FINAL CALL for Papers:
Seeking submissions from colleagues across the geographical humanities,
social sciences and sciences interested in engaging with the themes of
air and elementality.
Annual Meeting of the Association for American Geographers, Las Vegas
March 22nd-29th, 2009
'Aerographies': re-thinking unthought elemental and metaphysical
assumptions in recent spatial theories
"...our concepts have been formed on the model of solids." (H. Bergson)
"Metaphysics always supposes, in some manner, a solid crust from which
to raise a construction." (L. Irigaray)
The most vital of geography's concerns are those that materiality opens
in thinking the connections between earth and life (Whatmore 2006). The
return to materialist concerns in recent cultural, social and political
geographies reflects this vitality. Geographies of affect, emotion,
performance and performativity, mobilities, non-representation, science
and technology, corporeality, everyday life, representation and vision,
memory, networks and assemblages, complexity, etc... all premise their
engagements through specificities of the material, whose complex,
relational dynamics "en-world" us in multiple ways. Yet, while engaged
material practices are said to open relational thinking in dynamic ways,
"matter", and what we mean by the term itself, remains under considered.
This has implications, for the objects we think with shape our
metaphysical and ontological presumptions. As such, how we engage what
we mean by matter is shaped by the objects we mobilize and the empirical
sites we refract.
As Irigaray and Bergson argue, we moderns privilege "the solid crust" to
give our thought shape. But what if Being and thought are not of the
same matter? What if we began with the non-solid? What if we began, /in
medias res/, as Irigaray insists we must, with air? Is air the forgotten
material mediation of our geographical logos?
We are interested to deepen and extend recent efforts to re-think the
geographies of material relation (ex. Ingold, 2008; Olwig, 2008), by
interrogating the elemental assumptions behind how we engage the
conceptual and practical spaces of matter and relation. In particular,
we are interested to engage air as an evocative "object" for thinking
relational and experiential space. Would beginning with the most
ephemeral, and yet the constitutively most important element for life,
enable us to reflect relational interaction in exciting and ever more
relevant ways? Can 'thinking with air' respond with rigor, innovation,
and responsibility to contemporary geographical imperatives ? Can it do
so within registers perhaps under recognized in our present
earth-writing? Can air be an evocative object for extending geographical
engagements with relational materiality and space?
We welcome papers on such topics as, but not limited to:
* Air as an evocative "object" for thought
* Earth-writing/air-writing
* The spatial fold of breath
* Behind the Face: the ethical demand of breath
* Atmospheric spatialities
* Vocal spaces and soundscapes
* Noise pollution and the experience of space
* Air pollution and the experience of space
* Absence/presence and the elemental prejudices of visible solids
* Material and relational inference through observation
* Political ecologies of the invisible
* Pollen and the unseen predicates of the bios
* The gendering of solidity
* Pneumatic space
* Olfactory space
* Pheromones and the spatial caress
* Non-western elementalities
* Aether as the fifth element
* Dark matter and speculative materiality
* Choric space and the topographic privilege in geography
Papers submitted will be considered for one or more organised sessions
at the 2009 AAG in Las Vegas (March 22nd-27th).
Session organiser: Mark Jackson
Session Co-chairs: J-D Dewsbury, Maria Fannin
Send your titles and paper abstracts, and expressions of interest, to
Mark Jackson <[log in to unmask]>
*Deadline: October 10, 2008
References:
T. Ingold. 2008. 'Bindings against boundaries: entanglements of life in
an open world' /Environment and Planning A / 40 1796 – 1810
K. R. Olwig. 2008. 'Has ‘geography’ always been modern?: choros,
(non)representation, performance, and the landscape'/ Environment and
Planning A/ 40 1843 – 1861
S.Whatmore. 2006. 'Materialist returns: practising cultural geographies
in and for a more-than-human world' /Cultural Geographies/ 13.4 600-610
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________________________________
Dr. Mark Jackson
Lecturer in Human Geography
School of Geographical Sciences
University of Bristol
Bristol, UK BS8 1SS
+44 0117 928 9109
[log in to unmask]
________________________________
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________________________________
Mark Jackson
Lecturer in Human Geography
School of Geographical Sciences
University of Bristol
Bristol, BS8 1SS
United Kingdom
tel: +44 117 928 9109
fax: +44 117 928 7878
http://www.ggy.bris.ac.uk/staff/staff_jackson.html
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