Dragos Simandan
I completed my PhD at the University of Bristol, UK, under the supervision of Nigel Thrift and Ron Johnston (2000-2004), and currently work as a Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Brock University, Canada. My research interests are in economic geography; critical human geography & critical urban theory; health, wellbeing and the politics of biomedical research; and social theory & philosophy of the social sciences.
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Key words: COVID-19; authoritarianism; public health; Academic Left; pandemic response.
HOW TO CITE: Simandan, D., Rinner, C., Capurri, V., (2024). The academic left, human geography, and the rise of authoritarianism during the COVID-19 pandemic. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, vol. 106, issue 2, pp. 175-195, https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2023.2168560.
How to reference: Simandan, D. (2022). Social groups and the computational conundrums of delays, proximity, and loyalty. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 45, E121, https://www.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X21001205.
How to cite: Kutor, S.K., Raileanu, A. and Simandan, D., 2022. Thinking geographically about how people become wiser: an analysis of the spatial dislocations and intercultural encounters of international migrants, Social Sciences & Humanities Open. 6(1): 100288, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2022.100288
DOI (Open Access): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2021.100971
How to cite: Kutor, S.K., Raileanu, A., Simandan, D., 2021. International migration, cross-cultural interaction, and the development of personal wisdom. Migration Studies, volume 9, issue 3, pp. 490-513, https://doi.org/10.1093/migration/mnz049
Simandan, D., (2019). “Beyond Haraway? Addressing constructive criticisms to the ‘four epistemic gaps’ interpretation of positionality and situated knowledges” Dialogues in Human Geography [2017 impact factor 10.214, rank 1/84 Geography], vol. 9(2), pp. 166-170, https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820619850272 .
How to cite: Simandan D (2019) “Competition, delays, and coevolution in markets and politics”, Geoforum , vol. 98, pp. 15-24, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.09.014
Simandan D (2019) “Revisiting positionality and the thesis of situated knowledge” Dialogues in Human Geography [2017 impact factor 10.214, rank 1/84 Geography], vol. 9(2), pp. 129-149, https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820619850013
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X17752652
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.11.037
Key words: COVID-19; authoritarianism; public health; Academic Left; pandemic response.
HOW TO CITE: Simandan, D., Rinner, C., Capurri, V., (2024). The academic left, human geography, and the rise of authoritarianism during the COVID-19 pandemic. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, vol. 106, issue 2, pp. 175-195, https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2023.2168560.
How to reference: Simandan, D. (2022). Social groups and the computational conundrums of delays, proximity, and loyalty. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 45, E121, https://www.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X21001205.
How to cite: Kutor, S.K., Raileanu, A. and Simandan, D., 2022. Thinking geographically about how people become wiser: an analysis of the spatial dislocations and intercultural encounters of international migrants, Social Sciences & Humanities Open. 6(1): 100288, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2022.100288
DOI (Open Access): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2021.100971
How to cite: Kutor, S.K., Raileanu, A., Simandan, D., 2021. International migration, cross-cultural interaction, and the development of personal wisdom. Migration Studies, volume 9, issue 3, pp. 490-513, https://doi.org/10.1093/migration/mnz049
Simandan, D., (2019). “Beyond Haraway? Addressing constructive criticisms to the ‘four epistemic gaps’ interpretation of positionality and situated knowledges” Dialogues in Human Geography [2017 impact factor 10.214, rank 1/84 Geography], vol. 9(2), pp. 166-170, https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820619850272 .
How to cite: Simandan D (2019) “Competition, delays, and coevolution in markets and politics”, Geoforum , vol. 98, pp. 15-24, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.09.014
Simandan D (2019) “Revisiting positionality and the thesis of situated knowledge” Dialogues in Human Geography [2017 impact factor 10.214, rank 1/84 Geography], vol. 9(2), pp. 129-149, https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820619850013
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X17752652
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.11.037
The first part of the volume - "Old Ways" - addresses the question whether geography as we know it is worth keeping. The first chapter argues that traditional scientific disciplines are not as bad as we sometimes like to think they are. This argument is then deployed in the second chapter to investigate whether geography specifically is worth keeping. The chapter concludes that even if we admit a Cinderella status for geography among the disciplines, this aspect brings some secondary benefits out of which a rejuvenated geography can emerge. The second part of the book – "New Ways" – discusses some lines of flight towards this rejuvenated geography. Given the editorial constraints, I selected three possible new ways on which I have started to work lately. Thus, chapter three explores the stakes of an engagement between geography and metaphysics in the analytic tradition, chapter four makes some suggestions about how to understand the relativity of norms in geographical practice, and chapter five brings together two case studies that help explain why we need to pay sustained attention to the vicious logic of epistemic neglect.
The book aims to present a critical history of the process of modernisation in the margins of Europe, more specifically in Romania and, to a lesser extent, in Norway. By modernisation I mean the assemblage of theories and practices produced by the European Enlightenment and concerned with how to develop rather primitive cultures into civilized cultures (industrialised, urbanised, educated). This broad definition includes neoliberalism and communism as particular ways in which modernisation can proceed. Throughout the book, I analyse modernity in its various guises: Ceausescu's communist regime, Norway's welfare capitalism, or the neoliberal transformations taking place in both Norway and Romania since the early 1990s. The feeling of inadequacy resulting from the marginal condition of both countries has been crucial in triggering their juxtaposition in my research project. One can be modern in a number of ways. What Romania and Norway have in common is that they are marginally modern. The signifier "marginally" produces many slippages of meaning, but they all tend to suggest a negative register. What I do try to show is that a psychoanalytical reading of the history of modernisation in the two countries is very fruitful for deconstructing current hegemonic discourses in both Norway and Romania. There are still many politicians and intellectuals in the two countries who recite the tropes of inadequacy, and their recitations serve the political purposes of neoliberalism and neo-imperialism. I have tried to show that there is nothing inherently wrong with being Romanian and/or Norwegian and that the very obsession that something is fundamentally wrong indicates a cultural neurosis of marginality that does not help the two countries in any way.
This book distiled my own way of understanding the relation between epistemology, ontology, and politics, and the best name I found for labelling that way is pragmatic scepticism. Throughout the book, I stay away from the temptation to give a dictionary-like definition of this philosophy. I do not even like to think of it as a philosophy. Instead, I see pragmatic scepticism as a way of being and as a way of relating. A way of being human, i.e. enmeshed in language and limited by our senses; and a way of relating, i.e. crafted by the happy and sad encounters with theories, things, and lifeís happenings. The book is structured in three parts, which together give a sense of the potentials of pragmatic scepticism: as a way of thinking about the world, as a way of approaching theoretical dilemmas, as a way of mapping one's inner contradictions. The first part of the book introduces pragmatic scepticism in relation to the general questions underwriting the philosophy of knowledge and the study of science. The second part is more specific in that it deploys the pragmatic sceptical attitude to the central metatheoretical questions of the discipline of geography. The last part of the book groups under the heading "philosophies of struggle" two more applied essays on the political economy and the political epistemology of conflicts over knowledge in the globalised landscape of higher education in general and geography in particular.
HOW TO CITE: Simandan, D., 2023. “Geographies of the Future.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Geography. Ed. Barney Warf. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/OBO/9780199874002-0257
How to cite: Simandan, D., 2020. Industrialization. In: Kobayashi, A. (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2nd edition. vol. 7, Elsevier, pp. 255–260. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102295-5.10086-1
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118430873.est0103
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118430873.est0464
ABSTRACT: This article (1) defines industrialisation and indicates ways in which it can be measured, (2) highlights the importance of the timing of industrialisation and the inherent limits to the proper scientific explanation of this phenomenon, (3) disentangles the often confused conceptual relation between industrialisation and capitalism, (4) explicates the causal links between industrialisation and modernisation, (5) undertakes a brief assessment of the relative costs and benefits of industrialisation, and (6) discloses the defining contours of scholarship on industrialisation in Anglo-American human geography and illustrates it with a recent attempt to integrate the field with the help of a master metaphor called ‘recursive cartographies’. Its portrayal of economic reality as interplay of legacies, rhythms, and events conveys the usefulness of spatial thinking in industrialisation research.
Online conversations with visionary thinkers from the social sciences and humanities, mobility experts, stakeholders and European policy decision-makers on the topic of New Mobility Cultures and Policies. Dragos Simandan discusses his recent research, as well as the broader context of the COVID-19 pandemic. https://rebalancemobility.eu/being-guided-by-a-single-value-is-troubling-when-you-push-a-value-to-its-extreme-it-becomes-a-vice/