Collegiate Affiliation

After twenty-some years at the University of Minnesota I retired in May 2023. Most of my career at the "U" and the University of Arizona beforehand, was focused on the political economy of capitalism—very broadly defined. A bit more on that below. For the last seven years or so preceding my retirement I had an interest in sonic geographies as an experimental space for human becoming. This finally took the form of my most recent book, Blind Joe Death's America: John Fahey, the Blues, and Writing White Discontent (University of North Carolina Press, 2021). A quick internet search will tell you who John Fahey was. The book is an exploration of countercultural and new left adjacency in the 1960s and 70s, in the U.S., with Fahey's prose and musical works as the main lever. The book asks, when the need for social change is so clear, what is it that keeps the person who recognizes the need from joining in the struggle? What affects do they recruit to shore up their reticence and how might these affects be understood as symptomatic of not only the New Left but the history of affect in postwar, capitalist America?

Stepping way back, the background to most of my research was an interest in the diverse manifestations of capitalism and popular (or not so popular) expressions to move beyond capitalism. The diversity of these manifestations extends to the challenge of conceptualizing and representing what capitalism even is and what sort of value undergirds it. The broadest framing of this interest was my book Value in Marx: The Persistence of Value in a More-Than-Capitalist World (Univ of Minnesota Press, 2013).

Additionally, I had interests in the history and teaching of geographic thought. (See the edited volume I published in 2009 with my colleague and good friend Marv Waterstone, Geographic Thought: A Praxis Perspective.) I taught in that area for many years, as well as in urban geography, social-cultural geography, and Marx's political economy. If you glance at the list of publications below you'll see some of the other topics and themes that grabbed my attention. For example, I long had a fascination with narrative film as a locus of social and cultural critique, and taught the department's City in Film course a number of times. I especially enjoyed thinking with and writing about David Fincher's film adaptation of "Fight Club," from the standpoint of how it represents and challenges capitalist value. 

 

Educational Background & Specialties
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Educational Background

  • Ph.D.: Geography, University of California-Berkeley, 1992

Specialties

  • Post-capitalist politics
  • Marxism
  • Value theory of labor
  • Marxist cultural critique