Call for Papers
Association of American Geographers
2008 Annual Meeting, April 15-19th
Boston, MA
Geographies of Rhythm
Organizer: Tim Edensor (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Following Lefebvre’s richly suggestive work, geographical analyses that consider the
utility of rhythmanalysis are beginning to emerge. Studies of rhythm promise to undermine
the reification of place and culture and in identifying the sensual, volatile, immanent
and embodied experience of the world, avoid overarching and abstract spatial
conceptualisations. In this session, we want to explore the idea that people are
rhythm-makers as much as place-makers. Lefebvre argues that ‘power knows how to utilise
and manipulate time, dates, time-tables’ (2004:68) and indeed, rhythmanalysis is useful
in identifying the ways in which commercial, political and bureaucratic power is installed
and maintained, through the development of regular rhythms that become habitual, embodied
and thus difficult to knowingly contravene. Yet such dominant rhythms are also accompanied
by corporeal, seasonal and non-human rhythms, along with a host of differently scaled
temporal pulses. What is more, arrhythmic events and effects constantly threaten to
undermine these synchronic and unreflexively performed forms of temporal order.
Accordingly, we invite participants to explore how collective synchronicities order
spatial and social life, how a multitude of rhythmic combinations constantly fold time and
space to constitute place as process, and how disruptive temporalities confound and
unsettle these specific patterns.
Papers might investigate:
- The rhythms of the body and the ways in which they chime or conflict with space
- The changing complexity of urban rhythms, or the characteristics of rural rhythms
- The imposition of media rhythms and their increasing complexity
- The changing rhythms of work and production, leisure and consumption.
- The changing rhythms across the life course
- Local, national and global rhythms
- An eco-centric approach to the study of rhythms
Please send in a title and brief abstract (max. 200 words) to Dr. Tim Edensor,
[log in to unmask]
before Oct. 15th, 2007.
Please note that no financial assistance is available for this event.
Dr Tim Edensor
Reader in Cultural Geography
Department of Geography
Manchester Metropolitan University
John Dalton Extension
Chester Street
Manchester
M1 5GD
0161 247 6284
see Tim's 2 websites:
British Industrial Ruins
http://www.sci-eng.mmu.ac.uk/british_industrial_ruins/
and
Spaces of Dereliction: Industrial Ruins in the UK
http://www.sci-eng.mmu.ac.uk/industrial_ruins/
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