----- 2nd call for papers -------


Call for Papers: Thinking with more-than-human subsurfaces
American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, March 2023

Session Organizers:
Una Hamilton Helle, Artist & Phd Student: Think Deep, Royal Holloway University London 
Flora Parrott, Artist and Post Doctoral Researcher: Think Deep, Royal Holloway University London 

This session is an invitation to explore the environments below our feet - environments which have been ‘decentred from our imagination’ (Hawkins 2020) - in order to think with the species, spaces and spirits of the subsurface. These spaces are often starkly different from those above ground, necessitating other ways of adapting, sensing and thinking, whether one is visiting, inhabiting or even imagining these spaces. This session hopes to foreground ‘the ontological similarity between ourselves and those with whom we share the world’ (Harvey 2006), and explore through this lens how the more-than-human world below the surface enters into relationship with that above:

‘The (under)ground or (sub)terranean environment is a thick and complex, three-dimensional space of “nothing but change,” but whose utility is essential to sustaining urban life above it’ (Powis 2021:89). 

We would like to think with cave, marine and soil-dwelling creatures; fungal networks, creatures that dig and burrow, deep sea organisms, spirits of place and depth-dwelling deities, but also interrogate what implications such thinking-with has for human interactions when building infrastructure, climbing a mountain, or making offerings. Equally, we invite contributions that extend the definition of the more-than-human to the geological, allowing for a space of ‘thinking inorganic relationality otherwise’ (Reinert 2016), as well as to the invisible beings of the subsurface and the journeys taken to see them, whether such approaches are animist, phenomenological or otherwise (Abram, 2013; Taussig 2010). We welcome papers that engage with sensory responses to underground spaces (human or nonhuman), or narratives that engage with the more-than-human world of fantastical literature, myth and prehistoric art.

In geography, there has been a recent burgeoning interest in the underground; urban undergrounds and infrastructure (Buser and Boyer 2021; Gandy 2014; Garrett et al 2020; Powis 2021), caves (Bosworth 2017; Cant 2003, 2006; Della Dora 2016, Hawkins 2018, 2020; MacFarlane 2019; Pérez 2015, 2016), the submarine (Childs 2022; Squires 2018), imaginary undergrounds (Hawkins 2020; Overend et al 2020), geologic life and permeability (Bosworth 2017, Yusoff 2013, 2015). The more-than-human often features in this geographic scholarship, in the form of animal, plant and bacterial life, in living geologies, or in the presence of what cannot be seen, touched or measured.

In contemporary art, the field the conveners come from, we have also observed this thematic confluence, as seen in artworks by Ben Rivers (2019), Maeve Brennan (2018), Saodat Ismailova (2022), Leander Djønne (2022), Otobong Nkanga (2021), Cave Bureau’s practice, curator Sophie WiIliamson’s online program ‘Undead Matter’ and gallery programs such as the Serpentine’s ongoing interdisciplinary program ‘The Shape of A Circle In The Mind of A Fish’.  

Inspired by this work across art, geography and beyond, we wish to hear from a broad range of academics and artists whose research centers the theme of the more-than-human within the subsurface, and who wish to explore the ways in which our disciplines can best engage with these beings, habitats and imaginaries.

Please send an abstract of up to 250 words by 10th October to [log in to unmask] Accepted participants will be notified on 17th October and will need to submit abstracts to AAG’s system by its deadline 10 November. Please indicate whether you prefer to participate in person or virtually.




Bibliography:

Abram, D. ‘The invisibles: toward a phenomenology of the spirits’, pp.124-132, in: Harvey, G., 2013. The Handbook of contemporary animism, Durham: Acumen.

Bosworth, K. (2017) ‘Thinking permeable matter through feminist geophilosophy: Environmental knowledge controversy and the materiality of hydrogeologic processes’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35(1), pp. 21–37. doi: 10.1177/0263775816660353.

Buser, M. and Boyer, K. (2021) ‘Care goes underground: thinking through relations of care in the maintenance and repair of urban water infrastructures’, cultural geographies, 28(1), pp. 73–90. doi: 10.1177/1474474020942796.

Cant, S. G. (2003) ‘‘The Tug of Danger with the Magnetism of Mystery’: Descents into ‘the Comprehensive, Poetic-Sensuous Appeal of Caves’’, Tourist Studies, 3(1), pp. 67–81. doi: 10.1177/1468797603040531.

Cant, S. G. (2006) British speleologies: geographies of science, personality and practice, 1935–1953,
Journal of Historical Geography,Volume 32, Issue 4,

Della Dora, V. (2016). Landscape, Nature, and the Sacred in Byzantium. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316488386

Gandy, M. (2014). The Fabric of Space Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination, MIT Press. 368pp.

Garrett, D, de Lourdes, M, Zurita, M & Iveson, K (2020) Boring cities, City, 24:1-2, 276-285, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2020.1739455

Harvey, G. (2006) Animism: Respecting the Living World, Columbia University Press

Hawkins, H. 2020 ‘Underground imaginations, environmental crisis and subterranean cultural geographies’: Cultural Geographies, Vol. 27, No. 1, 01.01.2020, p. 3-22.

MacFarlane, R. (2019). Underland: a deep time journey. Hamish Hamilton. An Imprint of Penguin Books. London, UK

Overend, D., Lorimer, J. and Schreve, D. (2020) ‘The bones beneath the streets: drifting through London’s Quaternary’, cultural geographies, 27(3), pp. 453–475. doi: 10.1177/1474474019886828.

Pérez, M. A. 2016. ‘Yearnings for Guácharo Cave: Affect, Absence, and Science in Venezuelan Speleology’, cultural geographies (23) 4:693-714. DOI: 10.1177/1474474016643971.

Pérez, M. A. 2015. ‘Exploring the Vertical: Science and Sociality in the Field among Cavers in Venezuela’, Social and Cultural Geography (16) 2: 226-247. DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2014.973438.

Powis, A (2021) ‘The Relational Materiality of Groundwater’, GeoHumanities, 7:1, 89-112, DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2021.1925574

Reinert, H. (2016) ‘About a Stone: Some Notes on Geologic Conviviality’, Environmental Humanities 8:1 / May 2016, p. 95-117

Squire, R 2018, ‘Sub-marine territory: living and working on the seafloor during the Sealab II experiment’. in K Peters, P Steinberg & E Stratford (eds), Territory Beyond Terra. Rowman & Littlefield.

Taussig, M. T. 2010, ‘The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America’, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill. 

Yusoff, K. (2013)  ‘Geologic Life: Prehistory, Climate, Futures in the Anthropocene’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, no. 31: 779–95.

Yusoff, K. (2015) ‘Geologic subjects: nonhuman origins, geomorphic aesthetics and the art of becoming inhuman’, cultural geographies, 22(3), pp. 383–407. doi: 10.1177/1474474014545301.

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