Dear all, 

Is there any more broadly theoretical session happening on the next AAG meeting? I wrote the abstract below, about the "Contributions to security, control and surveillance studies from the theory of Brazilian geographer Milton Santos" but it doesn't seem to fit very well in the existent sessions. Is there any session organizer who would be interested in having this paper presented in your session?

Cheers,

Being a well-known prominent thinker throughout Latin America and some European countries, Milton Santos is still little known in the English-speaking world. This ignorance is, somewhat, due to the fact that only very few of his books and articles have been translated into English. This paper, thus, aims at filling this gap at least in part, by presenting the application of some of his ideas and concepts to the Anglophone debate on security, control and surveillance. Milton Santos was not an expert per se in such matters. His works have a broader claim, as they are intended as methodological support to reflections about the territory. The contributions of his concepts and theories can be seen in various areas, including in topics as diverse as health, finance, rural issues, economics and education. For Milton Santos, geography is a “philosophy of techniques” and its object of study should be geographical space, defined by him as an inseparable unity of objects and actions. This article intends to discuss these and other concepts created by Santos such as socio-spatial formation, used territory, form-content, psychosphere, technosphere, violence of globalization, globaritarism, technical-scientific and informational milieu, contemporary acceleration, technical oneness, enlargement of contexts, convergence of moments, geographical solidarity and counter-rationalities. More than mere neologisms, Milton Santos formulated concepts of greater consistency. This work reveals the explanatory power of his theories for the understanding security in the current information age.

Lucas Melgaço

Post-doctoral researcher at Queens University, Kingston, Canada.