Keith Woodward
Biographic Data
| ID | 3692692 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Keith Woodward |
| GIVEN NAMES | Keith |
| FAMILY NAME | Woodward |
| SIGNATURE | WOODWARD K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0637-0275 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1032 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
March of the kitten herders
Everything is affective; every thing is infrastructural. Or: (1) affectivity is the relational force of materiality and (2) a thing is the convergence of a range of relations and is itself a compositional element of others. Or again: if affect and infrastructure associate, it is on the order of what, in 2010, I called ‘abrupt conditions’ and tend, sometimes, toward the organization of a ‘site’. This dynamic system is ontologically ‘flat’ in the s…
Geophilosophy
Geophilosophy employs a range of concepts to reimagine the discipline of philosophy. Invented by Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and Félix Guattari (1930–1992), the field has grown and been elaborated by many thinkers. After reviewing the genesis of geophilosophy and its uptake in human geography through the 1990s, several key aspects are described: becoming rather than being; affect, virtuality, and the nonrepresentational; space; and minor theory. F…
Speed and space: Rates of motion in health and wellbeing
The posthumanist turn in health and wellbeing research has paid attention to the qualities of space, particularly through the work of geographers. Although a range of these qualities have been explicitly articulated and well explored, a clear omission in the literature has been ‘speed’ - an important quality in its own right, and an element of all other qualities. This review paper takes a good look at speed. First it considers what speed is and …
Geontographies: On Elizabeth Povinelli'sGeontologies: A Requiem for Late Liberalism
This forum brings together perspectives from geography, philosophy, and political science to reflect on Elizabeth Povinelli's, 2016 book, Geontologies: A Requiem for Late Liberalism. Contributions come from both junior and senior scholars across a range of interests and backgrounds. Elizabeth Povinelli's Geontologies is the fourth in her series on Dwelling in Late Liberalism that began in 1994 with Labor's Lot: The Power, History and Culture of A…
Translating affect
Geophilosophy
Geophilosophy was created by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and Félix Guattari (1930–1992). By adapting geographic concepts that emphasize proximity, contingency, interdisciplinarity, and bottom‐up modes of thinking, it overturns top‐down understandings of philosophical practice and linear histories of ideas. Geophilosophy has also influenced numerous theoretical and practical developments in geography, such as nonrepresentati…
Poststructuralism/Poststructural Geographies
Emerging in the late 1960s, poststructuralism initiated multiple political, epistemological, and ontological critiques of Western thought. Growing out of and away from the structuralist movement, it developed concepts such as difference and power to challenge systems that naturalize unevenness, prejudice, oppression, and exploitation. Many of its interventions have since been widely absorbed by the humanities and social sciences. Poststructuralis…
State reason and state affect
The speculative geography of Orson Welles
Orson Welles' experimental 'essay film', F for Fake (1973), captures in short form what the prodigious director's life expressed in grander gestures: a speculative geography for an accident-prone cinema. Documenting the fakery techniques of famed 20th-century art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving, the film has been widely read as a showcase of Welles' own 'charlatanism'. Indeed, even Deleuze's philosophy of cinema claims tha…
Mediated Geographies Across Arizona: Learning Literacy Skills Through Filmmaking
Impracticality and critique in a problematic field
Here I discuss how Guattari’s ‘impracticality,’ as Gerlach and Jellis put it, harbours rich models for political and theoretical practice. I describe these in terms of Guattari’s participation in militant activism and anti-psychiatric organizations, as well as his cross-disciplinary theoretical engagements, all of which exemplify nuanced navigations of ‘problematic fields’. After surveying what these are and how they work in Guattarian philosophy…
Touching Like a State
This paper offers a theorization of how the state touches. Through an analysis of the extensive 2011 protests over Wisconsin Senate Bill 11, we interrogate the relatively non‐violent interactions between police and protesters during the 17‐day occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol building. On display there were diverse police deployments of “soft” force and haptic touching, technologies that enabled officers to subtly affect the movements an…
One Sinister Hurricane: Simondon and Collaborative Visualization
This article offers a theory and methodology for understanding and interpreting collaborations that involve visualization technologies. The collaboration discussed here is technically a geovisualization—an immersive, digital “fulldome” film of Hurricane Katrina developed by the Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, produced in collaboration with atmospheric scientists at the National Center for…
Affect, state theory, and the politics of confusion
The politics of autonomous space
This paper offers a further exploration of ‘flat ontology’, an account of the world that takes the immanence of localized, material process to be fundamentally different from and ontologically prior to transcendent, structured, and formal treatments of space. Our previous work in this area aimed at developing the concept of the site – via site ontology – as an ‘event-space’ that describes the differential contours and pressures of aggregating and…
Of eagles and flies: Orientations Toward the Site
The macro‐micro distinction is one of the most powerful in the human and physical sciences. In this article we challenge the macro by positing an alternative that recognises the intricacies and complexities of material geographies. We employ the Latin proverb – Aquila non captat muscas (Eagles don't catch flies) – to epitomise our position. Instead of looking to general theory – the bird's eye view – we argue for interrogating the ontological and…
The Condition of Postmodernity (1989): David Harvey
On the other Hand … Dialectics
Downsizing Wal-Mart: A Reply to Prytherch
We are grateful to the editors of Urban Geography for inviting us to respond to the recent article by David Prytherch (2007), “Urban Geography With Scale: Rethinking Scale Via Wal-Mart’s Geography of Big Things.” In his essay, Prytherch criticized our article, “Human Geography Without Scale” (Marston et al., 2005), in which we argued that scale is an irredeemably chaotic concept, one more suggestive of a pervasive hierarchical epistemology—wherei…
Flattening Ontologies of Globalization: The Nollywood Case
In this article we offer some criticisms regarding the spatial ontologies that have underwritten theories of globalization. We evaluate different approaches to understanding their workings, each of which must grapple with the problem of connecting the local and the global, and contrast these to that of our recent work aimed at elaborating a ‘flat ontology’. The central feature of this alternative ontology is the site: a material localization char…
Situating Flatness
Human geography without scale
The concept of scale in human geography has been profoundly transformed over the past 20 years. And yet, despite the insights that both empirical and theoretical research on scale have generated, there is today no consensus on what is meant by the term or how it should be operationalized. In this paper we critique the dominant - hierarchical - conception of scale, arguing it presents a number of problems that cannot be overcome simply by adding o…
Deleuze and geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary
Human geography without scale
The concept of scale in human geography has been profoundly transformed over the past 20 years. And yet, despite the insights that both empirical and theoretical research on scale have generated, there is today no consensus on what is meant by the term or how it should be operationalized. In this paper we critique the dominant - hierarchical - conception of scale, arguing it presents a number of problems that cannot be overcome simply by adding o…
Situating Flatness
The politics of autonomous space
This paper offers a further exploration of ‘flat ontology’, an account of the world that takes the immanence of localized, material process to be fundamentally different from and ontologically prior to transcendent, structured, and formal treatments of space. Our previous work in this area aimed at developing the concept of the site – via site ontology – as an ‘event-space’ that describes the differential contours and pressures of aggregating and…
Of eagles and flies: Orientations Toward the Site
The macro‐micro distinction is one of the most powerful in the human and physical sciences. In this article we challenge the macro by positing an alternative that recognises the intricacies and complexities of material geographies. We employ the Latin proverb – Aquila non captat muscas (Eagles don't catch flies) – to epitomise our position. Instead of looking to general theory – the bird's eye view – we argue for interrogating the ontological and…
Affect, state theory, and the politics of confusion
Flattening Ontologies of Globalization: The Nollywood Case
In this article we offer some criticisms regarding the spatial ontologies that have underwritten theories of globalization. We evaluate different approaches to understanding their workings, each of which must grapple with the problem of connecting the local and the global, and contrast these to that of our recent work aimed at elaborating a ‘flat ontology’. The central feature of this alternative ontology is the site: a material localization char…
Touching Like a State
This paper offers a theorization of how the state touches. Through an analysis of the extensive 2011 protests over Wisconsin Senate Bill 11, we interrogate the relatively non‐violent interactions between police and protesters during the 17‐day occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol building. On display there were diverse police deployments of “soft” force and haptic touching, technologies that enabled officers to subtly affect the movements an…
Geontographies: On Elizabeth Povinelli'sGeontologies: A Requiem for Late Liberalism
This forum brings together perspectives from geography, philosophy, and political science to reflect on Elizabeth Povinelli's, 2016 book, Geontologies: A Requiem for Late Liberalism. Contributions come from both junior and senior scholars across a range of interests and backgrounds. Elizabeth Povinelli's Geontologies is the fourth in her series on Dwelling in Late Liberalism that began in 1994 with Labor's Lot: The Power, History and Culture of A…
The speculative geography of Orson Welles
Orson Welles' experimental 'essay film', F for Fake (1973), captures in short form what the prodigious director's life expressed in grander gestures: a speculative geography for an accident-prone cinema. Documenting the fakery techniques of famed 20th-century art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving, the film has been widely read as a showcase of Welles' own 'charlatanism'. Indeed, even Deleuze's philosophy of cinema claims tha…
One Sinister Hurricane: Simondon and Collaborative Visualization
This article offers a theory and methodology for understanding and interpreting collaborations that involve visualization technologies. The collaboration discussed here is technically a geovisualization—an immersive, digital “fulldome” film of Hurricane Katrina developed by the Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, produced in collaboration with atmospheric scientists at the National Center for…
Impracticality and critique in a problematic field
Here I discuss how Guattari’s ‘impracticality,’ as Gerlach and Jellis put it, harbours rich models for political and theoretical practice. I describe these in terms of Guattari’s participation in militant activism and anti-psychiatric organizations, as well as his cross-disciplinary theoretical engagements, all of which exemplify nuanced navigations of ‘problematic fields’. After surveying what these are and how they work in Guattarian philosophy…
State reason and state affect
Downsizing Wal-Mart: A Reply to Prytherch
We are grateful to the editors of Urban Geography for inviting us to respond to the recent article by David Prytherch (2007), “Urban Geography With Scale: Rethinking Scale Via Wal-Mart’s Geography of Big Things.” In his essay, Prytherch criticized our article, “Human Geography Without Scale” (Marston et al., 2005), in which we argued that scale is an irredeemably chaotic concept, one more suggestive of a pervasive hierarchical epistemology—wherei…
Deleuze and geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary
Human geography without scale
The concept of scale in human geography has been profoundly transformed over the past 20 years. And yet, despite the insights that both empirical and theoretical research on scale have generated, there is today no consensus on what is meant by the term or how it should be operationalized. In this paper we critique the dominant - hierarchical - conception of scale, arguing it presents a number of problems that cannot be overcome simply by adding o…
Deleuze and geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary
Flattening Ontologies of Globalization: The Nollywood Case
In this article we offer some criticisms regarding the spatial ontologies that have underwritten theories of globalization. We evaluate different approaches to understanding their workings, each of which must grapple with the problem of connecting the local and the global, and contrast these to that of our recent work aimed at elaborating a ‘flat ontology’. The central feature of this alternative ontology is the site: a material localization char…
Situating Flatness
The Condition of Postmodernity (1989): David Harvey
On the other Hand … Dialectics
Downsizing Wal-Mart: A Reply to Prytherch
We are grateful to the editors of Urban Geography for inviting us to respond to the recent article by David Prytherch (2007), “Urban Geography With Scale: Rethinking Scale Via Wal-Mart’s Geography of Big Things.” In his essay, Prytherch criticized our article, “Human Geography Without Scale” (Marston et al., 2005), in which we argued that scale is an irredeemably chaotic concept, one more suggestive of a pervasive hierarchical epistemology—wherei…
Of eagles and flies: Orientations Toward the Site
The macro‐micro distinction is one of the most powerful in the human and physical sciences. In this article we challenge the macro by positing an alternative that recognises the intricacies and complexities of material geographies. We employ the Latin proverb – Aquila non captat muscas (Eagles don't catch flies) – to epitomise our position. Instead of looking to general theory – the bird's eye view – we argue for interrogating the ontological and…
The politics of autonomous space
This paper offers a further exploration of ‘flat ontology’, an account of the world that takes the immanence of localized, material process to be fundamentally different from and ontologically prior to transcendent, structured, and formal treatments of space. Our previous work in this area aimed at developing the concept of the site – via site ontology – as an ‘event-space’ that describes the differential contours and pressures of aggregating and…
Affect, state theory, and the politics of confusion
Mediated Geographies Across Arizona: Learning Literacy Skills Through Filmmaking
Impracticality and critique in a problematic field
Here I discuss how Guattari’s ‘impracticality,’ as Gerlach and Jellis put it, harbours rich models for political and theoretical practice. I describe these in terms of Guattari’s participation in militant activism and anti-psychiatric organizations, as well as his cross-disciplinary theoretical engagements, all of which exemplify nuanced navigations of ‘problematic fields’. After surveying what these are and how they work in Guattarian philosophy…
Touching Like a State
This paper offers a theorization of how the state touches. Through an analysis of the extensive 2011 protests over Wisconsin Senate Bill 11, we interrogate the relatively non‐violent interactions between police and protesters during the 17‐day occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol building. On display there were diverse police deployments of “soft” force and haptic touching, technologies that enabled officers to subtly affect the movements an…
One Sinister Hurricane: Simondon and Collaborative Visualization
This article offers a theory and methodology for understanding and interpreting collaborations that involve visualization technologies. The collaboration discussed here is technically a geovisualization—an immersive, digital “fulldome” film of Hurricane Katrina developed by the Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, produced in collaboration with atmospheric scientists at the National Center for…
State reason and state affect
The speculative geography of Orson Welles
Orson Welles' experimental 'essay film', F for Fake (1973), captures in short form what the prodigious director's life expressed in grander gestures: a speculative geography for an accident-prone cinema. Documenting the fakery techniques of famed 20th-century art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving, the film has been widely read as a showcase of Welles' own 'charlatanism'. Indeed, even Deleuze's philosophy of cinema claims tha…
Geophilosophy
Geophilosophy was created by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and Félix Guattari (1930–1992). By adapting geographic concepts that emphasize proximity, contingency, interdisciplinarity, and bottom‐up modes of thinking, it overturns top‐down understandings of philosophical practice and linear histories of ideas. Geophilosophy has also influenced numerous theoretical and practical developments in geography, such as nonrepresentati…
Poststructuralism/Poststructural Geographies
Emerging in the late 1960s, poststructuralism initiated multiple political, epistemological, and ontological critiques of Western thought. Growing out of and away from the structuralist movement, it developed concepts such as difference and power to challenge systems that naturalize unevenness, prejudice, oppression, and exploitation. Many of its interventions have since been widely absorbed by the humanities and social sciences. Poststructuralis…
Translating affect
Geontographies: On Elizabeth Povinelli'sGeontologies: A Requiem for Late Liberalism
This forum brings together perspectives from geography, philosophy, and political science to reflect on Elizabeth Povinelli's, 2016 book, Geontologies: A Requiem for Late Liberalism. Contributions come from both junior and senior scholars across a range of interests and backgrounds. Elizabeth Povinelli's Geontologies is the fourth in her series on Dwelling in Late Liberalism that began in 1994 with Labor's Lot: The Power, History and Culture of A…
Geophilosophy
Geophilosophy employs a range of concepts to reimagine the discipline of philosophy. Invented by Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and Félix Guattari (1930–1992), the field has grown and been elaborated by many thinkers. After reviewing the genesis of geophilosophy and its uptake in human geography through the 1990s, several key aspects are described: becoming rather than being; affect, virtuality, and the nonrepresentational; space; and minor theory. F…
Speed and space: Rates of motion in health and wellbeing
The posthumanist turn in health and wellbeing research has paid attention to the qualities of space, particularly through the work of geographers. Although a range of these qualities have been explicitly articulated and well explored, a clear omission in the literature has been ‘speed’ - an important quality in its own right, and an element of all other qualities. This review paper takes a good look at speed. First it considers what speed is and …
March of the kitten herders
Everything is affective; every thing is infrastructural. Or: (1) affectivity is the relational force of materiality and (2) a thing is the convergence of a range of relations and is itself a compositional element of others. Or again: if affect and infrastructure associate, it is on the order of what, in 2010, I called ‘abrupt conditions’ and tend, sometimes, toward the organization of a ‘site’. This dynamic system is ontologically ‘flat’ in the s…
Sociology (16 works) · Political science (14 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works)