Nicholas Blomley

Bio: Nicholas Blomley is an academic researcher from Simon Fraser University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Property (philosophy) & Critical geography. The author has an hindex of 40, co-authored 92 publications receiving 5030 citations. Previous affiliations of Nicholas Blomley include University of Manchester & University of California, Los Angeles.

Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey, and the Grid

Abstract: Physical violence, whether realized or implied, is important to the legitimation, foundation, and operation of a Western property regime. Certain spatializations—notably those of the frontier, the survey, and the grid—play a practical and ideological role at all these moments. Both property and space, I argue, are reproduced through various enactments. While those enactments can be symbolic, they must also be acknowledged as practical, material, and corporeal.

Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property

Abstract: Short and accessible, this book interweaves a discussion of the geography of property in one global city, Vancouver, with a more general analysis of property, politics, and the city

Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power

Abstract: This illuminating new volume offers a ground-breaking exploration into the intriguing and politically significant relationship between law and geography. Nicholas K. Blomley asserts that space and law, rather than being fixed, objective categories, have a crucial bearing on the deployment of power and the structuring of social life. Arguing that the geographies of law can be powerful--even oppressive--in combination with their implied claims concerning social life, Blomley clearly demonstrates how, over the last two centuries, legal judgment has entailed the adjudication of issues of power and space. The volume synthesizes ideas from the fields of law and geography to construct a "critical legal geography" that both documents Blomley's theory and challenges the orthodox treatment of law, space, and power. With unusual insight into the ideology and intricacy of legal reasoning, the book shows how--contrary to appearance-- representations (or "geographies") of the spaces of political, social, and economic life are deeply embedded within legal thought and practice. These representations, he argues, touch on all aspects of legal life including property, constitutional interpretation, contractual relations, crime, and intergovernmental law. To illustrate the book's analysis, empirical chapters offer case studies in Britain, the United States, and Canada, to reveal how legal geographies reflect complex and often contesting visions of social life under law. In a wide ranging exploration, Blomley unpacks struggles over U.S. occupational safety, the British miners' strike of 1984 - 1985, mobility and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and common law legal history.

Enclosure, Common Right and the Property of the Poor

Abstract: Although considerable research has been conducted into the dynamics of commons in rural settings, we still know very little about common property within cities. Given the hegemony of certain models...

Making Private Property: Enclosure, Common Right and the Work of Hedges

Abstract: Analyses of enclosure in late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuryEngland have tended to focus on the social work of representations, in particularestate maps. I depart from this emphasis, however, in my attempt to focus onthe consequential and often contradictory role of material objects in producingenclosure.Inparticular,Iemphasisetheimportantworkthathedgesdid,physically,symbolicallyandlegally,inthedispossessionofthecommoner.Actingasanorganicbarbed wire, the hedge was increasingly put to work to protect the lands of thepowerful. Disrupting the propertied spaces of the commoning economy, hedgeswere not surprisingly targeted by those who opposed privatisation. The hedge,as both a sign and material barrier, served complicated and sometimes opposingends. It materialised private property’s right to exclude, but thus came into conflictwith common property’s right not to be excluded. The hedge was both an edge toproperty and was itself property. Both the encloser and the commoner, however,had property interests in the hedge. If broken, the hedge could signal violenceand riot, or the legitimate assertion of common right. The hedge served as an oftenformidablematerialbarrier,yetthisverymaterialitymadeitvulnerableto‘breaking’and ‘leveling’.‘The history of private property is rather silent on the conditions that produced it’(Mitchell, 2002)‘Enclosure was an act, or a series of actions, of creating new forms of boundary. Itinvolved placing hedges, ditches, fences, walls, pales’ (Johnson, 1996: 71)

The Production of Space

Abstract: ‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

萨义德的“Orientalism”释义

Abstract: 萨义德以其独特的双重身份,对西方中心权力话语做了分析,通过对文学作品、演讲演说等文本的解读,将O rie n ta lis m——"东方学",做了三重释义:一门学科、一种思维方式和一种权力话语系统,对东方学权力话语做了系统的批判,同时将东方学放入空间维度对东方学文本做了细致的解读。

A Space for Place in Sociology

Abstract: Sociological studies sensitive to the issue of place are rarely labeled thus, and at the same time there are far too many of them to fit in this review. It may be a good thing that this research is seldom gathered up as a “sociology of place,” for that could ghettoize the subject as something of interest only to geographers, architects, or environmental historians. The point of this review is to indicate that sociologists have a stake in place no matter what they analyze, or how: The works cited below emplace inequality, difference, power, politics, interaction, community, social movements, deviance, crime, life course, science, identity, memory, history. After a prologue of definitions and methodological ruminations, I ask: How do places come to be the way they are, and how do places matter for social practices and historical change?

Law's Empire

Abstract: Scholars of culture, humanities and social sciences have increasingly come to an appreciation of the importance of the legal domain in social life, while critically engaged socio-legal scholars around the world have taken up the task of understanding "Law's Empire" in all of its cultural, political, and economic dimensions. The questions arising from these intersections, and addressing imperialisms past and present forms the subject matter of a special symposium issue of Social Identities under the editorship of Griffith University's Rob McQueen, and UBC's Wes Pue and with contributions from McQueen, Ian Duncanson, Renisa Mawani, David Williams, Emma Cunliffe, Chidi Oguamanam, W. Wesley Pue, Fatou Camara, and Dianne Kirkby. This paper introduces the volume, forthcoming in late 2007. The central problematique of this issue has previously been explored through the 2005 Law's Empire conference, an informal but vibrant postcolonial legal studies network.