CfPs – Social and Cultural Geography Research Group

Social and Cultural Geography sponsored sessions at the Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference 2019

We are pleased to announce our list of sponsored sessions for the forthcoming Royal Geographical Society annual conference that will take place 27th – 31st August 2019. This year we are sponsoring 12 sessions for the annual conference. If you are interested in submitting a paper to a session for the conference, please contact the session conveners.

Postgraduate Snapshots of Trouble and Hope

Will Jamieson, Royal Holloway, University of London William.jamieson.2017@live.rhul.ac.uk
Amy Walker, Cardiff University walkerA13@cardiff.ac.uk

Abstract:
We live in troubling times, and in troubled places. Indeed, politically, economically and ecologically, trouble has acquired an inconceivable planetary dimension, cumulating with significant social and cultural transformation. When we situate these troubling times in spaces and places, they open up possibilities of rupture, alterity, and hope. If ‘staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present’ (Haraway 2016: 1), how can we as geographers make our concepts and theories ‘present’ to the trouble at hand? This session intends to explore ways in which Postgraduate Social and Cultural Geographers are ‘staying with the trouble’ to uncover these spaces of hope, possibility, and rupture, which lie embedded within existing social orders and cultural practices. Presenters are encouraged to explore how we can think through and with geographies of trouble and hope, and how we can make this dialectic present to surpass the impasse of our troubling times.

Each presentation will be centred round a single ‘Snapshot’ (whether an image, artefact, quotation, soundbite, field diary entry, or mini-video clip) which will form the focal point for 8-10 minute contributions. The Snapshot is intended to be either a literal or metaphorical prompt through which the topic of the presentation can be represented. As such it is envisaged that the snapshot will be the main artefact around which each contribution is orientated. We thus encourage participants to think critically about and fully utilise the trajectories, tensions, and textures of their snapshots as a means of enlivening understandings of their chosen topic.

‘Building better worlds’: utopian and dystopian speculative fictions

Richard Scriven, National University of Ireland Galway, r.scriven@umail.ucc.ie

Abstract:
Speculative fiction – including science fiction, fantasy, and supernatural fiction – articulates a vast range of human hopes and troubles through metaphor, analogy, and imagination. In different media and embodied practices, creators and audiences (co)produce new beings, planets, and landscapes replete with utopian and dystopian tropes. Reality is reflected and refracted in the compassionate humanity of Star Trek, the struggles of good and evil in Harry Potter, the post-apocalyptic challenges of the Fallout video games, and in countless other universes. This session explores speculative fictions as layered terrains that interweave contemporary and historic social, cultural, and political concerns with imaginative capacities. Papers are invited that critically engage with these topics, including (but not limited to) the representations of socio-political issues, the generation of new worlds, the disruptive faculties of fiction, gender and identity portrayals, the innovation of fanfics and cosplay, the solidarities of conventions and fan groups, and the relevance of escapism. Contributors are encouraged to creatively present their papers through the use of performance, participation, materials, and audio-visual cues.

The geographies of loneliness and solitude

Eleanor Wilkinson, Southampton University
Sarah Marie Hall, Manchester University
Alison Stenning, Newcastle University

Abstract:
This session seeks to provide a critical, geographical reflection into the so-called ‘epidemic’ of loneliness. Loneliness has been positioned as a pressing health concern, depicted as a risk to both physical and mental wellbeing, but also as a socio-economic issue of inequality. The rise in solo living, geographically distant kinship networks, and declining community bonds are all seen as potential factors that have resulted in this rise in loneliness. People are seen to be living increasingly isolated and detached lives, and this is something which people may increasingly be reflecting on and working to mitigate in their everyday lives. In this context, in 2018 the UK government published the first ‘strategy for tackling loneliness’, which set out ‘to build personal and community resilience’. Yet missing from this strategy is the role that austerity measures may have had in intensifying loneliness. Austerity has resulted in the closures of social infrastructures that offered the potential for connection, such as libraries and children centres, and has also led to housing and welfare reforms that have displaced people from the communities in which they once lived.

The session will also seek to move beyond framing loneliness as a ‘problem’, to examine what Denise Riley has termed ‘the right to be lonely’. Central here is the idea that to be alone is not the same as to be abandoned. In the context of the remaking of domestic and local spaces in austerity, for example, some are being expected to share everyday space in ways that are experienced as uncomfortable or undesirable. What might it mean to desire solitude, and what if our problem might not be disconnection, but too much closeness? This session will reflect upon how solitude may be an integral part of people’s mental wellbeing and ask how this broader discussion of the geographies of solitude might speak back to dominant policy concerns around loneliness.

In these ways, this session seeks to think about geographies of loneliness and solitude both as spaces of trouble and as spaces of hope. We welcome submissions that explore geographies of loneliness and solitude, connection and disconnection, at a variety of scales and in a range of geographical contexts.

Collective Feelings and Contemporary Conditions

Ben Anderson, Durham University, ben.anderson@durham.ac.uk
Helen Wilson, Durham University helen.f.wilson@durham.ac.uk

Abstract:
How can we sense, diagnose, and present the multiple ‘collective feelings’ that constitute contemporary conditions? What particular challenges do collective feelings pose for conceptualisation, research, and (re)presentation in the social sciences and humanities in the midst of ongoing interest in spaces of affect and emotion? The sessions will explore these questions at a time of apparent ‘crisis’ during which large-scale, societal moods are frequently invoked by commentators as causes of a range of today’s geographies of ‘trouble and hope’. For example, the emergence of various populisms and events, including the election of Donald Trump and Brexit, have been explained in relation to the feeling of being ‘left behind’, hope for something better, or rage at disempowerment, whilst climate change has been connected to a widespread sense of futility and hopelessness mixed with denial. In relation to the widespread claim of the role of collective feeling, the session has two aims. First, to map the relations between specific collective feelings and conditions (including but not limited to the ascendency of the right, crises of liberalism, precarity, transformations in racial capitalism and settler colonialisms, climate crisis and species loss) and events (including but not limited to Brexit, the election of Trump, and the advent of new social movements). Second, to stay with the challenges of conceptualising collective feeling in the midst of the emergence of concepts such as atmosphere, mood, and structures of feeling.

Hypersurfaces: exploring the geographies of multi-dimensional bodies

Mark Holton, University of Plymouth mark.holton@plymouth.ac.uk
Catherine Wilkinson, Edge Hill University catherine.wilkinson@edgehill.ac.uk
Samantha Wilkinson, Manchester Metropolitan University samantha.wilkinson@mmu.ac.uk

Abstract
The intimate turn in Geography has renewed engagement in bodies as visceral spaces of encounter that contain complex material, symbolic, emotional and affective dimensions (Price, 2013). Yet, while bodies are often demarcated – presenting the edges as margins, or a kind of hinterland – we question whether these edges could, in fact, represent frontiers, opportunities to extend the body beyond its ‘fleshiness’. We term this ‘hypersurface’ – the multiple and unspecified dimensions of the body’s edges through which corporeal practices are performed – to enquire how bodies’ materialities (skin, hair, nails etc.) can exist in, on and beyond the body in different and competing ways. We invite opportunities to think critically about how the features of the body that exist on, around or beyond its surface(s) might characterise, define and categorise identities and positionalities. These dimensions include – but are not limited to – skin, head/body hair, nails teeth etc. and how these inscribe (e.g. tattoos, scarring, make up etc.) and augment (e.g. hair/nail extensions, teeth veneers etc.) the body. Moreover, bodily absences (e.g. through alopecia, medically-induced hair loss, or congenital limb absence, amputation and prosthesis) carry equal importance, specifically in challenging perceived ‘acceptable’ dimensions of the body (Wilkinson et al., 2018).

We invite contributions that explore:
• How/whether the body’s surface/materialities contributes to intimate, emotional and affective geographies.
• In what manner bodies are performed at the edges of the body (e.g. hair/beauty practices etc.).
• The social construction of bodily routines (e.g. hair removal, make up application, body covering/exposure etc.).
• In what way the body’s surfaces might position identities in society (e.g. cultural practices etc.).

Alternative Spaces of Learning

Menusha De Silva, Singapore Management University menushads@smu.edu.sg
Orlando Woods, Singapore Management University orlandowoods@smu.edu.sg

Abstract:
Learning is a continuous, life-long process. It engages with diverse ways of knowing. In comparison, education is the formalisation of learning, and is rooted in hegemonic understandings of knowledge. Education is but one form of learning, to which many alternatives exist. For most individuals, formal education and informal practices of learning are integrated into one holistic framework of understanding. Yet, whilst the geographies of education have tended to focus on formal spaces of education (notably, state-funded schools and universities), they do not fully capture the range of learning spaces and experiences that are defined and shaped by our subject positions and journeys through life. In this session, we aim to broaden the geographies of education by exploring “alternative spaces of learning” within and beyond spaces of formal education. We invite papers that engage with the following questions:

• What constitutes alternative spaces of learning, in terms of pedagogies, students, temporalities?
• How can alternative spaces of learning offer hope to individuals in troubled times?
• How do these spaces problematize and/or align with hegemonic understandings of learning?
• Do understandings of alternative education and learning vary geographically?
• What are the spatialities that emerge from these contestations of global and/or localised understandings of learning?

Crafting Alterity: Hopeful Geographies of Creativity and Making

Rebecca Collins, University of Chester, rebecca.collins@chester.ac.uk
Dr Thomas Smith, Masaryk University, smith@fss.muni.cz

Abstract:
The geographical literature on craft and creative practices continues to grow apace (e.g. Price & Hawkins, 2017; Carr & Gibson, 2017). With this session, we seek contributions which trace the transformations brought forth by material engagement in various sites of vernacular and everyday creativity – not least transformations in understanding our being-in-the-world, material affordances, meaningful work, and alternative conceptions of embodied sustainable practices such as maintenance and repair.

Potential considerations include:
• Which practices do diverse craft spaces and communities encourage (or not) to counter unsustainable modes of living?
• Given that craft has been highlighted as key to grappling with the value-action gap in sustainability research (Coeckelbergh, 2015), what role can embodiment and skill play in sustainability transitions (see Royston, 2017)?
• What scales, temporal and spatial, are relevant in such (often slow and place-specific) practices, given the urgency of our ecological predicament?
• Amidst a growing recognition of certain crafts as endangered ‘intangible cultural heritage’ (HCA, 2017), and in tandem with the ‘dematerialisation’ of societies in the global North, how do skills linger in the landscape, and how does this affect socio-cultural resilience (Carr, 2017)?

We particularly welcome methodologically innovative research grounded in the messy materiality of the workshop, as well as heretofore lacking perspectives from beyond the global North.

More-than-human haunted landscapes: trace-ing binaries of hope/desolation

Adam Searle, University of Cambridge aeds2@cam.ac.uk
Jonathon Turnbull, University of Cambridge jjt44@cam.ac.uk

Abstract
Landscapes bear traces of hope and desolation. They are at once the physical manifestation of geologic time and the coming together of living and nonliving things, reminders of the past through iterations of the future. These traces haunt landscapes, they are active and inter/active of what Derrida would name hauntologies, methodological invitations to consider what is through attention to what isn’t. Landscapes are haunted in multifarious ways (e.g. through extinction, nuclear disaster, contamination) and the traces of haunting events refute the concept of singularity in meaning. What do haunted landscapes have in common? Their traces are material, for example, through geological imprints or altered ecological relations; but they are simultaneously virtual, culturally and affectively powerful, troublesome and stimulating. Haunted landscapes allow the binary of hope/desolation to function, often bringing promise with despair, engendering a dialectic between utopia and dystopia. With this panel, we invite papers interested in these traces which allow the binary of hope/desolation to function, asking how we can learn from each empirical haunting. In particular we encourage research at the intersections of human/animal/plant/geological worlds, and how the constellations of these shared existences inspire novel modes of understanding geographies of landscape, and the interrelations of existence and environment.

Geographies of alienation/alienating geographies

Jay Emery, University of Leicester jde7@le.ac.uk
Katy Bennett, University of Leicester, kjb33@le.ac.uk

Abstract:
This session aims to initiate a geographical research agenda focussed on the concept of alienation. We are often told by the media and political figures that certain demographics are alienated, and that political institutions or spaces are alienating. Moreover, these alienations are claimed to be generative of the populist politics and democratic ruptures of recent times. Harvey (2018), in a Marxian framework of alienation, has recently argued that alienation is so widespread as to be ‘universal’. Harvey suggests that neoliberal political economies are at the root of this ‘universal alienation,’ however, other geographers use alienation as a descriptor for the opposite or absence of belonging. Like belonging, the meaning of alienation can appear axiomatic and self-explanatory. Yet, despite apparently being at the centre of our current political and social malaise, alienation is rarely defined, theorised or examined as a concept or affective state. Aside Marx’s theorisations, little has been propositioned regards how alienation is formed, how it feels as an affective intensity or how it can be mediated. Acknowledging the clear geographical dimensions of alienation, this session engages directly with the chair’s theme by centring the supposed root of so much of the world’s troubles and barriers to hope.

The Geographies of Folk Horror: from the Strange Rural to the Urban Wyrd

Julian Holloway, Manchester Metropolitan University j.j.holloway@mmu.ac.uk
James Thurgill, The University of Tokyo jthurgill@g.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Abstract:
Over approximately the last decade, Folk Horror has seen increasing popularity in films, blogs, books and on internet fan pages. Folk Horror concerns itself with marginal and liminal landscapes that in various ways are active in the production of the horrific. Folk Horror’s landscapes are predominantly rural, coding the countryside as oppositional to modernity and capable of hosting ancient secrets ready to be revived or unearthed to the terror of the outsider. Folk Horror’s texts and practices revel in the idea that underneath the superficial solitude of the pastoral, malevolent forces work to promote acts of unspeakable violence. Beyond the landscape itself, the ‘folk’ of Folk Horror also deliver a sense of disquiet: its communities, with their forgotten or erased practices and rituals are central to the horrific, often committing atrocities themselves in order to satisfy the lore that protects the land.

The reach of Folk Horror arguably extends beyond the rural through the Urban Wyrd, wherein the cracks in the sheen of the cosmopolitan urban let forth the ghosts of occluded pasts and disturbing practices. This session therefore seeks to bring together those interested in Folk Horror, the Strange Rural, the Gothic countryside or the Urban Wyrd.

Papers are invited on the following non-exhaustive list of topics:

• Defining and characterising Folk Horror geographies.
• Representing the rural in Folk Horror.
• The cultural politics of Folk Horror and its geographies.
• The folk of Folk Horror.
• The horror of Folk Horror, its affects and atmospheres.
• Survivals, remnants and the place of time in Folk Horror.
• The ‘revival’ in interest in Folk Horror, its significance and implications.
• Living with and in the ‘Strange Rural’.
• Geographies of Folk Horror beyond the rural – the Urban Wyrd.
• Hauntology and Folk Horror.
• Psychogeography and Folk Horror.
• Folk Horror and Nationhood.
• Soundscaping Folk Horror and Wyrd Folk music.
• Geographic readings of contemporary Folk Horror films, fiction, art and craft practices.

Time and Austerity: Troubled pasts/ hopeful futures?

Stephanie Denning, Coventry University, stephanie.denning@coventry.ac.uk
Sarah Marie Hall, University of Manchester, sarah.m.hall@manchester.ac.uk
Ruth Raynor, Newcastle University, ruth.raynor@newcastle.ac.uk

Abstract:
In September 2018, the UK Prime Minister Theresa May claimed that ‘austerity is over’. This announcement was made after a decade of austerity policies, the everyday effects of which geographers have explored. These sessions engage with the question of time and austerity: they consider how, after the naming of an ‘end,’ austerity will endure, and continue to be endured. We take stock of current research on austerity in human geography and consider where it is heading. In the first session, lightning talks and interactive displays will showcase creative practice approaches to austerity research including a play by Ruth Raynor, an everyday austerity zine developed with Sarah Marie Hall, and ‘poverty response’ photo voice by Stephanie Denning. These will generate discussion with session participants about the place of participatory, activist and socially engaged research in the geographies of austerity. For the second session, conference papers will question the multiple and complex durations of austerity. This will include projects that are in their preliminary stages of research, and those which focus on the future of austerity. Together these two sessions will enable us to explore time and austerity: bringing together hope and trouble in the past, present and anticipated futures of austerity.

Intergenerational and family perspectives on mobility, migration and care

Co-sponsorship sought from the Geographies of Children, Youth and Families Research Group, and the Population Geography Research Group.

Matej Blazek, Newcastle University
Ruth Cheung Judge, UCL
James Esson, Loughborough University

Abstract:
Intergenerational care is a central aspect in numerous forms of mobility. For instance, the care needs of ageing populations drive worker movement (Anderson and Shutes 2014; Connell and Walton-Roberts 2016). Negotiations over the appropriate allocation and distribution of care for children and the elderly underpin family migration and transnational family arrangements (Baldassar 2016) and reflect the way mobility is deeply implicated in the constant renegotiation of kinship norms. Notions of care and family are central to transnational policies in areas such as child protection (Hoang et al. 2015). Thus, the politics of inequality, interdependency, exploitation or progressive change often coalesce around how intergenerational care and mobility are experienced, governed, altered and negotiated (Maksim and Bergman 2009).

This session invites further examination of connections between care, transnational mobility, and intergenerational and family relations. It asks how material and intersubjective power relations – and social and physical spaces – are maintained, produced and transformed at the intersections between these forces. The session will speak to and draw connections between these issues in both global North and South. We invite papers analysing how intergenerational and family care – understood as culturally produced rather than universal notions – shape mobility within and across national borders; and how methodological and theoretical insights on the experiences of mobility can generate fresh perspectives on the politics of family relations and care. In doing so, the session hopes to bring scholarship on care, mobility and migration, and the family into closer conversation for fresh perspectives on troubled and hopeful politics.

Specific themes to address include, but are not limited to:

• In-family and intergenerational care commitments as drivers of insecure migration
• How immigration politics challenge or are challenged by the politics of care
• Racialised, gendered and aged experiences of mobility and immobility driven by family care
• Family ideals, life-course aspirations, and intergenerational contracts as central to theorising mobility and migration
• Multi-scalar links between the intimacy of intergenerational caring relationships and global mobilities and migrations
• Political economies of family care mobilities
• How spaces and places are materially and socially (re)made through care mobilities

RGS Postgraduate Mid-term conference 24-26 April 2019: Calls for papers and posters OPEN!

Hello fellow geographers,

We are pleased to announce that the call for abstracts for the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) Postgraduate Mid-term Conference 2019 is now open. This is an annual Postgraduate focused conference that is co-organised by the RGS, it’s Postgraduate Forum research group and a UK host university. This year, the conference will be held at Manchester Metropolitan University (Manchester, UK) from Wednesday 24^th to Friday 26^th of April 2019. We hope to see you then!

Why should I attend?

This conference is a great opportunity for all postgraduate students in any discipline of geography, human, physical or environmental, to present their work in a friendly and supportive environment. We also welcome postgraduates outside the discipline who work with geography in some way. This interdisciplinary event is an excellent place to get feedback on your work, network, and practice your presentation skills whether you are a first-time presenter, or you are preparing for other conferences or PhD Viva.

How much?

The cost of the conference is: £65

The registration fee will include;

Access to a great programme of paper and poster presentations
Workshops to develop skills that are key for an early career researcher,
Keynote speeches from established academics in geography
Refreshments throughout the conference,
A drinks reception on the evening of Wednesday 24^th April,
Lunches on Thursday 24^th and Friday 25^th April
Conference meal on the evening of Thursday 25^th April at GRUB, a street-food venue, with a selection of food vendors and craft beer.

When can I register?

Registration for the conference will open in 2019. Please keep up to date on our social media, and the Postgraduate Forum Twitter account and website for details when they are announced. We will also be disclosing more information about our keynote speakers, workshops and other aspects of the conference in due course.

Can I apply for funding to attend?

There will be opportunities for postgraduates to apply for bursaries to attend the conference. These are facilitated and provided by the RGS’s research groups. Details of these opportunities and updates from the conference will be circulated via our Twitter account @rgsmidterm2019, the Postgraduate Forum Twitter account @PGF_RGSIBG and their website www.pgf.rgs.org.

How to apply?

Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words along with four keywords, your full name and university, and your intention to present a poster or paper, no later than 21^stJanuary 2019.

Please specify in your email upon submission of an abstract the following:

Your intention to present a paper or poster;
The area(s) of geography your paper/poster is situated, alongside four key words.

The above information will help the conference committee to sort out abstracts more easily and organise sessions around grouped themes.

You can submit your abstract or get in touch if you have any questions here: RGSMidterm2019@mmu.ac.uk

We look forward to welcoming you to Manchester in 2019!

The Manchester Metropolitan University Mid-Term Organising Committee

Jamie Halliwell, Gail Skelly, Matthew Carney, Fraser Baker, Rong Huang and Maria Loroño-Leturiondo.

CFPs: 2nd International conference on Migration and Mobilities

Venue: University of Plymouth

Date: 12th-13th July 2018

Conference abstract

Discussions of migration and mobilities feature prominently in our everyday lives. The often competing discourses debated by politicians and the media regarding the movement of people, of products and services, of resources and pollution, of ideas and beliefs have greatly influenced the ways in which people consider and contest notions of distance, proximity, territory and belonging and the (in)equitability involved in this. Within the academy, the rapidly changing shape of the world in terms of governance, finance, resources, war, terrorism etc. has encouraged migration and mobilities experts to challenge the theories and concepts we employ to explore, interpret and evaluate movement at a range of spatial and temporal scales to respond to a myriad of societal changes.

The first International Migration and Mobilities conference at Loughborough University in July 2016 successfully created a space through which these patterns and processes of migration and mobilities could be interrogated by drawing together scholars from across both fields to cultivate and share new ideas. Through the second conference in this series we build upon these themes and seek to draw these fields even closer to explore more critically how the intersections between migration and mobilities might contribute towards new understandings of contemporary societal debates through an interdisciplinary lens.

This two-day conference will be broadly organised around the themes of:

Theoretical and conceptual understandings of / interconnections between migration and mobility studies;
Methodological approaches for researching migration and mobilities;
Scales of migration and mobilities and the impact upon borders and boundaries;
Experiencing migration and mobilities through embodied performances – of ‘being mobile’;
The politicization of migration and mobilities that (de)enable / (dis)empower;
The role of intersectionality in migration and mobility that might affect the ability to move equitably (e.g. age, gender, class, religion, sexuality, ethnicity race etc.);
The role of community and belonging in critiquing the categorisations associated with migration and mobilities (e.g. Diaspora, (home)lands, (dis)connections and the search for belonging);
The role of structural actors in shaping and managing migration and mobilities (e.g. governments, cities, institutions, industries, agencies etc.).

Submitting abstracts: Please can participants submit abstracts that are between 150-200 words long for the paper and poster sessions. We also welcome participants that wish to propose workshop sessions and these will require abstracts of 300-400 words that outline:

the type of workshop
the anticipated group size(s) – i.e. is there a minimum/maximum number of participants required?
the aims and objectives of the session
the activities that will be covered during the session
any special requirements, for example equipment, room layout etc.

Informal enquiries regarding workshop proposals can be directed to Dr Mark Holton (mark.holton@plymouth.ac.uk).

Please register your abstract at: www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/Migration_and_Mobilities_2018 before Friday 9th March 2018.

Further details of the conference, including venue, accommodation, transport etc. can be found at: https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/whats-on/2nd-international-conference-on-migration-and-mobilities

Our sponsored sessions for RGS-IBG 2018

We can finally announce the list of our sponsored sessions for the upcoming Royal Geographical Society conference in Cardiff 28th – 31st August 2018.

Please contact session organisers if you are interested in submitting a paper.

Postgraduate Snapshots in/of the landscape

Maddy Thompson, Newcastle University, m.c.thompson@newcastle.ac.uk

Jen Owen, Cardiff University, OwenJ4@cardiff.ac.uk

Social and cultural landscapes – the traces and imprints of people and groups on the land – have long been of interest to geographers. Social and cultural geographers are adept at analysing, reading, and interrogating ‘landscapes’ from a variety of perspectives; accounting for processes of creation and maintenance, as well as lived experiences and practices. Even after forty years geographers are finding new ways and methods to conceptualise and understand landscape, considering how issues of power and dissent, identity and belonging, inequality and social justice, and memory and representation play out in the landscape.

This session showcases the ways Postgraduate Social and Cultural Geographers are negotiating and critically engaging with the concept of ‘landscape’ within their research. Each presentation will be centred round a single ‘Snapshot’ (whether an image, artefact, quotation, soundbite, field diary entry, or mini-video clip) which will form a focal point. Presenters are encouraged to delve into the varying ways we can encounter, apprehend, inhabit, belong to, move through, and be haunted by landscapes.

Sandscapes: geographies of flux and flow

Julian Brigstocke, Cardiff University, brigstockej@cardiff.ac.uk

William Jamieson, Royal Holloway, University of London William.jamieson.2017@live.rhul.ac.uk

Sand is the stuff of power. It is a vital material in modern construction. It transgresses borders and thresholds. It connects the elemental to the global. It is at home in land, sea, and air. Yet within social and cultural geography, little attention has been paid to the material life of this imaginatively potent material. This session addresses calls for a multiplication of materiality within the discipline (Anderson and Wylie 2009; Whatmore 2006), by delving into the multiplicity of sandscapes that pervade our lives in the context of a global shortage of sand (Peduzzi 2014). Sand, a seemingly mundane material, is an active substrate of the spaces of modernity, and constitutes a vantage point from which to read and write landscapes that are urban, coastal, nomadic; wet and dry; dispersed and fragmented; eroded and reclaimed. What aspects of the production of space slip through our fingers? How do we develop new ways of reading and writing everyday spaces that are intimately entangled with an inherently itinerant material?

This session invites papers that engage with the materiality of sandscapes, examining how sand might reinvigorate debates around: new materialism; affective and more-than-human geographies; and new ways of reading and writing landscape.

Landscapes of “Detectorists”

Dr Innes M. Keighren, Royal Holloway, University of London innes.keighren@rhul.ac.uk

Dr Joanne Norcup, University of Glasgow, joanne.norcup@glasgow.ac.uk

The BAFTA-winning situation comedy-drama “Detectorists” has, across three series and a Christmas special (2014–17), garnered critical praise for its affectionate portrayal of metal detecting and amateur archaeology in rural England. In its attention to the embodied practice of detecting and to the social worlds of detectorists, the programme has been described by critics variously as “about hardly anything and almost everything” (Lloyd 2015) and “the most accurate portrait of men being men that you’ll find in current popular culture” (Fewery 2015). For one Twitter user (Sumsion 2014), the show is simply “a warm, beguiling, slow-burn meditation on male friendship and prosaic details of Englishness, plus some metal”. Explaining his motivation for creating “Detectorists”, Mackenzie Crook, writer and director of the programme, has said “I wanted to do an exploration of men and their obsessions, and I wanted to do a celebration of people and their hobbies, and a celebration of the English countryside” (Crook 2015).

While the comedy in “Detectorists” centres largely on the friendship of Andy Stone (Mackenzie Crook) and Lance Stater (Toby Jones) as they pursue their niche hobby in the diverse company of the Danebury Metal Detecting Club (DMDC), the dramatic foil is provided by the relationships Andy and Lance have with their significant others—Andy’s geography-graduate, school-teacher wife, Becky (Rachael Stirling) and Lance’s exploitative ex-wife, Maggie (Lucy Benjamin)—and their antagonists, ‘Simon and Garfunkel’ (Simon Farnaby and Paul Casar), members of the DMDC’s arch rivals, the Antiquisearchers/Dirt Sharks. Nuanced characterisation and relatable situations have endeared “Detectorists” to viewers in the United Kingdom and beyond. Fans of the programme praise its “humanity and the honest observations of the real world” (Meaden 2015).

Where “Detectorists” is distinct from most situation comedies is that much of the action takes place outdoors, in the fields and meadows where the programme’s protagonists pursue their hobby. Both aesthetically and thematically, landscape dominates “Detectorists”. Filmed on location in Framlingham, Suffolk—standing in for Essex, and the fictional town of Danebury— the visual palate of the programme enfolds a non-human supporting cast of insects, birds, plants, and trees, and variously echoes the landscape paintings of Thomas Gainsborough and George Shaw, and the cinematic vision of Peter Hall’s “Akenfield” (1974). Landscape is, also, the focus of the protagonists’ preoccupations; it is variously walked, surveyed, sensed, gazed upon, read, and dug. Landscape is where the programme’s characters seek solitude, find companionship, and navigate the sometimes dramatic intrusions from ‘the rude world’. Landscape reveals the past while concealing the prospect of future discovery.

The following is a list of topics/themes our session seeks to explore:

 Aesthetics and landscape;

 Amateur and vernacular knowledge-making and practise;

 Gender and friendship;

 Geographies of comedy-drama;

 Geographies of detecting;

 Hobby geographies;

 Landscape and Englishness;

 Landscape and heritage;

 Landscape and identity;

 Rural geographies;

 Sonic geographies;

 Technology and the sensing of landscape;

 Vertical geographies.

Historical-Cultural Geographies of Exhibition and Display

Dr James Robinson, Manchester Metropolitan University, james.robinson@mmu.ac.uk

Geographers have long expressed an interest in the practices and spaces of exhibition and display, from museum spaces and art installations (Geoghagen, 2010; Hawkins, 2008) to festivals, parades and a range of commemorative acts and landscapes (Cudney, 2014; Johnson, 1995; Marston, 2002). These engagements have taken place in conjunction with a diverse range of geographical themes: exploring the discipline’s colonial legacies (Driver, 2013), the construction of imperial landscapes (Driver and Gilbert, 1999), cultures of remembrance (Johnson, 2003), and socio-cultural representations of nature (Naylor, 2002), to name some examples. Moreover, these accounts have often reflected upon the role of display and exhibition in the construction and contestation of a myriad of identities – of nationality (Kong and Yeoh, 1997), gender (Whitehead, 2008), sexuality (Johnston, 2008) and the non-human (Anderson, 1995). This session seeks to provide a forum for ongoing discussions about the historical-cultural geographies of exhibition and display. Contributions to the session may be historical or contemporary in nature. Themes for consideration include (but are by no means limited to):

 Material landscapes and cultures of display and exhibition

 Performative and enacted spaces of display

 Sensuous geographies of display and exhibition

 Parades and ritualised cultures of display

 Cultural and contested politics of exhibition

Uncomfortable Geographies

Jen Owen, Cardiff University, OwenJ4@cardiff.ac.uk

Amy Walker, Cardiff University, WalkerA13@cardiff.ac.uk

Anthony Ince, Cardiff University, InceA@cardiff.ac.uk

As geographers have sought to consider everyday resonances of emotions, affects, and sensations, many have considered the notion of ‘comfort’, engaging with materialities (Price et al. 2018), public spaces (Boyer 2012), mobilities (Bissell 2008) and hospitality (Craggs 2015). However, in Cruel Optimism, Berlant (2011) reminds us that comforting things may have a darker side: aspirations to the ‘good life’ and middle-class dreams of suburban comfort consistently fail. We therefore view comfort and our desire for it in a tense relationship with its antitheses: discomfort and the uncomfortable.

To be uncomfortable is to feel discomfort, unease or awkwardness, or be fearful of the unknown. If Hinton (2010) suggests that comfort is an achievement/aspiration then discomfort can be perceived, within discourses of neoliberal austerity, as a personal failing. Yet discomfort can be generative or productive, driving social change, such as through geopolitical negotiation, political struggle, and living in diverse communities. This session wishes to explore what pushes us outside of our comfort zone. We invite deep empirical and theoretical engagements with dissonance, contradictions and the ambiguous that go beyond discomfort as just ‘another emotion’ (Pile 2010).

Topics could include but are not limited to:

 Identity – being (un)comfortable in own skin

 Being comfortably off – downplaying success/ wealth

 Taboo – acknowledging the forbidden

 Tragedy – dealing with distressing events

 Violence – combating hostility

 Political correctness – confronting discrimination

 Morals/ values – re-evaluating ‘sinful’ behaviour

 Ethics – engaging participants with discomfort

Everyday Landscapes of Memory

Amy Walker, Cardiff University, awalker13@cardiff.ac.uk

Kieran O’Mahony, Cardiff University, omanhonyk@cardiff.ac.uk

Kate Boyer, Cardiff University, boyerk@cardiff.ac.uk

Since Pierre Nora’s assertion that narratives of memory are fixed in place, or lieux de mémoire, geographers have increasingly engaged with the temporal-spatialities of memory and heritage (Nora 1989). Of particular interest to this session are the unofficial and everyday spatial practices that exist alongside formalised sites of heritage and commemoration. Many geographers have explored the ways in which such spaces and their practices are imbued with memories comprising of affective (Jones 2011), material (DeSilvey 2012), emotional (Horton and Kraftl 2012), spectral (Edensor 2005) and embodied capacities, forming ‘ecologies’ of memory across our everyday lives (Hoskins 2016). These memories may entangle the human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate matter, and occur at differing temporal scales.

This session aims to not only engage with the different ways in which memory can be understood, but also on the consequences of (doing/enacting) memory in the everyday. Being open to the ways they are invoked in contemporary contexts helps us consider the potential for these every day, illusive and multi-faceted memories to become politicised and intersect with broader collective narratives.

This session would welcome papers, or non-traditionally formatted presentations, on topics such as (but not exclusive to):

 Everyday practices of memory

 Family memory and remembrance

 Non-Human/Material/Animal Memories

 Affective Landscapes and memory

 Everyday heritage practices

 Commemoration and public/private memory

 Embodied and performed memory

 Contemporary political issues related to nostalgia- e.g. Brexit vote, nationalism, rewilding

movements

Geohumanities, literary cultures, and new landscapes of cartography

Jon Anderson, Cardiff University, andersonj@cf.ac.uk

Kirsti Bohata, Swansea University, K.Bohata@swansea.ac.uk

Kieron Smith, Cardiff University, smithk30@cardiff.ac.uk

Jeffrey Morgan, Cardiff University, morganj51@cardiff.ac.uk

Geographers have been central to re-presenting and re-creating the relations between landscapes and people from its inception as a public and academic discipline. The recent turn within cartography from the representational to the processual (see Kitchin, Gleeson, and Dodge, 2013) has not only created new ways of understanding what maps can be(come), but also coincided with the proliferation of social scientific, humanities, and digitised disciplines exploring the cartographic as a way to articulate the human condition.

This session explores these arena with particular attention to the relations between literature, culture, and place. It explores the ways an array of literary cultures story the landscapes around us. It asks how stories create new worlds, and how they relate to the ’real’ worlds in which we live? How do pictures (e.g. in the graphic novel), words (e.g. through oral narrative and novels), and illustrative augmentation (be it digitised or otherwise) combine to contribute new representations to the cartographic repertoire? Inviting papers that range from conventional distant mapping in literary geographies, to locative literature, ambient literature, artistic illiterature, and distant mapping, the session seeks to creatively explore what mapping can usefully be understood to be as a consequence of technological change, interdisciplinary convergence, and the processual turn. In short, it asks: what maps now exist to best aid our navigation of the real and imaginary landscapes we live in?

New Geographies of Automation?

Sam Kinsley, University of Exeter, s.kinsley@exeter.ac.uk

This session invites papers that respond to the variously promoted or forewarned explosion of automation and the apparent transformations of culture, economy, labour and workplace we are told will ensue. Papers are sought from any and all branches of geography to investigate what contemporary geographies of automation may or should look like, how we are/could/should be doing them and to perhaps question the grandiose rhetoric of alarmism/boosterism of current debates.

Automation has been the recent focus of hyperbolic commentary in print and online. We are warned by some of the ‘rise of the robots’ (Ford 2015) sweeping away whole sectors of employment or by others exhorted to strive towards ‘fully automated luxury communism’ (Srnicek & Williams 2015). Beyond the hyperbole it is possible to trace longer lineages of geographies of automation. Studies of the industrialisation of agriculture (Goodman & Watts 1997); Fordist/post-Fordist systems of production (Harvey 1989); shifts to globalisation (Dicken 1986) and (some) post-industrial societies (Clement & Myles 1994) stand testament to the range of work that has addressed the theme of automation in geography. Indeed, in the last decade geographers have begun to draw out specific geographical contributions to debates surrounding ‘digital’ automation. From a closer attention to labour and workplaces (Bissell & Del Casino 2017) to the interrogation of automation in governance and surveillance across a range of scales (Amoore 2013, Kitchin & Dodge 2011) – the processes and experiences of automation have (again) become a significant concern for geographical research.

The invitation of this session is for papers that consider contemporary discussions, movements and propositions of automation from a geographical perspective (in the broadest sense).

Examples of topics might include (but are certainly not limited to):

 AI, machine learning and cognitive work

 Automation and bias

 Autonomy, agency and law-making

 Automated governance

 Boosterism and tales of automation

 Economies of automation

 Material cultures of robots

 Mobilities and materialities of ‘driver-less’ vehicles

 Robotics and the everyday

 Techno-bodily relations

 Working with robots

Sonic Spaces: music landscapes, soundscapes and identity

Eveleigh Buck-Matthews, Coventry University, Eveleigh.buck@gmail.com

Kris Vavasour, Ara New Zealand Broadcasting School, Kris.Vavasour@ara.ac.nz

Dr Heather Jeffrey, Middlesex University Dubai, Heather.l.jeffrey@gmail.com

Sonic spaces feature in a broad spectrum of research, and proposals are welcome from any areas of geography, cultural/media studies, and other social sciences that engage with musical spaces and places. This forum will discuss geographies of music and how these have developed, interconnecting with cultural practices, values and wider society, in keeping with the conference theme of landscapes. The social, legal, political, environmental, and economic geographies of music and sonic spaces offer many angles through which to explore the changing landscapes/soundscapes of the world.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

 Music festivals and gigs

 Music subcultures and scenes

 Music as resistance or protest

 The night time or gig economy

 Leisure spaces and music consumption

 Drugs, drink and music scenes

 City-based or regional sounds

 Music and politics and/or legislation

 Changing mediascapes of music

 Music Pilgrimage

Accounts and reflections on research and fieldwork, alongside embodied experiences, are encouraged. We invite empirical and theoretical papers around these themes and others related to musical landscapes, including alternative forms of presentation.

Over-Researched Places

Cat Button, Newcastle University, cat.button@ncl.ac.uk

Gerald Taylor Aiken, University of Luxembourg, gerald.aiken@uni.lu

Certain places are magnets for researchers and sometimes we bump into other researchers or share interview times with them. The ‘Ghosts of Researchers Past’ linger at the case study sites we visit and traces are present in the work we produce. There has been recent interest in the problems of large numbers of researchers in places as diverse as Hackney (Neal et al, 2016), the Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp in Lebanon (Sukarieh & Tannock, 2013), and Transition Towns (Taylor Aiken, 2018). This body of literature focuses primarily on reasons that particular places are popular with researchers or on research fatigue of respondents. There is a need for reflexive interrogation of the issue of this researcher saturation and its consequences. The research itself, and theory building more widely, can be weaker where it is over-reliant on examples which may prove to be outliers or the applicability of generalisations over-claimed. Over-research also produces a sample bias: familiar cases are easier to communicate to other researchers; possibly easier to publish; or conversely, researchers wring dry popular cases. This also raises questions on the nature of research itself: is it possible to over-research anything, or is seeming over-research just poor research? We could even ask if the research encounter is singular?

This session aims to explore the consequences of theory being developed from research on places that are saturated with other researchers from multiple disciplines. Papers are invited to bring case studies of urban or rural landscapes anywhere in the world to address such issues as: Theoretical links and implications; Methods and Positionality; Research (and researcher) fatigue; Researching researchers; Encounters. Papers that use a reflexive approach or consider the conceptual complications of researching in researcher-saturated landscapes are particularly welcomed.

The cultural politics of lingering

Esther Hitchen, Durham University, e.j.u.hitchen@durham.ac.uk

Angeliki Balayannis, University of Melbourne, abalayannis@student.unimelb.edu.au

Lingering is a commonly used, but taken-for-granted term within cultural geography. It is largely invoked as a descriptor or metaphor for crafting other thematically related concepts – in particular, haunting (Edensor, 2008; 2012), absent-presence (Wylie, 2009), dwelling (Ingold, 2011), residues (Krupar, 2012), traces (Hetherington, 2004), fragments (DeSilvey, 2007), and discards (Crewe, 2011; Stanes & Gibson, 2017). This session, however, aims to consider how lingering can be conceptualised in itself and be used to bring diverse literatures into conversation.

This session raises questions about what lingering is and does: What are the temporalities of lingering – how does it endure, persist, or stretch space-times? What are its spatialities, such as within particular landscapes, sites, and institutions? How can we think about lingering politically, for example, as a mode of action, as a disruption, as a refusal to disappear? And in what ways is lingering used within different methodological approaches, including ethnographic work, participatory methods, and artistic practice?

This session welcomes papers on a range of themes, including, but not limited to:

 The affective life of lingering

 Lingering as affirmative and/or negative

 Materialities of lingering

 Racialized, gendered, and/or queer politics of lingering

 Lingering across different scales

 More-than-human forms of lingering

Utility After Abandonment? The New Ruin as Cultural Asset and Public Space

Hayden Lorimer, University of Glasgow, Hayden.Lorimer@glasgow.ac.uk

Ruth Olden, University of Glasgow, Ruth.Olden@glasgow.ac.uk

Ed Hollis, University of Edinburgh, E.Hollis@ed.ac.uk

Luke Bennett, Sheffield Hallam University, L.E.Bennett@shu.ac.uk

Across the arts and humanities, and associated cultural spheres of literature, cinema, architecture, heritage, urban exploration and curated art, interest has intensified in ruinenlust, ruins and ruination (Edensor 2005; Lavery and Gough 2015; Bennett 2017). Ruminating on the ruin is a sensibility reflective of classical, romantic and picturesque tropes.

Learning how to live with ruins is a twenty-first century challenge requiring cultural articulations that are forward-thinking and experimental, acknowledging new models of intervention, ownership and access, and welcoming contrasting – even conflicting – forms of aesthetic and emotional attachment (Hollis 2010; Lorimer and Murray 2015; DeSilvey 2017).

Nationally and internationally, there are a multitude of valued heritage landscapes, in a ruinous, vulnerable, degraded state, requiring differing form of creative intervention for the purposes of rehabilitation, re-occupation and reinvention, so as to safeguard cultural legacies for the future. For this session we seek not only statements of intent, but also critical reports on activities already occurring in cities under austerity and non-urban landscapes, in the global north and global south.

Papers will be sought which variously address three connected questions:

 How do you activate modern ruins safely?

 How do you activate modern ruins creatively?

 How do you activate modern ruins collaboratively?

Call for RGS 2018 sponsored sessions are now open!

The RGS-IBG Social and Cultural Geography Research Group (SCGRG) would like to invite expressions of interest for sponsored sessions for the RGS-IBG 2018 Annual Conference, which will take place in Cardiff from Tuesday 28 to Friday 31 August 2018.

The theme for the 2018 Annual Conference, chaired by Professor Paul Milbourne, is Geographical landscapes / changing landscapes of geography.

SCGRG is keen to sponsor sessions that directly relate to the conference theme but also those sessions that engage with broader issues of contemporary concern to social and cultural geographers.

You can find out more about the theme at: http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/ConferencesAndSeminars/Annual+International+Conference/Chairs+theme.htm

When designing your session proposals please take note of the following:

A session cannot occupy more than two timeslots on the conference programme unless this has been pre-arranged with the RGS team. Those seeking more than one timeslot should consider co-sponsorship (i.e. splitting sponsorship so as to have a sponsor for each time slot).
Each attendee can only make two substantive contributions to the conference programme (e.g. as paper presenter, panel member, discussant). A substantive contribution is defined as one where the individual concerned needs to be present in the session room, and so can include session organiser if attendance is necessary. For individuals proposing multiple co-authored papers, an alternative presenter must be clearly nominated at the time of submitting the session/paper.

You can find the RGS guidelines for session proposals at: http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/ConferencesAndSeminars/Annual+International+Conference/Call+for+sessions+papers+and+posters/Call+for+sessions+papers+and+posters.htm

SCGRG is able to sponsor 12 timeslots and you are welcome to propose joint sessions to be co-sponsored by another research group.

Please send expressions of interest including the below information by Wednesday 13^th December at 6pm. We will inform applicants of the outcome by 22^nd December.

(i) Title of session;

(ii) Name of Co-sponsoring groups, if applicable

(iii) Name and Contact Details for Session Convenors

(iv) Abstract, outlining scope of session – 200 words max.

(v) Number of session timeslots that are sought – please note: this year a session may not occupy more than 2 time slots unless this has been pre-agreed with the RGS.

(vi) Indication of session format

Proposals for, or questions about, SCGRG sponsored sessions should be sent to Laura Prazeres: Laura.Prazeres@st-andrews.ac.uk

SCGRG call for sessions: RGS-IBG Annual Conference, London 2017

The RGS-IBG Social and Cultural Geography Research Group (SCGRG) would like to invite expressions of interest for sponsored sessions for the RGS-IBG 2017 Annual Conference, which will take place in London, between Tuesday 29th Aug – Friday 1st Sept 2017.

The theme for the 2017 Annual Conference, chaired by Professor Sarah Radcliffe, is Decolonizing geographical knowledges: opening geography out to the world.