Franck Billé, "Somatic States: On Cartography, Geobodies, Bodily Integrity" (Duke UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. You're listening to New Books in Geography, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm your host for today, Stentor Danielson, Associate Professor of Environmental Geoscience at Slippery Rock University. Today, I'll be talking to Frank Bia, author of Somatic States on Cartography, Geobodies, Bodily Integrity, published in 2025 by Duke University Press. Dr. Bia, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me, Stentor. I'm very happy to be joining you.

To start off, why don't you tell our listeners a bit about your background and how you came to write this book? Yeah, so my background is where I... It took me kind of a long way to get to where I am now and to figure out what I wanted to do. I started off as an undergrad in languages, in Russian and Arabic in London, and then kind of discovered anthropology and did an MA in Anthro at SOAS.

also in London, and then kind of got interested in the region kind of around Russia and China, and that was Mongolia. And I decided to do my PhD on Mongolia.

So, actually on the relationship between Mongolia and China. So it was deeply in that throat. But then after that, when I finished that, I started getting interested in borders. I had a postdoc with my former thesis advisor, Caroline Humphrey, on the Russia-China border. And I got really fascinated by the concept of borders.

and slowly kind of moved kind of towards geography. I was reading a lot of books in geography more than athro. So I had a bit of a kind of

identity crisis. Who am I? Am I an anthropologist? Am I a geographer? What I was trying to publish in Anthro was not really getting accepted in journals, but it was accepted in geography. So I thought, okay, so I don't know. So I sort of, it took me a while and then kind of, I realized I was sort of in between, which is kind of a good, um,

maybe a good place to be. So this book kind of started like many projects. They start kind of randomly. But I remember specifically being at a workshop in the UK at Cambridge and we had a workshop on the Russia-China-Mongolia border. And a Russian scholar was talking about the loss of

of territory from the Soviet Union to Russia. So I'm thinking about, you know, Central Asia particularly. And he mentioned the word, you know, he mentioned the term phantom paints and that really struck me and I couldn't get it out of my mind. And I was thinking, that's such an interesting way to look at it. And then I started developing an article on the kind of corporeal

ideas of the state in the context of Russia and China. And I really liked that paper. It was a very, it felt very personal, I don't know, a really kind of interesting way to look at it.

And I presented it and published it. And when I presented it, I was struck by comments I was getting from people telling me, oh, yeah, but actually, you know, this concept is the same in this part of the world or, you know, from India. And we also talk about it this way or, you know, I mean, I don't know, German, Germany. Like it was all over the place. I said, oh, that's really interesting. Maybe I should do a bit more about this. I really enjoyed writing on this concept.

And I thought, maybe I'll write a little book about this. And then this little book got bigger and bigger. Eventually, when I pitched it to the press and got a contract, it was on the basis of like 60,000 words. It ended up being twice that. It just became kind of a very personal project and something that took me over 10 years to really kind of write.

um so yeah so he started off you know it's going to be it's actually a question I always ask people you know when I when I meet people say how did you get into your your research or your on this particular book it's really interesting to see how very often is so random just you speak to somebody they just say one thing and then it just takes you takes you in a certain direction so that's uh yeah so that for me was really kind of also kind of very random in that way yeah

Yeah, I mean, that's definitely something I've found doing these interviews for this podcast, is that all of a sudden it's just a little idea like that, and then it snowballs into a much bigger project. Yeah, and actually in the beginning. You see all the connections and all the things that can run into it. Yeah. At first, I thought it would be just like a little in-between things. You know, I had like ideas about what I would be doing in terms of books, and I thought that's going to be just a little fun book to write. And it became kind of the main thing, kind of the main event, the most important book I've written.

So it's kind of interesting how things develop strangely. Yeah. And so I had a personal run in with some of the issues that you're discussing in this book recently, because I wrote a book myself and we were going to have it printed in China. But the Chinese printer refused to print it because it included a world map whose borders didn't match what Chinese law says the borders of China are supposed to look like.

on maps. So can you tell us about why these kind of laws exist in countries like China and India and, you know, what their function is? Yeah, so actually the example of China and India are kind of prominent because that's the kind of...

That's something that happens quite a lot. I have a colleague also who's published in India. And on any map, I think you need to have some kind of mention saying, well, these are not representing the exact-- I mean, you have to find some kind of leeway around it to just be able to publish it and acknowledge that you might not be correct. So yeah, I think thinking of maps,

Maps are actually important to, I think, all states, but not in the same way. I found, because this project ended up being kind of more global and not just focusing on the Russia-China border, that it really varies for various reasons, historical reasons. Very often, it's important to states...

like the maps and the outline of the actually we're talking about the outline not just the map itself right um the outline of the state where the state ends um is very important to in cases where borders are seen unstable in flux or under attack or or if there's like a particular colonial history to it so china and india are going to fit that space in the way that they're kind of

they establish, I mean, they make claims that are in conflict with others. So it's a very politicized question. I mean, you ask about maps and I think we also have to think about like, are we talking about maps or outlines? So it's two different things. In the case of Russia,

The maps of the country, the way the country is, I mean, like not just the outline, but what's in the country is also something that was for a long time, especially during the Soviet Union, that was very contentious. So there was the Soviet state would publish maps that were slightly wrong, that it would have a city, you know, somewhere else. I mean, like a few miles away. So because they were trying to...

kind of keep these kind of certain places that were kind of secret, like military kind of towns or so that's one thing. But the border is something a bit different. Yeah, I think it's I mean, I'm thinking about in terms of yeah, I think so. I don't know whether that whether that answers your question.

I mean, what I try to trace in the book is also try to understand why the outlines are so important. I mean, the way sovereignty was managed and imagined in the past was very different, right? It was not about the land. It was not about the territory so much as the person that held that power. So you have the king who was sovereign over people rather than land, right?

and it's only when sovereignty became kind of melded into this idea of the territory that borders became very important. So the state became kind of like a hard, hardly, you know, hard-bound shell rather than just something that would radiate outside, you know, outwards. So that's how borders became so important. Yeah.

So it's kind of a-- Yeah, that brings me nicely to my next question, which is about a concept that you use to think about the importance of this outline or border to the state, which is the idea of a logo map. So can you talk about what is a logo map and how do you use that concept in your book? Right. So the logo map was a term that was originally coined by Benedict Anderson in his book Imagine Community.

and when I read this book a long time ago, I was really kind of stopped by the really kind of resonated with me. Um, uh, so the basic idea of the logo map is that the outline of the state has become iconic. Uh, so in the term logo map, you have logo, which kind of makes you think of a more commercial, maybe a commercial, uh, support, uh, um,

But it's of course much more than that. I mean, it is used also for various reasons. I'm thinking of a fascinating book looking at the logo map of Texas. And there's so many different ways in which it is used by various actors. It can be for commercial reasons, for political reasons, for cultural reasons. And it's...

And this is something that's really fascinating because it's kind of a shorthand for what the state is. The state is a complex entity. So the map, the outline functions a bit like a flag in a way, more than actual map because it doesn't show things. It's just the outline.

But it hits something kind of something visceral, something that you have a sense of immediate recognition. When you see it, you immediately know what it is. And it's done through a radiative process, right? You see it, the more you see it, the more you become aware.

used to it. And I remember reading about this so many years ago and it reminded me of the time when I was a teen in France and there was a map of the country on the wall in the geography class and there was something off about it. And it was France, but it wasn't France. And it took me a while to realize that there was like a little bit missing.

because it was a map of in between wars between World War I and World War II and a part of the country was under the German sovereignty and so it was a little bit lopsided but just slightly and it was enough the fact that it was slightly different it was uncanny enough to kind of draw your attention you know it's like you know so I think all these things kind of stay with you in some way so reading about the logo map I kind of

maybe kind of made me think of this, but maybe a more potent concept than the Logo Map is the one actually that's in the title, is the idea of GeoBody, which was coined by a Thai scholar, the Thongchai Winichakul, which I don't know how to pronounce correctly. And I think he was a former student of Benedict Anderson. So actually Benedict Anderson wrote about this too.

And what was really fascinating and really brilliant about the coinage is that it really tapped into the kind of the visceral nature of the state as we imagine it. And it's at the same time immediately recognizable. So what was interesting for me when reading about this concept of geobody was that on the one hand,

I realized it had been used kind of easily and seamlessly by many scholars for different concepts, for different parts of the world. It was something that just kind of immediately, it was immediately understandable and people just started using it.

But what also struck me was that it kind of remained untheorized. I really wanted in with this book to see like where this analogy of the state and the body was coming from and how it had become so pervasive and so recognizable universally, but also what were the limitations and constraints? What was this past and also its future? So this idea of logomap and geobody, these two concepts are very modern and

As I said before, like a few hundred years ago, it would have been completely meaningless because borders were, the way we have them now did not exist. They were more fuzzy, right? It was like you had a sovereign who had power over people. And at the end of that, you had some kind of overlapping, maybe sovereignty with others.

So that created actually more of a patchwork of territorial entities, which then became enclaves that sort of more or less disappeared from modern maps nearly everywhere. So the idea of the state kind of having very hard limits

is a very, very new thing. We think of borders as always been there, but they haven't. There were multiple types of borders, not just the kind of royal space, but also cultural and religious.

And then these new borders, these kind of hard borders have kind of brought all this, at least discursively, into one single... I mean, ideally, there should be a single line, right? Dividing self from other that would just be self-contained. So, yeah.

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So I want to pick up on this idea of geo bodies to ask about if we have this bodily metaphor for the state, how is that shaped by things like race and gender and ability that bodies have? Yeah, so yeah, so the the the idea of the body at the skin with what is at the center of the state narratives

is this kind of a body that would be whole, kind of integral and integrated. The idea is to have... We imagine the state as being an entity that is self-contained, self-discrete, like the body, right? So the representations tend to be

Well, very often we have like a female body that is kind of used as a, especially when the body, when the state is under threat, there's a lot of images about that, about, you know, kind of a woman that needs to be protected by, you know, patriotic males. And I give some examples in the book, but the body at the center of state narrative is not something that is usually over-defined.

The metaphors are corporeal in the sense that the loss of territory is equated with like rape, for instance. But there is not, you know, it works through metaphors and it's rarely kind of over defined. So in a way, like people can relate to the, well, it's like, okay, it's the body that is kind of,

in state discourse is a body of a specific imagined community, right? It's like, so it's one that is assumed to be mainstream in the sense that it would be kind of cisgender, able-bodied, and at least in a Euro-American context, it would be a white body. So it's a body that kind of excludes differences, and it's something that actually we see

currently in the direction that is followed by the current US administration, which seeks to place the male, white, cisgender and able body at the center in very explicit ways by kind of sidelining all the different forms, different kind of bodily forms. So

Does that answer your question? Yeah. Yeah.

So then, you talked at the beginning about how this project began with your research in Russia, China, Mongolia, but you draw together case studies and examples from all over the world, from different cultural and political economic contexts throughout this book. So what were some of both the benefits and the challenges of casting your net so broadly in this book?

So actually that was a central concern of mine, at least at the beginning, because my training in anthropology can make me very wary of making kind of statements that were like seen as sweeping statements or assumptions about all states.

And it's definitely something that we have to be wary about. There are a lot of differences from one place to another. And when I speak, for instance, of territorial losses, mutilation is not something that, or phantom pains, is not something that all states will respond in a similar way. Some losses of territories are more painful in some contexts and less in others. Yeah.

So there are a lot of differences from one place to another and we have to be careful not to flatten kind of this picture through generalization. But at the same time, when you focus on detail and specificity like anthropology can do, it can also mute what things have in common. So I think depending on what argument you want to make,

you have to either zoom in, zoom in, or zoom out, right? In either case, you're going to get a partial picture. If you try to look at something over, kind of looking at kind of the what things have in common, then of course you're going to lose the details, the textured detail. But if you look at the detail, then you're going to lose sight of something bigger that actually this place you're looking at is embedded into.

So for me, it was important to bring them together. Actually, that was kind of the journey of the book, starting with a particular case and then realizing there was a bigger argument to be made about this. It was not about Rosh Hashanah. It was much bigger than that. So I do argue in the book that the concepts that we have of border, of nation, state, or the logomap, they have become hegemonic.

They are not identical, but they are a category that we could call maybe a kind of fuzzy category in the sense that every, you know, like those what they call prototype category, but different members of that category wouldn't share a number of characteristics, but not all of them. Maybe...

A good example of that can be the category of bird. The prototype may be like a sparrow. You know, imagine a bird, you imagine that, but there are members in that category, like the ostrich that lay eggs and have wings, but they don't fly. Chicken is also another one that we might not immediately think of when we think of a bird. So I guess this is the kind of...

category that I'm thinking of, that there is a central element, but there are actually a number of elements, but not every state will share them. But the one that they share, most of, I mean, there's definitely a strong corporeal aspect to it. To most, I mean, the metaphors that I use, the corporeal metaphors that I use are

kind of easily understandable and feel very visceral. So that's my argument in the book. It's like, we need to look at this. Where does that come from? And the similarities I argue are on the one hand historical and political because they have emerged in particular places, namely in Europe and also in America, and they've spread globally. So there is this element. But at the same time, there's

the fact that they've been adopted so quickly and so seamlessly hints at something deeper, something that is cognitive and pre-cultural. And this is something I unpack in one of the chapters, maybe actually the longest chapter, chapter two. And there's been a lot of work on this, on the body as being the primary and

an original kind of unit of measure. So it kind of makes, we see what is around us in terms of our own bodies. So it makes sense to then have this extend to the state as also kind of a bodily extension. So, yeah, so I, but yeah, I, as I was writing the book, I always had this kind of a little voice in my head saying, oh, but,

Really? Can you generalize? Yeah, so I try to also show the differences. I will show that there's a texture to it and not every case is the same. But there is something that I think that is to be said about the general...

the general idea and I really hope that other people will pick up on this and bring more texture to it and just show maybe where things are not, you know, where it doesn't work so well. I mean there might be cases where, you know, the main metaphor is not corporeal but could be different and I think it's very possible.

particularly in places that have been kind of maybe less integrated into kind of the modern kind of political framework. But I think at the same time it's difficult to sustain. I mean, as I was writing this book, I had people making comments about, yeah, but what about, you know, in this place and that.

But very often we see these kind of alternatives modes of imagination of the imaginary of the state to have sort of melted away of

because you know it you kind of in order to be recognized as uh as a state right you need to adopt certain certain concepts and they I so there is again it goes back to this idea there's a um a place of origin um for for these ideas but at the same time there is something that

that is pre-cultural in the fact that they've been adopted so easily. So you can easily switch from one model to another and adopt this one.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's so important that we're able to kind of move back and forth between recognizing the specific local uniqueness of cases and also seeing these broader commonalities and generalities. So switching gears a little bit now, I know you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but I admit the one thing that moved this book up my list

of books to cover on the podcast was the cover image, which shows a person who has the outline of New Jersey tattooed in their armpit. So can you talk a bit about the origin of that image and why you selected it for the cover of the book? Yeah, so I, yeah, when I start writing a book, very often I have the final product in my mind, but I didn't have a cover for this until maybe two years ago.

when a friend of mine my friend adam sent me because he kept sending me he was we've been talking about this book for a while and he was every time he saw an interesting geobody he would send it to me and then he sent me this one like two years ago and i i thought that's the image i want it was just perfect it was you know it was basically kind of the the link between the body and the state so i'm

I'll talk a bit more about state in the context of the US maybe later. That's something I want to talk about. And at the same time, it was kind of a meta narrative, right? It was like the armpit in the armpit,

it was just perfect I thought this is awesome this is like this is the image I want it has it and I couldn't imagine anything else and and I was too scared to to approach the the photographer because I thought if he says no I'm gonna be because I've got nothing else that works as well

And when I was finishing the book and I spoke to my editor and I shared the image with her, I said, "Yeah, maybe. Yeah, that could work." And then we'd see what the art, you know,

what the art department thinks. And it just happened that the art director at Duke is from New Jersey. And he said, okay, brilliant. I was like, yes, we definitely should go with that. And then, yeah, they approached the photographer who said yes. So that was great. That was like perfect. I think it's a very powerful image, the way she looks at the reader. I think it's just...

Yeah, so I'm glad you found that way, that you're so kind of, you like the cover. I think it's kind of unusual and it's just, I, because I wasn't sure that this would be the cover, I mentioned, I think just in passing somewhere that it's New Jersey and it's the armpit and explain it, but I think a lot of people might miss that.

not being American, I would actually have not got it myself if my friend hadn't told me. I would have just seen an outline and not realized what it was and not knowing that New Jersey is called the armpit of America. I would have missed that. So I wish I had kind of devoted a paragraph to that in the book itself. I think it might be a line somewhere or maybe a footnote

uh so yeah i just wish i had done that but i yeah i i wasn't able to do that and then if i couldn't get a picture i would have to put it away so yeah so that's the only thing but yeah what i wanted to say about the states again it goes back to your question about the idea of you know kind of when you look about a particular global uh idea like the logo map when i was when i was writing that i was

I mean, I was trying to see in what cases a state would not use a logomap. And I realized actually very few logomaps of the US as a state, as a country. There are some, but not many. But there are so many of the individual states. The individual state is kind of the unit that...

people kind of have this kind of a corporeal attachment to. This is like everywhere. I mean, I mentioned this book on Texas, but living in California is the same. So you see it everywhere. It's not all the states because of course some states there, you need to have some kind of iconicity to it. You need to have a specific shape.

So not all states use it to the same extent. The states that are kind of, you know, in the middle of the country that are more squarish, it's more difficult to use it as a kind of a unique kind of, you know, organic. Because if it doesn't look organic, then it's kind of difficult to use in that sense. So Texas works particularly well.

because of its shape that is nearly, I mean, kind of face within a circle, which is kind of the ideal state, you know, if you, ideal shape, if you think of, you know, kind of an island or something kind of, so the idea that is kind of independent and cut off from the rest.

The French is another one that is used a lot. And the two of them actually used as units of measure very often. They're like prototypes, if you go back to this idea of the bird, the sparrow. They're like the sparrows of LogoLabs because they work in a way that Chile would not work, for instance, or a country that is...

And an archipelago would not work either. So it would be more difficult to, because you don't get a good sense of the shape. But something kind of roundish is kind of fits perfectly. And they tend to be prototypes. So yeah, so the US is an example where the country's not logo mapped as much as the states are. Another one that is kind of unusual is UK.

Because it's, it's, you have different units, you have, you know, the United Kingdom, that would be the main island plus, plus Northern Ireland. So it's kind of weird to have as a shape, you have a half an island, you have Great Britain, that is the main one, you have England, that is, people would not even know the shape of England, because it's kind of within the, within the

the Great Whale within kind of the main island. This is kind of a part of it. So they tend to use the flag for these reasons because it's just kind of difficult to local map otherwise. But many countries use the local map, a lot of them, especially countries that are kind of emerging like countries that were like for instance the former

former Yugoslavia, that all these countries kind of emphasize this because they need to really kind of put themselves on the map, right? Literally. So interesting to see in what way it works and what way it's used and what way it's not used. Countries that are more established tend to feel less threatened in that way. They don't need to kind of prove where they are. So there's less of a need for that. But yeah.

Yeah, I always felt a little bad for Colorado and Wyoming. They don't have very good logo maps because it's just a square. Yeah. Yeah.

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Yeah, so continuing to talk a little bit about the United States, you opened the book with a quote from Donald Trump's first campaign, where he said, we don't have a country if we don't have borders. So how might your book help us make sense of what's happening now that we are a few months into Trump's second term as president? Yeah, so...

Yeah, so I think when I was writing this book, sometimes I felt I was like swimming against the tide in terms of a scholarly, academic, you know, powerful tide where you had so many books that were getting published. Like you...

They were like problematizing the idea of the border, showing, you know, through many ethnographic cases that border management practices had been kind of split, like they've been away from, they're taking place away from the actual border.

Like, for instance, if you're traveling from Europe to the U.S., you'll go through border control before you board the plane. So, you know, there's other countries like Australia or Canada, they have also implemented various kind of devices to refuse entry to migrants even before they reach the border. So it's much more complicated than just a line.

And in a way, when I was writing the book, I felt like it felt a little bit archaic in the sense I was looking at representations of the state that didn't really seem to correspond to reality on the ground. Similarly, there's a lot of literature on kind of new military technologies. They're saying that the concept of territory has become obsolete, you know, because you have all these kind of different...

different technologies now that do not, the logic is different. The spatial logic is not kind of aligned on this kind of idea of borderline or front. And so these two things were, I argue in the book, are true, but at the same time, they're incompletely true.

The idea of kind of externalizing, outsourcing border control is something that you can do if you are a powerful state like the US or European states. You could not imagine, you know, a small country saying, well, no, you're going to have border control, you know, before you come in. That's not, you know, there's a power relation to it. If you think of the US-Mexico border, you know, like the power differential is very stark. Like you...

you can just walk into Mexico without any documents. I mean, at least that was the case a few years ago. I don't know if it's still the case now, but to come back, you have to go through long lines. It's like it's so, you know, this is a very different way of managing the borders. I think this idea of...

outsourced or kind of border control at a distance is something that you can impose if you have the force to, if you're strong enough to do that, right? So the idea that all borders are no longer there, they don't exist anymore, you know, they're everywhere.

Yes, I know, but it's also, it maybe speaks from a place of privilege. I mean, especially if you imagine, if you see all the people who are dying trying to cross that actual line, you know, in coming into the US or coming into Europe, then you realize the line is still very powerful. And the idea of the military...

technologies having rendered territorial sovereignty obsolete is clearly not true. It's again, you just have to look at Russia and Ukraine. That actually is far in a very traditional, geopolitical way. So you have, on the one hand, borders are

how borders are managed in actual practice and how they're imagined. And my book was really about this imagination of the imaginary of the border, the imaginary of the state, the imaginary through the logo map, through, oh, this is what the border is, we need to have a border wall. It's a very simplistic and partial view, but at the same time, it's one that's very powerful.

And this is how people get elected, not just Donald Trump in the US, but in Europe people have been, and elsewhere people have been elected because they say we will protect the border, we protect that line. So it's in a way kind of reminds me of the concept of race that we know is not sound scientifically, but it remains very potent, right? Socially, it's a social fact.

And that's what the logo map is. It's a social fact. It makes it easier to understand what the state is, even if it's reductive. So yeah, so it is very powerful. So I think it's not just...

We say, well, he got elected in large part, not just because of this, but in large part because he said he would keep the border strong. So what was interesting for me was less the deployment of this kind of populist idea,

politicians, but how powerful, how powerfully people respond to it. So I really wanted to tap into that and understand the affect behind that. Not just the use of this, but then the response of it, the response to it. So how does it change? Well, I think it's just... I think it's just, yeah, I think the fact that he was re-elected kind of maybe confirms kind of some of the arguments I make in the book. I mean, I...

Yeah, this is one of those cases where you don't want to be proven right. All right. So as we're moving towards the end of our time here, I wanted to give you an opportunity to give a shout out or a thank you to anyone whose help was important to you as you were writing this book. Wow, there's been so many. Imagine in more than 10 years. I would have to, yeah. I mean, all the people I spoke to kind of gave me...

gave me kind of great you know examples counter example illustrations my friend Adam gave me the cover uh in terms of the yeah there's so many people that would like to I mean some of you have thanks in person of my emailing them um people with scholarship kind of uh

as kind of helped me write that. There'd be so many, so many people. I'm not sure I would have to be such a long list. I would have to thank my family, my husband who's been very patient as I was writing this and taking a lot of time away from more important domestic concerns and focusing on this. So yeah.

Yeah, I don't know. It'd be so many, so many people. I don't know. I don't want to single anybody outside. I'm not going to say just a few names and just, you know, there's like a very long list of acknowledgement. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Well, then that brings us to our traditional final question here on the NBN, which is what are you working on next? Right. So actually, as I said before, when I started writing this book, it started as a little kind of idea that sort of grew into something bigger. And as I was developing this, I was getting more and more interested in territorial sovereignty. And as

In parallel to this book, I worked on a collective volume that also came out with Duke in 2020 called Voluminous States. So it's kind of looking at... So this one, Somatic States, is looking at the connection between the body and the state. The other one is looking at the state as a three-dimensional entity.

kind of flipping the the map sideways and looking at what's above and what's below um i was lucky to attract a group of people that was like amazing and i wrote like really wonderful chapters so so that was actually that was a two kind of a

two books that are kind of a part of the same project in a way looking at territorial sovereignty and there is a third book that I'm just starting to I'm at the research stage at the moment and is looking at the state as a

looking at the surface of the state as a flexible, stretchy space. So kind of looking at the tension between where the borders are on the map and where the state actually ends in through practices. And I'm mobilizing the concept of topology, which is kind of looking at

at where things are in relation to each other rather than where they are in actual space. So it's really kind of a project looking at connections and connectivity but really kind of foregrounding the space as a physical stretchy materiality. So this book is also going to be a kind of a global

a global look with the introduction kind of bringing the theory and then all the chapters looking at different parts of the world and looking at kind of what we can do with this idea of topology and how it can be useful. So it's kind of a how to do basically, how to do topology, how to use topology to look at political geography.

All right. Well, I'll definitely be looking forward to that. And maybe we can have you back on the show to talk about it once that one's published. Yeah. Thank you. Hopefully I won't take 10 years to write that one. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thank you so much for inviting me. This has been a conversation with Frank Bia, author of Somatic States on Cartography, Geobodies, Bodily Integrity, published in 2025 by Duke University Press.