Mitch Rose

BA, Middle East History, University of Wisconsin, 1992 MA, International Relations, Syracuse University 1996 MA, Geography, Syracuse University 1998 PhD, Geography, Cambridge 2003

Negative Geographies: over the last two decades, contemporary cultural geography has championed the emancipatory potential of the affirmative. Drawing upon thinkers such as Nietzsche, Deleuze, Haraway, Spinoza, Latour, Negri and others, these ontologies emphasise creativity, relationality and a generative capacity imminent to a living world; a world whose nature is thought to be vital, open, plastic and becoming. My interest in the negative stems from those thresholds of living that withdraw from relationality and refuse to become. While conditions like hunger, disease, lethargy and pain can be understood through a lens of positive relationality, to do so misses something essential about their nature and the manner in which they shadow the problem of being a living being. This concern operates as a red thread throughout my work, whether it be on culture, governmentality, indigeneity, democracy or heritage landscapes in Egypt. 

The Question of Culture: I have a long-standing interest in rehabilitating the culture concept from its current condition of intellectual penury. The key problem with the way culture has been theorised is that it stood as a placeholder for the problem of difference. The aim of my work has been to emancipate the concept from these constraints by arguing that difference is essentially unknowable. While difference is an obvious and empirical fact of life, emerging and receding at various scales, the nature of difference itself defies explanation. Yet rather than seeing this as an obstacle to theorising culture, my work uses it as an invitation to think culture differently: culture not as an explanation for difference but as an elucidation of a phenomenon I term ‘claiming’. This project culminated in my recent monograph Dreams of Presence: a Geographic Theory of Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2024).