Anti-Atlas Critical Area Studies from the East of the West

• Format: eBook
• Language: English
• Published: London UCL Press 2025
• Series: FRINGE
• Subjects: academic knowledge; academic knowledge areas; Anti-Atlas; area studies; area studies politics; area-informed perspectives; autobiographical reflections; collaborative; collaborative research; critical approach; critical area studies; Criticality; data visualisations; Decolonial Studies; Eastern Europe; Europe; geopolitical analysis; heterodox; heterodox positions; hierarchies of value; History; History and Archaeology; History of other geographical groupings and regions; intellectual resources; Interdisciplinary studies; knowledge and power; knowledge construction; knowledge simplifications; Michał Murawski; North America; open access area studies; Political Science; politics; Post-Socialist; Post-Soviet; Postcolonial Studies; Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary subjects; Regional / International studies; scholarly articles; Sociology; Tim Beasley-Murray; Transdisciplinarity; travel guide; UCL Press Anti-Atlas; un-disciplined approaches; vernacular; Wendy Bracewell
• ISBN: 9781800087798; 1800087799; 1787351890; 1787354113; 9781787351899; 9781800087804; 1800086148; 9781800087828; 1800087802; 9781911307907; 1911307908; 1800087829; 9781787354111; 9781800086142
• DOI: 10.14324/111.9781800087811

The invasion of Ukraine is the latest in a series of upheavals that have made eastern Europe a telling point from which to consider the place of area studies in the construction of knowledge about the world. The politics of academic knowledge about ‘areas’ now feels more urgent than ever. Anti-Atlas plays with the politics of the conventional atlas, with its assumptions about knowledge and power, its hierarchies of value, and its simplifications. It presents a collection of essays written by an eclectic mix of authors from Europe, both east and west, the UK and North America. These entries analyse a necessarily incomplete selection of topics, but they all engage with the question of how an approach to area can be ‘critical’ – and each entry demonstrates different aspects of criticality. The editors develop a manifesto for such criticality, calling attention to positions that are heterodox, area-informed or vernacular, ‘undisciplined’, and collaborative. Through a variety of genres, including the scholarly article, the travel guide, autobiographical reflections and data visualisations, Anti-Atlas provides readers with a diverse series of intellectual resources, asking them to think critically about the ways in which we construct the world by dividing it into pieces. Praise for Anti-Atlas ‘Anti-Atlas is an imaginative, brave attempt to reframe area studies, simultaneously rebuilding “our images and cartographies of the world”. Assembling dozens of authors from broad swaths of Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the East of the East, the volume is an essential antidote to knowledge produced in the service of empires, past or present.’ Aida A. Hozić, University of Florida