with population that prioritised instead a set of everyday dangers that were to be averted by continual action for and upon individuals. In this paper I argue that territoriality is more geopolitical in character and …
Naturalising Empire
At the start of the twentieth century, Halford Mackinder's geopolitical writings provided a powerful justification for British imperialism. He presented imperialism as a force of nature by emphasising historical rupture, essential conflict and geopolitical strategy. A century later, these same themes re-appear in contemporary accounts of our new world order and serve now to naturalise the imperial mission of the United States. A critical examinat…
Educate that holy hatred
Private property and public health reform in England 1830-1870
The Butler Affair and the Geopolitics of Identity
In the wake of the Global War on Terror, Judith Butler has written of the 'precarity' of life, of the inevitable vulnerability of one's life in the face of the actions of strangers. Refusing to accept this, the United States has developed a form of nationalism that claims invulnerability for its citizens while treating as expendable the lives of distant others who even unwittingly associate with those who threaten the US homeland. Butler has exte…
The population history of England
The Virtuous Circle of Facts and Values in the New Western History
The relations between facts and values in the writing of historical geography need to be mutual and reinforcing. I explore this point by examining the work of a group of historians who have foregrounded the relations between facts and values. These New Western Historians take up themes such as social justice, regionalism, and environmentalism that have been central to the concerns of historical geographers, but they are more explicit than many hi…
An ethnography of risk management amongst illicit drug injectors and its implications for the development of community-based interventions
Qualitative research which describes the social behaviour of illicit drug users has a key role to play in refining community- based interventions. Such research has been used for many years in drugs research, but during the AIDS epoch its practical application has been most fully realised. Data are presented to illustrate the way in which qualitative research can inform the development of outreach initiatives targeted towards illicit drug injecto…
Philosophy and human geography
Geography, ideology and social concern
Vegetative States
The potato has been critical to plant–human assemblages both in South America and in Europe. A study of the capacities, or affordances of this plant within diverse political economies highlights its mutability in some circumstances and vulnerability in others. The contrasts are stark. In South America, peasant agriculture took the potato across a large and diverse ecumene allowing its elaboration into many varieties and sustaining extensive state…
An accumulated wrong
History, geography and world-systems theory
Neil Smith
The Descent of Darwin
Noel Castree (2009) regrets that academic geographers let pass without much fuss, the sesquicentenary of the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species. In part, this is the voice of Madison Avenue admonishing the sales team for missing a glorious promotional opportunity: `buy evolution, get geography free'. Castree has also a more serious point to make in remarking that Darwin used geographical reasoning to fundamentally alter the way…
Metropolitan London
The geopolitical economy of the original condition
Placed outside theory, the 'original condition' provides theory's unquestioned foundation. For the discourses explicated as geoeconomics by Mallin and Sidaway, the points of departure include a capitalist economy on a world scale, and a set of states constituted around the pursuit of profit for private enterprises in turn understood as comprising the national economy. In this commentary I highlight how this version of the original condition has b…
Historical geography at the I.B.G
Geography, ideology and social concern
Metropolitan London
Geography and the state
Philosophy and human geography
The government of Victorian London 1855–1899
Making space for Marx
Closed Space and Political Practice
Turner's frontier thesis and Mackinder's heartland thesis are examples of closed-space thinking, Closed-space theories were current at the beginning of this century when public debate was penetrated both by biology and by geography. This conjuncture allowed spatial concepts to form the basis for the theoretical arguments advanced for political positions. The internal structure of closed-space theories allowed them to promote political conclusions…
Historical Geography
Historical geography
History, geography and world-systems theory
Private property and public health reform in England 1830-1870
Death in the time of cholera
The population history of England
Historical geography
Mothers of Misery
Historical geography
Le handicap urbain et le déclin de la mortalité en Angleterre et au Pays de Galles, 1851-1900
L'article est une recherche sur les causes de la mortalité en Angleterre et au pays de Galles dans la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle, sur leur évolution et sur les différences très marquée entre villes et campagnes : le handicap urbain. Le problème est de bien mesurer les causes de la mortalité, ce qui suppose une recherche plus approfondie que celles qui ont été menées jusqu'ici sur le rôle des différentes maladies et sur la définition des circo…
Urbanising Britain
List of figures List of tables Preface Notes on contributors Introduction: class, community and the processes of urbanisation Gerry Kearns and Charles W. J. Withers 1. Biology, class and the urban penalty Gerry Kearns 2. Public space and local communities: the example of Birmingham, 1840-1880 Bill Bramwell 3. Class, culture and migrant identity: Gaelic Highlanders in urban Scotland Charles W. J. Withers 4. The country and the city: sexuality and …
Death in Childbirth
An ethnography of risk management amongst illicit drug injectors and its implications for the development of community-based interventions
Qualitative research which describes the social behaviour of illicit drug users has a key role to play in refining community- based interventions. Such research has been used for many years in drugs research, but during the AIDS epoch its practical application has been most fully realised. Data are presented to illustrate the way in which qualitative research can inform the development of outreach initiatives targeted towards illicit drug injecto…
The Imperial Subject
How do places shape and interact with subjectivity? By exploring how a change of location had implications for the way the effects of imperialism were registered, this paper shows how imperialism shaped subjectivity both at home and abroad. It takes the travels and mountain climbing of Mary Kingsley and Halford Mackinder as case studies for a consideration of gender as an effect and as a part of these processes
The Virtuous Circle of Facts and Values in the New Western History
The relations between facts and values in the writing of historical geography need to be mutual and reinforcing. I explore this point by examining the work of a group of historians who have foregrounded the relations between facts and values. These New Western Historians take up themes such as social justice, regionalism, and environmentalism that have been central to the concerns of historical geographers, but they are more explicit than many hi…
Graham Smith (1953–99)
Graham Smith died on 23 April. He was 46 years \nold, and had been suffering for some time with \nundetected carcinomas, only discovered during his \nbrief spell in hospital preceding his death. At this \ntime, his love and regrets were for his wife, \nMarilyn, his son, Alex, and other members of his \nfamily. His pride and content with his academic \nwork were both evident and justified
Constructions of the Social
Political science (45 works) · Sociology (38 works) · Law (36 works) · Politics (31 works) · History (26 works) · Geography (25 works) · Law (21 works) · Geopolitics (16 works) · History (16 works) · Philosophy (15 works)