Hello everyone, and apologies for cross posting.
RGS-IBG Annual Conference, London. 28-30th August, 2013.
This is the first CfP for Session title - "Narrating and Remembering Landscapes of Trauma and Conflict"
While research into trauma has accelerated in recent years (Caruth ed. 1995; Winter and Sivan eds. 1999; Bal, Crewe and Spitzer 1999, eds; Ley 2000; Cappelletto 2003 and 2005 ed.; Janz 2000; Butler 2010 to cite a few), it doesn’t always address questions of space and place consistently. And while landscapes of conflict are frequently addressed and unpacked through concepts such as personhood, trauma, dispossession and loss of identity, and despite the pioneering work of Woodward (2004), as geographers we still seem curiously reluctant to think in more geographical ways about how war and conflict scars places, regions or countries.
This session aims to explore how geographical frameworks help us to move beyond the casual naming of places as sites of trauma to consider in more detail how wartime convulses and produces landscapes through violence (Pearson 2012), but also through subsequent narration and remembering. In particular, we want to think about individual subjects and their experiences of conflict landscapes. Throughout the modern warfare of the Twentieth-century, with its terror, genocides, occupations, resistance, displacement and forced migrations, individuals were caught in shifting webs of affiliations, loyalties, commitments, fears, anger, nationalism and other sentiments. But these ever-changing allegiances and the danger and terror unfolded across, and overlapped with, the lived in and loved places of everyday lives before the conflict began. In addition, most histories record the disastrous and traumatic experiences of civilians; they less frequently discuss the combatants who were also enmeshed in the all too messy process of fighting and striving to survive. For all those parties mired in this trauma, how did they understand these places at the time, and how were these understandings reworked through narration, remembering and forgetting after the conflict?
The session aims to explore the bottom-up, grass-roots experience of conflict landscapes in an attempt to better understand the emplaced practices, embodied interactions and understandings of the various actors involved, and the way these events and places have been framed, narrated and remembered ain the aftermath of war.
Topics for papers could include, but are not limited to, themes such as:
- Historical-geographical framings of conflict landscapes
- Emplaced, embodied perspectives on war and trauma
- The geographies of narrating and remembering conflict landscapes
- Geographical approaches to oral histories of wartime trauma
- Spatialising memories of conflict, violence and occupation
- Senses of place and shared/ conflicting loyalties in conflict landscapes
Please send your proposed titles and abstracts (of 200 words) by February 4th 2013 to:
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References
Bal, M. and Crewe, J. V. and Spitzer, L. 1999 (eds.), Acts of memory: cultural recall in the present. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press
Butler, J. 2010 Frames of war: when is life mournable? Verso (2010 reprint)
Cappelletto, F. 2003, “Long-term memory of extreme events: from autobiography to history” in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 9: 241-260
Cappelletto, F. 2005 (ed.), Memory and World War II: an ethnographic approach. Oxford: Berg
Caruth, C. 1995 (ed.) Trauma and memory. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Janz, O. 2006, ‘The Cult of the Fallen Soldiers in Italy after the First World War’ In: Olaf Farschid/Manfred Kropp/Stephan Dähne (eds): The First World War as Remembered in the Countries of the Eastern Mediterranean. Würzburg: Ergon, 203-211
Ley, R. 2000 Trauma: a Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Pearson, C . 2012, Researching Militarized Landscapes: A Literature Review on War and the Militarization of the Environment, Landscape Research, 37: 115-133.
Winter, J. and Sivan, E. 1999 (eds.), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Studies in the Social & Cultural History of Modern Warfare). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Woodwar, R. 2004. Military Geographies. Oxford: Blackwells.
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