* final * CFP: OBSERVANT GEOGRAPHIES IAG, Melbourne, July 2007
A proposed session at the annual conference of the Institute of Australian
Geographers, held in Melbourne from 1-6 July, 2007. See details here:
http://www.sages.unimelb.edu.au/IAGconference/
Convenors: Fraser MacDonald ([log in to unmask]) & Rachel Hughes
([log in to unmask]), University of Melbourne.
It is often said that geography is a visual enterprise. If this has been a
staple truth since the era of Halford Mackinder, the association, as Gillian
Rose recently pointed out, has become rather too glibly offered. But what
difference does sight, alongside other senses, make to the doing of
geography? Under the 'anti-ocularcentric' influence of feminism and critical
theory, human geography has undertaken a 'moral stratification' of the human
senses. Hearing and touch have acquired virtue. Sight, by contrast, has
become somewhat suspect, the 'gaze' being a familiar metonymic expression
for patriarchal or imperial power.
This session seeks to revisit the relationship between geography and visual
culture. Such a reassessment is timely not least because of new directions
in human geography which challenge the primacy of representation. What TJ
Clark describes as 'the hauling of visual images before the court of
political judgment' has given way to a wider set of concerns about the
embodied business of looking and the relationship between sight and other
senses. We therefore invite a broad spectrum of papers on sight and space
that are cognisant of emerging work in this field. While these papers might
address longstanding geographical concerns with landscape, visual
methodologies and the analysis of particular images, we would particularly
welcome papers on any of the following themes:
- Observant practice: embodied, subjective, multi-sensory perceptual
practices
- Landscape and the body: from art historical to post-phenomonological
approaches
- The status of the visual in non-representational theory; the end of 'the
gaze'?
- Surveillance culture, from satellites to CCTV
- Screen capitalism and status of the spectacle; economies of the image
- Critical studies of the map, GIS and popular cartographies like GoogleMaps
- Visual methodologies
- Lively historical treatments of visual culture
- Geopolitics and visual culture
- Visuality and the making of geographical knowledge
- Optical technologies and instrumentation
- Revisiting key texts such as Berger's Ways of Seeing or Cosgrove and
Daniels' The Iconography of Landscape
Expressions of interest should be sent to either Fraser MacDonald
([log in to unmask]) or Rachel Hughes ([log in to unmask]) by the
31st March
Fraser MacDonald
Academic Visitor
Institute of Geography
University of Edinburgh, Feb-June 2007
Lecturer in Human Geography
School of Social and Environmental Enquiry
The University of Melbourne
221 Bouverie Street
VIC 3010
AUSTRALIA
P: +61 3 8344 9318
E: [log in to unmask]
http://www.sages.unimelb.edu.au/staff/macdonald.html
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