Matthew G Hannah
Biographic Data
| ID | 659928 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthew G Hannah |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthew G |
| FAMILY NAME | Hannah |
| SIGNATURE | HANNAH M G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bayreuth |
| ORCID | 0009-0009-9738-0268 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 284 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Navigating new ‘social relations of believability: A response
The commentaries on my original paper in this forum both challenge the value for critical scholarship of dwelling upon hoaxes and raise important, novel points. This response takes the commentaries as an occasion to place hoaxes within larger shifts de-emphasizing authorial intention and positionality. Commentators’ thoughts in the direction of a broader sense of ‘hoaxing’, as well as of a different sense of ‘positivism’, are discussed in the con…
New figurations of freedom: Ricoeurian perspectives on the digital society
In the face of innovations triggered by advances in digital technology, biomedicine, and behavioural/neurological research, the analysis of power relations has moved into substantially new territory. Attempts to chart this new territory in terms of ‘surveillance capitalism’, ‘algorithmic governmentality’, ‘sensory power’, ‘post-liberal government’, or ‘neuroliberalism’ have emphasized different dimension of emerging systems of power. These power …
Taking ‘nonsense’ seriously: Hoaxes, spoofs, and the epistemic cultures of geography
The ‘Grievance Studies Affair’, a deceptive publishing project launched in 2017, offers a revealing lens through which to see beyond simplifying polarizations and establish more constructive relations among geography's wide range of ‘epistemic cultures’. This article places the Grievance Studies Affair in the context of other hoaxes and spoofs and draws upon speech act theory to pin down how such deceptive publications are supposed to work. The c…
‘Powerless to separate from the clouds’: Badiou, mathematics and geography
Alain Badiou’s work provides an important opportunity for critical human geographers to enhance our grasp of a range of abstract mathematical concepts while clarifying that toward which we must remain critical. Yet the geographical encounter with Badiou thus far has been needlessly hampered by, and has itself reinforced, a certain pessimism about the ability of qualitatively-trained geographers to deal in any meaningful way with his mathematical …
Kiel 2019: Geographischer Dialog für die Zukunft
In conditions of unavoidably increasing mutual ignorance among human geographers about each others' areas of expertise, the question of how to pursue dialogue in a mutually respectful way that promotes insight and learning is ever more pressing. The dialogue between Carolin Schurr and Peter Weichhart in Kiel in 2019 offers instructive examples of how this issue can be addressed. The first, shorter part of the contribution is devoted to the substa…
P aul S chor . Counting Americans: How the US Census Classified the Nation
Paul Schor’s Counting Americans is an excellent addition to the existing literature on the history of the U.S. Census as it has both reflected and shaped social and demographic changes for over two centuries. Schor, who teaches American history at the Université Paris Diderot, is an expert on race and ethnicity in the United States, and these themes form the core concerns of the book. Building upon earlier social histories of the census such as t…
Governmentality
Governmentality refers to a modern problematic of government, and its associated practices and rationalities, centered on the economic government of social life. It was coined by Michel Foucault in 1978, and has since come to be applied to a wide range of contexts in the critical social sciences. Geographers have employed the term to help understand how spatial relations play a role in social ordering schemes, and how governmental projects in tur…
Dark Territory in the Information Age: Learning from the West German Census Controversies of the 1980s
Through a detailed account of the West German census controversies of the 1980s, this book offers a robust and geographical sense of what effective 'resistance' and 'empowerment' might mean in an age when the intensification of 'surveillance society' appears to render us ever more passive and incapable of controlling our own registration.
Hitler's geographies: The spatialities of the Third Reich
Hitler’s geographies: the spatialities of the Third Reich." Social & Cultural Geography, 18(1), pp. 114–115
Innovations in the afterlife of the Cold War: German-language human geography
This commentary will coalesce around two main points. First, the articles by Markus Hesse on urban geography, by Annika Mattissek and Georg Glasze on recent developments in discourse-analytic approaches, and by Ulrich Best on the genealogy of radical–Marxist or critical German-language geography all support the contention that key features of Germanophone human geography still mark it out as a ‘Cold War’ human geography. As will become clear, thi…
On shifting preoccupations with ‘security’
Clive Barnett’s important critique of recent critical analyses of securitization is convincing on its own terms. Reframing his argument from within the perspective of a political economy of attention and distraction allows us to see it in a different light. Even if his critique of exclusively negative analyses of security is valid, we should not be at all reassured by it. Recent processes of securitization may indeed involve a healthier dynamic o…
State knowledge and recurring patterns of state phobia: From fascism to post-politics
This paper identifies some key underlying assumptions of critical political analysis by examining two moments that have brought these assumptions to the fore: the Klaus Croissant affair in West Germany and France in the late 1970s, and Edward Snowden’s revelations in the 21st century regarding the activities of the US National Security Agency. Interesting parallels can be identified between ‘distinction-collapsing discourses’ prominent in the two…
Stuart Elden. The Birth of Territory
Journal Article Stuart Elden. The Birth of Territory. Get access Stuart Elden. The Birth of Territory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. xi, 493. $30.00. Matthew G. Hannah Matthew G. Hannah Universität Bayreuth [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 120, Issue 1, February 2015, Pages 188–189, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/120.1.188 …
Spaces of Benevolent Abandonment: The German Air Security Decision of 2006
This paper presents the 2006 Air Security decision rendered by the German Constitutional Court as an occasion to question typical assumptions in critical scholarship about the relations between sovereign power and biopolitics and about the kinds of political spaces these logics can generate. After a brief overview of the argument the first part of the paper summarizes the 2006 Air Security decision and the legislation it addressed. Public debates…
Attention and the phenomenological politics of landscape
This article argues that the inherent directedness of attention is a central and pervasive condition of politics across a wide range of social fields. The subfield of landscape geography serves as an occasion to illustrate what can be gained by attending to attention. The argument begins by reflexively placing the problematic of attention within a brief genealogy of constructions of modern perception. Within this frame, the article takes a closer…
Reading Matthew G. Hannah’s Dark Territory in the Information Age: Learning from the West German Census Controversies of the 1980s
Foucault's 'German Moment: Genealogy of a Disjuncture
Foucault's lectures from early 1979 on the German Ordo-liberalen are typically taken to comprise his most comprehensive account of why Germany is important for understanding neo-liberal governmentality more broadly. This paper argues, to the contrary, that the 1979 lectures actually obscure a potentially more complete account of German, neo-liberal governmentality Foucault had begun to sketch in 1977. To support this reading and to offer an expla…
Biopower, Life and Left Politics
The terms biopower and biopolitics have been deployed in widely varying ways in recent critical political analyses. This essay seeks to rescue from the welter of its deployments a general understanding of biopower potentially useful to left political projects. First, recent iterations of the concept of biopower are surveyed. In the main body of the paper, a series of interventions in recent critical debates are used to trace out a critical re-map…
Reading Gerry Kearns' Geopolitics and Empire: The Legacy of Halford Mackinder
Learning from the 'war on terror
(Mis)adventures in Rumsfeld space
Calculable territory and the West German census boycott movements of the 1980s
Ulrike Meinhof und die deutsche Verhältnisse
Hannah, M. G. (2008). Review essay on Peter Bruckner, Ulrike Meinhof und die deutsche Verhaeltnisse.Historical Materialism, 16 (1), 200-215
Torture and the Ticking Bomb: The War on Terrorism as a Geographical Imagination of Power/Knowledge
Torture can be understood as part of a geopolitical response to a discursively inflated threat. Public discussions of torture in the United States between 11 September 2001 and the May 2004 revelations of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison cautiously justified brutal interrogation methods by couching the threat of terrorism in the language of the ticking-bomb scenario. Terrorist acts constitute a real threat to material security, specifically to the “to…
In full view yet invisible: On Neil Smith's American Empire
Sampling and the Politics of Representation in US Census 2000
Counting of people in official censuses and other social surveys produces representations that are arguably of far greater political importance than the representations produced by voting. The recent controversy around the use of sampling methods in US Census 2000 illustrates some important political-geographical dimensions of our decisions regarding whether and how to be counted in surveys. The argument is intended both to illuminate political f…
Torture and the Ticking Bomb: The War on Terrorism as a Geographical Imagination of Power/Knowledge
Torture can be understood as part of a geopolitical response to a discursively inflated threat. Public discussions of torture in the United States between 11 September 2001 and the May 2004 revelations of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison cautiously justified brutal interrogation methods by couching the threat of terrorism in the language of the ticking-bomb scenario. Terrorist acts constitute a real threat to material security, specifically to the “to…
Biopower, Life and Left Politics
The terms biopower and biopolitics have been deployed in widely varying ways in recent critical political analyses. This essay seeks to rescue from the welter of its deployments a general understanding of biopower potentially useful to left political projects. First, recent iterations of the concept of biopower are surveyed. In the main body of the paper, a series of interventions in recent critical debates are used to trace out a critical re-map…
Attention and the phenomenological politics of landscape
This article argues that the inherent directedness of attention is a central and pervasive condition of politics across a wide range of social fields. The subfield of landscape geography serves as an occasion to illustrate what can be gained by attending to attention. The argument begins by reflexively placing the problematic of attention within a brief genealogy of constructions of modern perception. Within this frame, the article takes a closer…
Calculable territory and the West German census boycott movements of the 1980s
Space and social control in the administration of the Oglala Lakota ("Sioux"), 1871-1879
Space and the structuring of disciplinary power: An interpretive review
This paper is an attempt to provide an organizing framework for understanding geographic (and related) research that deals with modern social control. The basic panoptic logic of what Foucault termed disciplinary power can be understood to operate at a variety of scales, from that of buildings to that of national territories. But the particular way in which disciplinary power plays out, the way in which the logic of visibility interacts with othe…
Skeptical Realism: From Either/or to Both-And
In this paper a rapprochement is attempted between epistemological skepticism and ontological realism, two positions hitherto understood to be incompatible by most sociospatial theorists. It is done by recontextualizing key aspects of these two positions within an analysis of individual human finitude. Avoiding both individualism' and 'decisionism', and taking full account of poststructuralist insights concerning fragmented or multiple subjectivi…
Domesticating Postmodernism
This paper proceeds in three steps. First, it gives more focus and rigor to the geographic reception of “postmodernism,” through an investigation of the problem of representation as it has evolved from Kant through de Saussure and Wittgenstein to Derrida. Second, it arranges historical materialist encounters with the problem of representation along a spectrum of increasing seriousness leading from Palmer through Jameson to Adorno. Third, the vari…
Space and the Structuring of Disciplinary Power: An Interpretive Review
Ornamentalism: Geography and the Labor of Language in Structuration Theory
In an effort to respond to the so-called 'postmodern challenge' in a way that continues to allow for an understanding of social interaction in time and space, geographers have increasingly turned to the theory of structuration put forward by Anthony Giddens. This theory paints a picture of the human agent as being constrained by sociohistorical circumstances and yet being fundamentally autonomous. The success of Giddens attempt to transcend the t…
State knowledge and recurring patterns of state phobia: From fascism to post-politics
This paper identifies some key underlying assumptions of critical political analysis by examining two moments that have brought these assumptions to the fore: the Klaus Croissant affair in West Germany and France in the late 1970s, and Edward Snowden’s revelations in the 21st century regarding the activities of the US National Security Agency. Interesting parallels can be identified between ‘distinction-collapsing discourses’ prominent in the two…
(Mis)adventures in Rumsfeld space
Spaces of Benevolent Abandonment: The German Air Security Decision of 2006
This paper presents the 2006 Air Security decision rendered by the German Constitutional Court as an occasion to question typical assumptions in critical scholarship about the relations between sovereign power and biopolitics and about the kinds of political spaces these logics can generate. After a brief overview of the argument the first part of the paper summarizes the 2006 Air Security decision and the legislation it addressed. Public debates…
Foucault's 'German Moment: Genealogy of a Disjuncture
Foucault's lectures from early 1979 on the German Ordo-liberalen are typically taken to comprise his most comprehensive account of why Germany is important for understanding neo-liberal governmentality more broadly. This paper argues, to the contrary, that the 1979 lectures actually obscure a potentially more complete account of German, neo-liberal governmentality Foucault had begun to sketch in 1977. To support this reading and to offer an expla…
Foucault on Theorizing Specificity
Philo has brought Foucault's early, 'archaeological' work to the attention of human geographers as a possible source of help in theorizing specificity. By contrast, in this paper the archaeological project is portrayed as an illuminating failure which holds valuable lessons for geographers. The archaeological period is placed in the context of Foucault's career, and then the Archaeology of Knowledge is situated as the arena for Foucault's most in…
Anatomy of debate in human geography
Innovations in the afterlife of the Cold War: German-language human geography
This commentary will coalesce around two main points. First, the articles by Markus Hesse on urban geography, by Annika Mattissek and Georg Glasze on recent developments in discourse-analytic approaches, and by Ulrich Best on the genealogy of radical–Marxist or critical German-language geography all support the contention that key features of Germanophone human geography still mark it out as a ‘Cold War’ human geography. As will become clear, thi…
New figurations of freedom: Ricoeurian perspectives on the digital society
In the face of innovations triggered by advances in digital technology, biomedicine, and behavioural/neurological research, the analysis of power relations has moved into substantially new territory. Attempts to chart this new territory in terms of ‘surveillance capitalism’, ‘algorithmic governmentality’, ‘sensory power’, ‘post-liberal government’, or ‘neuroliberalism’ have emphasized different dimension of emerging systems of power. These power …
Reading Matthew G. Hannah’s Dark Territory in the Information Age: Learning from the West German Census Controversies of the 1980s
Taking ‘nonsense’ seriously: Hoaxes, spoofs, and the epistemic cultures of geography
The ‘Grievance Studies Affair’, a deceptive publishing project launched in 2017, offers a revealing lens through which to see beyond simplifying polarizations and establish more constructive relations among geography's wide range of ‘epistemic cultures’. This article places the Grievance Studies Affair in the context of other hoaxes and spoofs and draws upon speech act theory to pin down how such deceptive publications are supposed to work. The c…
Ornamentalism: Geography and the Labor of Language in Structuration Theory
In an effort to respond to the so-called 'postmodern challenge' in a way that continues to allow for an understanding of social interaction in time and space, geographers have increasingly turned to the theory of structuration put forward by Anthony Giddens. This theory paints a picture of the human agent as being constrained by sociohistorical circumstances and yet being fundamentally autonomous. The success of Giddens attempt to transcend the t…
Domesticating Postmodernism
This paper proceeds in three steps. First, it gives more focus and rigor to the geographic reception of “postmodernism,” through an investigation of the problem of representation as it has evolved from Kant through de Saussure and Wittgenstein to Derrida. Second, it arranges historical materialist encounters with the problem of representation along a spectrum of increasing seriousness leading from Palmer through Jameson to Adorno. Third, the vari…
Space and social control in the administration of the Oglala Lakota ("Sioux"), 1871-1879
The Obsolescence of Labor: Reference and Finitude in Barnett and Sayer
Foucault on Theorizing Specificity
Philo has brought Foucault's early, 'archaeological' work to the attention of human geographers as a possible source of help in theorizing specificity. By contrast, in this paper the archaeological project is portrayed as an illuminating failure which holds valuable lessons for geographers. The archaeological period is placed in the context of Foucault's career, and then the Archaeology of Knowledge is situated as the arena for Foucault's most in…
Postmodernism comes to dinner in Mr Norwine's neighborhood
Space and the Structuring of Disciplinary Power: An Interpretive Review
Space and the structuring of disciplinary power: An interpretive review
This paper is an attempt to provide an organizing framework for understanding geographic (and related) research that deals with modern social control. The basic panoptic logic of what Foucault termed disciplinary power can be understood to operate at a variety of scales, from that of buildings to that of national territories. But the particular way in which disciplinary power plays out, the way in which the logic of visibility interacts with othe…
Skeptical Realism: From Either/or to Both-And
In this paper a rapprochement is attempted between epistemological skepticism and ontological realism, two positions hitherto understood to be incompatible by most sociospatial theorists. It is done by recontextualizing key aspects of these two positions within an analysis of individual human finitude. Avoiding both individualism' and 'decisionism', and taking full account of poststructuralist insights concerning fragmented or multiple subjectivi…
Response to Seamus Grimes's commentary on “Anatomy of debate in human geography”
Anatomy of debate in human geography
Sampling and the Politics of Representation in US Census 2000
Counting of people in official censuses and other social surveys produces representations that are arguably of far greater political importance than the representations produced by voting. The recent controversy around the use of sampling methods in US Census 2000 illustrates some important political-geographical dimensions of our decisions regarding whether and how to be counted in surveys. The argument is intended both to illuminate political f…
The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City
In full view yet invisible: On Neil Smith's American Empire
Torture and the Ticking Bomb: The War on Terrorism as a Geographical Imagination of Power/Knowledge
Torture can be understood as part of a geopolitical response to a discursively inflated threat. Public discussions of torture in the United States between 11 September 2001 and the May 2004 revelations of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison cautiously justified brutal interrogation methods by couching the threat of terrorism in the language of the ticking-bomb scenario. Terrorist acts constitute a real threat to material security, specifically to the “to…
Ulrike Meinhof und die deutsche Verhältnisse
Hannah, M. G. (2008). Review essay on Peter Bruckner, Ulrike Meinhof und die deutsche Verhaeltnisse.Historical Materialism, 16 (1), 200-215
(Mis)adventures in Rumsfeld space
Calculable territory and the West German census boycott movements of the 1980s
Learning from the 'war on terror
Biopower, Life and Left Politics
The terms biopower and biopolitics have been deployed in widely varying ways in recent critical political analyses. This essay seeks to rescue from the welter of its deployments a general understanding of biopower potentially useful to left political projects. First, recent iterations of the concept of biopower are surveyed. In the main body of the paper, a series of interventions in recent critical debates are used to trace out a critical re-map…
Reading Gerry Kearns' Geopolitics and Empire: The Legacy of Halford Mackinder
Reading Matthew G. Hannah’s Dark Territory in the Information Age: Learning from the West German Census Controversies of the 1980s
Foucault's 'German Moment: Genealogy of a Disjuncture
Foucault's lectures from early 1979 on the German Ordo-liberalen are typically taken to comprise his most comprehensive account of why Germany is important for understanding neo-liberal governmentality more broadly. This paper argues, to the contrary, that the 1979 lectures actually obscure a potentially more complete account of German, neo-liberal governmentality Foucault had begun to sketch in 1977. To support this reading and to offer an expla…
Attention and the phenomenological politics of landscape
This article argues that the inherent directedness of attention is a central and pervasive condition of politics across a wide range of social fields. The subfield of landscape geography serves as an occasion to illustrate what can be gained by attending to attention. The argument begins by reflexively placing the problematic of attention within a brief genealogy of constructions of modern perception. Within this frame, the article takes a closer…
Spaces of Benevolent Abandonment: The German Air Security Decision of 2006
This paper presents the 2006 Air Security decision rendered by the German Constitutional Court as an occasion to question typical assumptions in critical scholarship about the relations between sovereign power and biopolitics and about the kinds of political spaces these logics can generate. After a brief overview of the argument the first part of the paper summarizes the 2006 Air Security decision and the legislation it addressed. Public debates…
Sociology (32 works) · Political science (24 works) · Law (22 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Politics (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · History (11 works) · Social science (10 works)