The Cultural Geography Study Group of the Institute of Australian
Geographers (IAG) presents:
GEOGRAPHIES LOST AND FOUND:
LANDSCAPE, MOBILITY AND PRACTICE¹
Dr Hayden Lorimer
Saturday 28 and Sunday 29 June 2008
Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
* Geographies Lost and Found: Landscape, Mobility and Practice¹ is a
workshop event designed around the critical consideration of intellectual
advances and retreats in cultural geography.
* It takes landscape as a crucible and a workshop for contemporary concerns
recognised across cultural, social, urban and historical geography, namely:
practice, mobility, politics, place and ethics.
* It is aimed at academic staff and postgraduate students, and will offer a
convivial forum for wide-ranging geographical conversations.
Among geographers, landscape has been a longstanding interest and widely
accepted interpretive category. Recent considerations of mobility and
practice, principally in cultural geography, have altered the manner in
which landscape is understood and explained.
As a consequence, today¹s landscapes are cosmopolitan entities, variously:
fluid, embodied, re-materialised, performed, unfinished, spectral, lost,
sonic, vital, more-than-human, rhythmic and affective. Always on the move,
they take place on the city bus, the back-seat of the SUV, and in the
airport departure lounge. Still putting down roots, they are housed in
high-rise buildings, inhabit local nature reserves, and prosper in pavement
cracks. Neither discretely cultural nor natural, geography¹s landscapes
abound and proliferate. Turn a street corner. Take a walk in the woods.
Geographers are already there, apprehending and animating landscapes.
The momentum gathering behind our collective enterprises can be attributed,
in part, to the non-representational episode in geographical thought. Claims
of intellectual renewal and conceptual animation have secured a high profile
for non-representational commentaries, and provoked widespread debate. To
date, these disciplinary dialogues have tended to centre on the UK. The
workshop will explore how well such theory travels, and consider its
potentials in different professional and geographical settings. Other
diverse efforts to realign landscape, mobility and practice draw on, and
select from, a longer and more expressly geographical heritage of ideas.
Simultaneously, methodological approaches have shifted. Creative forms of
expression found in contemporary art, field science and environmental
activism, are reflected in an expanded range of research techniques and
efforts at experimental practice. Largely unheralded, these new modes of
praxis merit greater attention.
The impact of these disciplinary developments on research, and on teaching,
will be the subject of critical appraisal at the workshop. The event will
run for a day and a half. Participants will need to undertake some
pre-reading. The workshop will comprise presentations from Hayden Lorimer
(University of Glasgow, Scotland) leading to chaired discussions,
small-group conversations and some participatory landscaping.
Hayden Lorimer¹s research interests are in cultural and historical
geography, and in histories and philosophies of geography. His research
explores the geographical and cultural dimensions of a series of themes:
landscape, memory, place, mobility, animals, ecology, fieldwork, science and
biography.
In collaborative research projects he has forged connections with
practitioners in visual and environmental art, physical geography,
ethnomethodology and social anthropology. He is interested in shaping
creative spaces of geographical research method and practice: by exploring
how landscapes are encountered and remembered; experimenting with talk and
text based techniques; and, generating ways to communicate geographical
ideas popularly.
Hayden has reported regularly on developments in cultural geography for
Progress in Human Geography. Other recent articles appear in Environment and
Planning D, Social and Cultural Geography, Mobilities and Cultural
Geographies, and book chapters are forthcoming in Taking Place:
Non-Representational Geographies and The Handbook of Qualitative Methods in
Human Geography.
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Register your interest for the workshop early (numbers will be limited) by
email to [log in to unmask] Registration will close on Friday April 11.
There is no charge for the workshop, but participants must be members of the
IAG - to join see www.iag.org.au. The CGSG would like to thank the IAG for
their funding of this event.
Dr Rachel Hughes
Convenor, Cultural Geography Study Group
University of Melbourne, AUSTRALIA
+61 3 8344 9323
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