CFP RGS-IBG Annual Conference, Exeter, September 2015

Session Title: Elemental experiments

Sponsored by the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group

Session conveners:

Derek McCormack (Geography, University of Oxford), Sasha Engelmann (Geography, Oxford), and Bronislaw Szerszynski (Sociology, Lancaster)

Abstract

In recent years geographers and others have begun to engage with the elemental. Work here has focused on how air, wind, and water, etc., offer different possibilities of living, moving, and thinking (e.g. Pete Adey, Tim Ingold, Owain Jones, Craig Martin, Bronislaw Szerszynski).  This work suggests that “the contemporary importance of our immersion within materially complex and fragile balances of earth, air, water, and fire, and the importance of their delicate balance for our specifically human continuity and flourishing, means more than simply recognizing, in banal ways, how we take matter for granted” (Jackson and Fannin 2011, 436).  Rather, it means better apprehending or “listening” to the force and flux of elemental matter (Ash 2013, Adey forthcoming, Jackson and Fannin 2011).  We can also think of this work as allied and sometimes covalent with philosophies and geographies of geo-power and geo-aesthetics (e.g. Elizabeth Grosz, Kathryn Yusoff, Nigel Clark, Harriet Hawkins). 

Building upon this scholarship, in this session we invite contributions that address the elemental as a medium of conceptual, aesthetic, and ethico-political experiment.  In other words, we invite contributors to take the elemental not as a given, but as a medium that must be made explicit through experiments with a range of concepts, devices, and practices.

Potential contributions might reflect on the kinds of concepts and theories that help us think through and experiment with the elemental. How, for instance should we conceptualize the relation between bodies and the elemental materials in which they are immersed? How should we account for the generative processuality of the elemental in ways that disclose how it shapes spheres of life? At the same time we are particularly interested in contributions that combine philosophical reflection with exploration of how the ‘force of the elemental’ (Adey, forthcoming) is rendered explicit through aesthetic, geopolitical, and technoscientific experiments. How might such experiments help us understand the elemental spacetimes of the Anthropocene? Equally, how might experimenting with the elemental remind us of life’s exposure to entities (e.g. stars, comets) and energies (e.g. radiation, light) that are more-than-planetary? In addressing these and other questions we encourage presentations that experiment with a range of genres, formats and styles.

Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words to Derek McCormack ([log in to unmask]) Bronislaw Szerszynski ([log in to unmask]) and Sasha Engelmann ([log in to unmask]) by Wednesday 11^th February 2015.

Works Cited:

Adey, P. forthcoming. Air's Affinities: Geo-politics, Chemical Affect, and the Force of the Elemental. Dialogues in Human Geography. 

Ash, J. (2013). Rethinking affective atmospheres: technology, perturbation and space times of the non-human. Geoforum, 49, 20-28.

Jackson, M., & Fannin, M. (2011). Letting geography fall where it may – aerographies address the elemental.  Environment and Planning-Part D, 29(3), 435.