~~~ 2nd Call for Papers ~~~
Annual Meeting
American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting
Boston, MA April 5-9, 2017
INTO THE VOID
In another scene [from Yellow Submarine (1968)], John and Paul emerge from adjacent holes and Paul’s head dwarfs John’s upper body. The Sea of Holes, a mishmash of Cartesian, topological, and quantum spaces, provides an apt illustration for how much of music’s power to move and grip people relies on its ability to traverse a ‘parallax gap’ (Žižek 2006), that is, a gap between two points wherein a harmonious rapport or mediation seems impossible. Music is powerful because it is able to cross the parallax between sound waves and wellbeing, that is, between objective material causes and subjective poetic effects. Music’s sounds move not only through the solid tubes of tracheas, external auditory canals, conical tubes, and synapses, but also through the voids of sound holes, F-holes, and D-holes, as well as across the chasms that separate cultural communities, signifiers in chains, dancers on a stage, and lovers across dance floors. When we listen to music, we immerse ourselves in a sea of holes (Kingsbury 2014: 93).
This session offers a forum for geographers who are engaged in theoretical, empirical, and/or methodological research that examines how holes, voids, chasms, lacks, gaps, nothingness, and other empty or unfathomable entities (de)structure spaces, places, landscapes, and other geographical phenomena. We will consider any contributions that engage the above, as well as any of the following topics:
• Caves, underground installations, bunkers, tunnels, subterranean worlds, missing objects, missing persons, missing time, lost data, black boxes, the quantum gap, irrational intervals, creatio ex nihilo…
• Parallaxes, aporias, impasses, holey spaces, lacunae, gaps, lacks, deficits, trypophobia, Fana’, Wu, différends, Śūnyatā, noumena, the Real, negativity, the not-all, vanishing mediators…
• Escape routes, legal loopholes, exit strategies, power vacuums, disappearing acts, empty gestures, empty nesters, horror vacui, kenophobia, disappearing ice, landforms, caves, sinkholes, vortices, ocean eddies, craters, hollow earths, black holes…
• Taboos, absent discussions, broken relations, blank spaces, apostrophes, awkward silences, glaring inconsistencies, the missing half second, patchy memories, holes in hearts, un-finished business, lost property, lost loves, blind spots, roads to nowhere, orifices, emptiness, nihilism…
Selected papers will be submitted for inclusion in a co-edited and peer reviewed volume as part of the University of Nebraska Press’ “Cultural Geographies + Rewriting the Earth” book series (edited by Paul Kingsbury and Arun Saldanha).
Please send an abstract by October 15, 2016 of no more than 200 words to:
Paul Kingsbury ([log in to unmask]) and Anna Secor ([log in to unmask])
References
P. Kingsbury (2014) Listen! It’s alive. In G. Andrews, P. Kingsbury, and R. Kearns, eds. Soundscapes of Wellbeing in Popular Music, Routledge: New York, 91-106.
S. Žižek (2006) The Parallax View. The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.
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