~~~ Call for Papers ~~~
Annual Meeting
American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting
Boston, MA April 5-9, 2017
INTO THE VOID
In The Beatles’ 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine, John, Paul, George, Ringo, and Jere-my (a friendly fellow traveler and so-called “Nowhere Man”) find themselves awash in the “Sea of Holes”. The five characters fall through and slide over an endless mottled expanse of black holes amidst a white background that resembles an optical illusion. The holes are variously solid, static, shimmering, black, yellow, upside down, and topside up. During one scene, Ringo picks up a hole, which resembles a floppy rubber disc, and watches his leg disappear into its blackness. An interlude of distorted keyboards and a didgeridoo adds to The Sea of Holes’ trippy disorientation.
This session offers a forum for geographers who are engaged in theoretical, empirical, and/or methodological research that examines how holes, voids, chasms, lacks, gaps, nothingness, and other empty or unfathomable entities (de)structure spaces, places, landscapes, and other geographical phenomena. We will consider any contributions that engage the above, as well as any of the following topics:
• Caves, underground installations, bunkers, tunnels, subterranean worlds, missing objects, missing persons, missing time, lost data, black boxes, the quantum gap, irrational intervals, creatio ex nihilo…
• Parallaxes, aporias, impasses, holey spaces, lacunae, gaps, lacks, deficits, trypophobia, Fana’, Wu, différends, Śūnyatā, noumena, the Real, negativity, the not-all, vanishing mediators…
• Escape routes, legal loopholes, exit strategies, power vacuums, disappearing acts, empty gestures, empty nesters, horror vacui, kenophobia, disappearing ice, landforms, caves, sinkholes, vortices, ocean eddies, craters, hollow earths, black holes…
• Taboos, absent discussions, broken relations, blank spaces, apostrophes, awkward silences, glaring inconsistencies, the missing half second, patchy memories, holes in hearts, unfinished business, lost property, lost loves, blind spots, roads to nowhere, orifices, emptiness, nihilism…
Selected papers will be submitted for inclusion in a co-edited and peer reviewed volume as part of the University of Nebraska Press' “Cultural Geographies + Rewriting the Earth” book series.
Please send an abstract by October 15, 2016 of no more than 200 words to:
Paul Kingsbury ([log in to unmask]) and Anna Secor ([log in to unmask])
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