CFP: Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, Washington
DC April 14-18, 2010
Aesthetic Geographies
Session organisers: Elizabeth Straughan (Aberystwyth University), Harriet
Hawkins (University of Exeter)
This session aims to engage geographers, social scientists and creative
practitioners in conversation on aesthetic geographies and materialities.
As publications and conference sessions over the last few years have made
clear, aesthetics has emerged across the geographic discipline.
Contemporaneous literatures within the social sciences have also begun to
draw out the relevance of the aesthetic for our, and our human and
non-human companions, being in the world. Whether focused on the
aesthetic as contributor to knowledges of ‘creative agency, rigor and
responsibility’ (Haraway, 1991, 2005), as a significant factor in the
disturbing matter of new biotechnologies (Davis, 2003), or as artistic and
scientific compilations which can assist in the political re-envisioning
of the post-human subject (Dixon, 2009), a horizon has opened for the
contemplation of why aesthetics matter. In light of this work we invite
papers that think through not only the body’s composite relations, but
also the social interactions and political imperatives involved in the
production and experience of cultural practices (such that we might
explore why aesthetics matter to geography and geographers). In particular
we are looking for papers that critically address the relationship between
geography and aesthetics through the following overlapping themes:
Affective Aesthetics:
We are interested in: (1) the aesthetic as it is mobilised through
relations of feeling and capacities of affect; as well as (2) the complex
interplay of the senses and their role in perceptual experience.
Aesthetic Materialities:
We are interested in: (1) the importance of aesthetics in the experiences
and analyses of materiality; (2) a consideration of how engagement with
materiality and associated social, spatial and symbolic practices might
involve emotional and affectual responses; and (3) how aesthetics revolve
around particular forms of materiality, such as the abject, the grotesque
and the formless.
Political Aesthetics.
This theme opens up discussion for the politico-aesthetic: (1) as a space
for creative engagement with struggles that seek to reconfigure
subjectivities; (2) as interaction with the more-than- and non- human
worlds and related concerns of control, resistance and transgression; as
well as a (3) Foucauldian, ethical consideration of the choices, problems,
transformations, and possibilities that contribute to the aesthetics of
existence; that is, life as ‘a work of art’.
Please direct abstracts of not more than 250 words and enquiries by 14th
October to both organisers at: [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask]
Please ensure that your abstracts meet the AAG requirements. See:
http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/2010/papers.htm
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