Michael Watts
Encyclopedia
Michael J. Watts is "Class of 1963" Professor of Geography
and Development Studies at the University of California, Berkeley
, and a leading critical intellectual figure of the academic left. An intensively productive scholar, he works on a variety of themes from African development to contemporary geopolitics, social movements and oil. As Perrault notes, his work charted a "rigorous and wide-ranging theoretical engagement with Marxian political economy" (Perrault, 2004:323,http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Watts/watts-con0.html), with contributions to the development of political ecology
, struggles over resources, and - more recently - how the politics of identity play out in the contemporary world.
This should not obscure the fact that during the early 1980s Watts adhered to a populist analysis, and that the politics of identity of which he is now critical was criticized earlier, by non-Geographers who engaged with populists linked to the subaltern studies
project of that decade. His main role has tended to be not that of an innovator so much as a conduit; to transmit ideas generated outside geography by non-geographers, communicating them to other geographers who don’t yet know about these external theoretical developments. Geographers who are unaware of the origin of these ideas occasionally attribute them in error to the messenger.
Raised between Bath and Bristol
in the UK, Watts received his bachelor's degree in geography and economics
from University College London
in 1972 and his PhD in 1979 from the University of Michigan
. His PhD work was on agrarian change and politics in Northern Nigeria
, published as Silent Violence in 1983. He joined the faculty of the Geography Department at UC Berkeley in 1979, and served from 1994 to 2004 as Director of the Institute of International Studies, a program that promotes cross-disciplinary global and transnational research and training. Watts was named a 2003 Guggenheim fellow
for his research on oil politics in Nigeria, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences http://www-casbs.stanford.edu at Stanford University
(2004), and the Smuts Lecturer at Cambridge University in 2007. In 2004 he was awarded the Victoria Medal
of the Royal Geographical Society
.
On July 25, 2007, he was shot in the hand in Port Harcourt, Nigeria
by unknown gunmen.
Watts is married to Mary Beth Pudup, who is a UC Santa Cruz faculty member, and has two children. He is a member of Retort collective
, a Bay Area-based collective of radical intellectuals, with whom he authored the book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, published by Verso Books.
He is also on the advisory board of FFIPP-USA (Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace-USA), a network of Palestinian, Israeli, and International faculty, and students, working in for an end of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and just peace. http://www.ffipp.org/about_us
Geography
Geography is the science that studies the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes...
and Development Studies at the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
, and a leading critical intellectual figure of the academic left. An intensively productive scholar, he works on a variety of themes from African development to contemporary geopolitics, social movements and oil. As Perrault notes, his work charted a "rigorous and wide-ranging theoretical engagement with Marxian political economy" (Perrault, 2004:323,http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Watts/watts-con0.html), with contributions to the development of political ecology
Political ecology
Political ecology is the study of the relationships between political, economic and social factors with environmental issues and changes. Political ecology differs from apolitical ecological studies by politicizing environmental issues and phenomena....
, struggles over resources, and - more recently - how the politics of identity play out in the contemporary world.
This should not obscure the fact that during the early 1980s Watts adhered to a populist analysis, and that the politics of identity of which he is now critical was criticized earlier, by non-Geographers who engaged with populists linked to the subaltern studies
Subaltern Studies
The Subaltern Studies Group or Subaltern Studies Collective are a group of South Asian scholars interested in the postcolonial and post-imperial societies of South Asia in particular and the developing world in general. The term Subaltern Studies is sometimes also applied more broadly to others...
project of that decade. His main role has tended to be not that of an innovator so much as a conduit; to transmit ideas generated outside geography by non-geographers, communicating them to other geographers who don’t yet know about these external theoretical developments. Geographers who are unaware of the origin of these ideas occasionally attribute them in error to the messenger.
Raised between Bath and Bristol
Bristol
Bristol is a city, unitary authority area and ceremonial county in South West England, with an estimated population of 433,100 for the unitary authority in 2009, and a surrounding Larger Urban Zone with an estimated 1,070,000 residents in 2007...
in the UK, Watts received his bachelor's degree in geography and economics
Economics
Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...
from University College London
University College London
University College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and the oldest and largest constituent college of the federal University of London...
in 1972 and his PhD in 1979 from the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
. His PhD work was on agrarian change and politics in Northern Nigeria
Nigeria
Nigeria , officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a federal constitutional republic comprising 36 states and its Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. The country is located in West Africa and shares land borders with the Republic of Benin in the west, Chad and Cameroon in the east, and Niger in...
, published as Silent Violence in 1983. He joined the faculty of the Geography Department at UC Berkeley in 1979, and served from 1994 to 2004 as Director of the Institute of International Studies, a program that promotes cross-disciplinary global and transnational research and training. Watts was named a 2003 Guggenheim fellow
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
for his research on oil politics in Nigeria, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences http://www-casbs.stanford.edu at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
(2004), and the Smuts Lecturer at Cambridge University in 2007. In 2004 he was awarded the Victoria Medal
Victoria Medal (geography)
The Victoria Medal is an award presented by the Royal Geographical Society. It is awarded "for conspicuous merit in research in geography" and has been given since 1902.-Past recipients:...
of the Royal Geographical Society
Royal Geographical Society
The Royal Geographical Society is a British learned society founded in 1830 for the advancement of geographical sciences...
.
On July 25, 2007, he was shot in the hand in Port Harcourt, Nigeria
Nigeria
Nigeria , officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a federal constitutional republic comprising 36 states and its Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. The country is located in West Africa and shares land borders with the Republic of Benin in the west, Chad and Cameroon in the east, and Niger in...
by unknown gunmen.
Watts is married to Mary Beth Pudup, who is a UC Santa Cruz faculty member, and has two children. He is a member of Retort collective
Retort collective
The Retort is a radical encounter of about forty writers, teachers, artists, and activists, all opponents of capital and empire, which has been based for the past two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area....
, a Bay Area-based collective of radical intellectuals, with whom he authored the book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, published by Verso Books.
He is also on the advisory board of FFIPP-USA (Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace-USA), a network of Palestinian, Israeli, and International faculty, and students, working in for an end of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and just peace. http://www.ffipp.org/about_us
Books
- Watts MJ (ed.) with photographs by E. Kashi. 2008. Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta. Brooklyn NY: Powerhouse Books.
- Associate Editor. 2007. "New Encyclopedia of Africa" (ed. Joseph C. Miller ) Simon and Schuster, New York (5 volumes). Second Edition. (ISBN 9780684314549 ) (First Edition, 1998, awarded the African Studies Association Conover-Porter Prize for Reference Books.)
- RetortRetortIn a chemistry laboratory, a retort is a glassware device used for distillation or dry distillation of substances. It consists of a spherical vessel with a long downward-pointing neck. The liquid to be distilled is placed in the vessel and heated...
collective (Iain Boal, T.J. ClarkT. J. Clark (historian)Timothy James Clark often known as T.J. Clark, is an art historian and writer, born in 1943 in Bristol, England.-Life and work:Clark attended Bristol Grammar School. He completed his undergraduate studies at St. John's College, Cambridge University, he obtained a first-class honours degree in 1964....
, Joseph Matthews, Michael Watts). 2005. Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. London: Verso. - Peet, R & Watts, MJ (eds). 2004. Liberation Ecologies (2nd edition). Routledge. (first edition 1996)
- Peluso N. and MJ Watts (eds.). 2001. Violent Environments. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
- Watts, MJ. 2000. The Hettner Lectures: Geographies of Violence. Heidelberg: University of Heidelberg. review
- Johnston RJ, D Gregory, G Pratt, MJ Watts, DM Smith. (eds) 2000. Dictionary of Human Geography. Oxford: Blackwell.
- Watts, MJ and P Little (eds.) 1997. Globalizing Agro-Food. Routledge.
- RJ Johnson, P Taylor, and MJ Watts (eds.) 1995. Geographies of Global Change. Blackwell. Second Edition 1998, Third Edition in 2002.
- P.D. Little & M.J. Watts (eds.) 1994. Living under contract: contract farming and agrarian transformation in sub-Saharan Africa. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press.
- Pred, A. and M.J. Watts (eds.) Reworking Modernity: Capitalisms and Symbolic Discontent. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey.
- Watts, M.J. 1987 (ed.). State, Oil and Agriculture in Nigeria. Institute of International Studies Press, University of California, Berkeley.
- Watts, MJ. 1983. Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria. Berkeley: University of California Press. [runner-up for Herskovitz Prize, 1984]
Recent articles
- Watts, MJ. 2007. Revolutionary Islam and Modern Terror. In Allan Pred and Derek Gregory (eds)., Violent Geographies, London, Routledge, pp. 175–205.
- Watts, MJ. 2007. The sinister political life of community http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/GreenGovernance/papers/Watts_SinisterPolitical.pdf, in G. Creed, The Romance of Community, SAR Press.
- Watts, MJ. and I Boal. 2006. The Liberal International. Radical Philosophy, 140, Dec, pp. 40–45.
- Watts, MJ. 2006. Empire of Oil. Monthly Review, 58/4, 1-16.
- Watts, MJ. 2006. Neither There War nor their Peace/All Quiet on the Eastern Front. In Okwui Enwezor (ed)., The Unhomely. BIACS @: Seville, pp. 27–31 (reprinted in New Left Review, 41, September 2006, pp. 88–92.
- Watts, MJ. 2006. Culture, Development and Global Neoliberalism.http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/GreenGovernance/papers/Watts_CultureDevelopment.pdf in S.Radcliffe (ed)., Culture and Development in a Globalising World, London, Routledge, pp. 30–58
- Watts, MJ and A Zalik. 2006. Imperial Oil.http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=9712 Socialist Review, April.
- Watts, M.J. 2005. Baudelaire over Berea, Simmel over Sandton? Public Culture 17/1. http://publicculture.org/articles/volume_17_number_1/baudelaire_over_berea_simmel_ove
- Watts, M.J. 2005. Righteous Oil?: Human rights, the oil complex and corporate social responsibility.http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/GreenGovernance/papers/Watts_RighteousOil.pdf Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 30
- Watts, MJ. 2004. Resource Curse? Governmentality, Oil and Power in the Niger Delta, Nigeria. Geopolitics [Special issue] 9/1.
- McKeon N, MJ Watts and W Wolford. 2004. Peasant Associations in Theory and Practice. http://www.unrisd.org/80256B3C005BCCF9/(httpPublications)/EB035306BD930F87C1256F6A0056A117?OpenDocument Civil Society and Social Movements Programme Paper Number 8, UNSRID.
- Watts, MJ. 2003. Thinking With the Blood. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 24/2.
- Watts, MJ. 2003. Development and Governmentality. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 24/1, pp. 6–34.
- Watts, MJ. 2003. Alternative Modern: Development as Cultural Geography, in S. Pile, N. Thrift and K. Anderson M. Domosh, (eds)., Handbook of Cultural Geography, Sage: London, pp. 433–453.
- Watts, MJ. 2002. Migrations. Commentary on Sebastiao Salgado. Occasional Paper # 26, Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California, Berkeley, pp. 35–42.
- Watts, MJ. 2002. Chronicle of a Death Foretold: Some Thoughts on Peasants and the Agrarian Question. Oesterreichische Zeitschrift fuer Geschichtswissenschaften, 4, pp. 22–51 (and commentary pp. 51–61).
- Watts, MJ. 2002. Hour of darkness. Geographica Helvetica, 57/1, pp. 5–18.
- Watts, MJ. 2002. Green Capitalism, Green Governmentality. American Behavioral Scientist, 45/9, pp. 1313–1317.
- Watts, MJ. 2001. Lost in Space. Progress in Human Geography, 25/4, pp. 625–628.
- Watts, MJ. 2001. "2001 Black Acts", New Left Review, 9, pp. 125–140.
- Watts, MJ. 2000. "1968 and all that...", Progress in Human Geography, 25/2, pp. 157–188.
- Watts, MJ. 2000. "Violent Geographies: speaking the unspeakable and the politics of space", City and Society, XIII/1,pp. 83–115.
- Watts, MJ. 2000. "Development Ethnographies", Ethnography 2/2, pp. 283–300.
- Watts, MJ. 2000. "Development at the Millennium", Geographische Zeitschrift, 88/2, pp. 67–93.
- Watts, MJ. 2000."Political Ecology", in T. Barnes and E. Sheppard (eds.), A Companion To Economic Geography, Oxford, Blackwell, pp. 257–275.
- Watts, MJ. 2000. "The Great Tablecloth", in G. Clark, M. Gertler and Feldmann (eds.), A Handbook of Economic Geography. London, Oxford University Press, pp. 195–215.
- Watts, MJ. 1999. "Islamic Modernities," in James Halston (ed)., Cities and Citizenship, Durham, Duke University Press, pp. 67–102.
- Watts, MJ. 1999. "Collective Wish Images: Geographical Imaginaries and the Crisis of Development," in John Allen and Doreen Massey (eds.), Human Geography Today, Cambridge, Polity Press, pp. 85–107.