Please do circulate this conference Call for Papers to interested colleagues, students and contacts:
Annual conference of the Royal Geographical Society with Institute of British Geographers, London, 27th-29th August 2014
Session Title: NARRATING RUIN, RUINING NARRATIVE: CO-PRODUCING SITES, MATERIALS AND STORIES
Sponsors: Historical Geography Research Group
Organisers: Caitlin DeSilvey (University of Exeter); Hayden Lorimer and Michael Gallagher (University of Glasgow)
The term ‘ruin’, understood in its broadest sense, refers to the physical destruction or disintegration of something, or the state of disintegrating or being destroyed.
In this session we invite papers that grapple with how ruins, and processes of ruination, are brought into circuits of geographical knowledge through narrative practices.
In their engagement with ruins geographers often aspire to co-production, attempting to share narrative authority with other voices, actants and forms of life. Experiments with sound, story and image have drawn out the potential for co-production, but exposed a paradox at the heart of this kind of work. What attracts us to ruins is often their radical indifference and their apparent autonomy; but any attempt to ‘story’ the ruin involves acts of selection, editing and framing that impose an order on disorder, and threaten to domesticate destruction. To narrate these places requires a willingness to allow for the disintegration of conventional narrative forms, and an openness to other ways of presencing animals and plants, weather and water, absent people and other beings.
Papers are invited that reflect on these themes. Creative approaches to presentation are welcome.
Please send your abstract of 250 words or less, to:
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DEADLINE for receipt of abstracts: Wednesday 12th February 2014.
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