Royal Geographical Society –
“Landscape, mobility and
practice”
A series of sessions
organised by Peter Merriman and George Revill on behalf of the Historical
Geography Research Group of the RGS-IBG
Call for
papers:
In this session we aim to
bring together geographers and academics from related disciplines who are
concerned with human movement in the landscape. In the past few years there has
been a resurgence of work on mobility in disciplines such as sociology and
geography, while over the past decade geographers, anthropologists and others
have been increasingly drawing upon non-representational theories and
phenomenological writings in an attempt to cultivate more performative and
practice-oriented accounts of the way people encounter, move through and inhabit
landscapes. This session aims to juxtapose these more recent conceptual
engagements with the dynamism of landscape with studies of the long and varied
historical geographies of attempts by writers, artists, travel writers,
landscape practitioners and others who, along with academics, have developed and
expressed sensibilities to movement in the landscape, whether by providing
critical commentaries on the experiences of travel, or developing artistic
techniques for representing the dynamism of
movement.
This session will provide a
forum for papers which explore a range of sensibilities to movement, embodied
movements and mobile practices in the landscape, bringing together researchers
who use a diverse array of methodologies and theories from across geography and
related disciplines.
We welcome papers on a
diverse array of themes. These might include, but are not limited to, papers
which engage with:
•
Embodied human movements in and through
the landscape, from railway travel and walking, to rock climbing or parachuting.
•
Aesthetic styles or techniques for
representing or expressing the dynamism of
landscape.
• Historical and cultural
geographies of travel and transportation.
• Technologies of
visualising and sensing, from perspective drawing and cinema to
CAD.
•
Practices of landscape design,
gardening or engineering the landscape.
• Different sensibilities
to stillness, materiality and the knowable, and their relation to sensibilities
to movement, flow and the sublime.
•
Theoretical engagements with the
dynamism of landscape, using approaches from phenomenology and Marxist-humanism,
to performance and non-representational theories.
Please send abstracts of no
more than 200 words to both of the convenors by Friday 13th January
2006.
Convenors:
Dr Peter Merriman,
Dr George Revill,
Details of the 2006 RGS-IBG
Annual Conference are available at: