AAG 2008 CFP: Non-Representational Geographies
Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Boston, 15-19
April 2008
Organisers: JD Dewsbury (University of Bristol), Paul Harrison (University
of Durham), Derek McCormack (University of Oxford), and John Wylie
(University of Exeter).
A dozen ten years have passed since the advent of 'non-representational
theory' (Thrift, 1996), and from the turn of the century UK-based human
geography in particular has witnessed a rapid upsurge of interest in new
conceptualisations of, for example, practice, performance, politics,
embodiment and materiality. This session proposes to look at the ongoing
evolution of NRT, how it continues to problematize the heart of social
scientific endeavour by acting as "a machine for multiplying questions, and
thereby inventing new relations between thought and life" (Thrift, 2002).
For our purposes here, we can think these relations as those that interfere
with preconceived ideas (1) around perception - thus the precognitive,
non-contemplative excessive array of forces and flows capturing and
creating life in a multiple and becoming world; (2) across representations
- expressive and affective experiments presenting and orientating
dispositions to the world that perform it into being as well as give some
capture of it, that thus touch the intangible and that which cannot be
arrested by linguistic systems of representation, and that therefore
witness and testify to life itself; and (3) within practice - rethinking
matter as agency and as distributed in-between object and subject, human
and nonhuman, action and inaction thus soliciting a social that lies in
ecologies of practical intelligibility and inarticulate affective modes of
understanding.
We welcome advocates and critiques alike, and papers of varying range and
ambit, including but not restricted to:
Aesthetics
Performativity
Deleuzian inspirations
Affect
Molecular and viroid worlds
Testimony and witness
Experiment and expression - literary, performance based
Technology, practical action and intelligence
Viscerality, flesh and embodiment
Post-phenomenological debates
Nonhuman and inorganic agency
Matter and immateriality
Events
Vulnerability and activity
Subjectivity and politics - race, sexuality, health
Ethics and non-relationality
Ecologies of practice
Mobility and immobility
Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words by October 17th to BOTH:
[log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask]
----------------------
JDC Dewsbury
Senior Lecturer in Human Geography
School of Geographical Sciences
University of Bristol
tel: +44 (0)117 95 46855
fax: +44 (0)117 928 7878
http://www.ggy.bris.ac.uk/staff/staff_dewsbury.html
|