Wake up: the urgent appeal of Allan Pred

Abstract

ABSTRACT We are living in what geographer Allan Pred called an “extended moment of danger.” Accelerations of capitalist modernity have for decades yielded new sensibilities and situations that have given way to crises of democracy across the globe. While the sentiment that we are living in precarious time has been expressed by many over the years, we believe it to be extraordinarily apt today, and that Allan Pred's later work offers a set of illuminations and methods with which to interrogate, re-present, and make the dangers more intelligible. In this introduction to the special issue “Brute Facts: Hauntings, Racisms and Collective Amnesia” we contend that his work (e.g., concepts of situated ignorance; collective amnesia; the taken-for-granted) helps us understand the intensification of deep and abiding global problems. Pred advanced a way to re-think accepted philosophies of history, progress, goodness, cultural boundedness and other taken-for-granted ideas that are often complex and difficult to make sense of. He developed approaches to examining how political economic shifts impact and are reworked in local, everyday experiences and collective identities, giving rise, for example, to changing dominant discourses of power and contestations created by social subjects in differentially situated locations of gender, race, class, and ethnicity.