Association of American Geographers Annual Conference, Boston, USA, 15-19
April, 2008
"Practiced architectures: spaces, performances, events"
organized by Jane Jacobs (Edinburgh) and Peter Merriman (Aberystwyth)
Call for papers:
Building on recent work on the geography of architectures, this session will
provide a forum for papers examining architecture as a practiced and
performative event. Conventional geographical engagements with architecture
have been confined to the social production of built form, semiotic and
representational readings of meaning, and morphological and formalistic
interpretations. Recent calls for a new geography of architecture have
radically restructured this sub-field of the discipline, opening out new
trajectories of inquiry. Buildings and building work have come under new
scrutiny through an emphasis on the co-production of socio-technical worlds,
while a new awareness of the performative, practical doings of everyday life
has activated a new sensitivity to the active materiality of what once were
held simply to be 'contexts' or 'settings' for action. This session will
provide a forum for scholars wishing to examine further the socio-technical
co-production of lived architectures.
We welcome papers on a diverse array of themes. These might include, but are
not limited to, papers which provide critical examinations of:
. The performative, practical, and embodied dimensions of architectural
spaces
. The socio-technical logics of lived architecture
. Methodologies for understanding the materialities, temporalities and
spatialities of buildings
. How buildings learn
. Spectacular and mundane geographies of the building-event, from practices
of 'moving-in', repair, maintenance and regeneration, to those of
preservation, demolition or collapse
. The ways in which architectures - and their inhabitation and consumption -
refract contemporary theoretical ideas about performance, place, the event,
embodiment, the everyday, materiality
. Professional and non-expert knowledges and practices of architectural
design and building work
. The site visit in architectural practice
. Ephemeral architectures and event spaces
. How architectural and aesthetic qualities (shape, proportion, height,
density, texture, strength, function, light) afford particular performative
possibilities
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to BOTH of the convenors by
30 September 2007.
Convenors:
Professor Jane M Jacobs, School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, EH8
9XP. Email: [log in to unmask]
Dr Peter Merriman, Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, University of
Wales, Aberystwyth, SY23 3DB, UK, e-mail: [log in to unmask]
Details of the 2008 AAG Annual Conference are available at:
http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/2008
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