My diary (detail)

I just wanted to draw attention to a number of interesting events over the next few months. Please let me know below of other seminars, conferences or talks!

29.10.11  |  Rhythm and Event symposium  |  KCL, London

01.11.11  |  John Mullarkey – Art-Practice-Thought: The Case of Cinema  |  Goldsmiths, London

21.11.11  |  Bruno Latour – Waiting for Gaia  |  Institut Français, London

21.11.11  |  Paul Simpson – Ecologies of Performance  |  School of Geography, Oxford

28.11.11  |  Caren Kaplan – The Visual Culture of Stealth  |  School of Geography, Oxford

29.11.11  |  Lars Spuybroek  - The Sympathy of Things  |  AA, London

06.12.11  |  Ian James – Art – Technics  |  Goldsmiths, London

ongoing  |  Topology project  |  Tate Modern, London

forthcoming  |  François Laruelle – Non-Standard Philosophy  |  TBC

forthcoming  |  The New in Social Research seminar series  |  TBC

Deleuze, G. (2007) For Félix. In: Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Here’s a plug for a session I’m co-convening at the next AAG in New York, in February. I really should have posted about this sooner as the deadline for the call for papers deadline is today, 15 September. If you are interested in doing something then please drop me a line.

For Félix: Transversal Geographies

CFP – AAG, 2012; New York, 24th – 28th February

Convenors: JD Dewsbury (University of Bristol), Thomas Jellis (University of Oxford), Joe Gerlach (University of Oxford)

“I believe I am neither an intellectual nor a revolutionary. I’m just pursuing something I started long ago” (Guattari, 2009a: 177)

“Just as an artist borrows from his precursors and contemporaries the traits which suit him, I invite those who read me to take or reject my concepts freely” (Guattari, 1995: 12)

Pierre-Félix Guattari (1930-1992) in a familiar self-deprecating gesture declared himself an ‘idea-thief’ (Guattari, 2009a: 23), yet it would be misplaced to regard his theoretical, and practical, work as straightforward appropriation. Instead, Guattari, through his ‘visionary cartography’ (Berardi, 2008), was incessantly productive in the cultivation of transversalising ideas: concepts and folding-points of inflection that segue into thinking, writing, becoming and doing differently. Recent newly constituted editions of his writings (Guattari, 2009a; 2009b; 2011; forthcoming; Guattari and Rolnik, 2008) – primarily though Semiotext(e) – attest to the growing interest and demand for translations of his work. Moreover, Guattari has come to be appreciated across a number of disciplines, not just in philosophy (Holmes, 2009; Stengers, 2010) but also in sociology (Genosko, 2002) and cultural studies (Grossberg, 2010; Murphie, 2004), in what has been described as the ‘Guattari Effect’ (see Alliez and Querrien, 2008; Alliez and Goffey, 2011). However, Guattari has received only muted attention in geography (Katz, 1996; Dewsbury, 2000; McCormack, 2003; 2005; Saldanha, 2010), and his work is often conflated with, or occluded by notorious collaborations. Nonetheless, in this session we hope to encourage a sustained engagement with Guattari’s ideas, exploring how they might resonate with contemporary issues in geography, and, as a result, open up our practices towards alternative ways of making connections between science-society-ethics-aesthetics-politics.

Specifically, we welcome papers attending to:

- therapeutic spaces

- eco-logic and ecosophical approaches

- diagramming and the diagrammatic

- schizoanalytic cartographies

- autonomist movements and collective assemblages of enunciation

- modelling and modelisation

- micropolitics; minoritarian and molecular revolutions

- ethico-aesthetics, and the proto-aesthetic

- refrains, ritornellos and habit

Dandelion, 2011

It seems an age since I last added something here. Indeed, the last post on this blog was way back in October 2010! Since my trip to Brussels to visit FoAM, things have been pretty hectic…

Anyway, reactivating. What’s that all about? Well, put simply, I’m going to try and post more regularly on here. While the writing has been on pause – at least on here – the blog has still been fairly lively. One of the earlier posts seems to have been picked up by a media class and transformed through a proliferation of their blogs; another post has also been taken up in a discussion elsewhere which I stumbled across. To make sharing more straightforward, I’ve added the ‘sharethis‘ plugin. And on this topic, I wanted to also thank those who have linked my blog to their website – much appreciated. I plan to update my rather small list of links in the coming weeks.

Pecha Kucha Brussels #14

‘We Can Change the Weather: 100 cases of changeability’¹ & Pecha Kucha Brussels #14²

On Tuesday 21 September, at Recyclart, a collection of one hundred tangible and local initiatives were published in the form of book titled ‘We can change the weather’. Part of a series called crosstalks which aims to develop a space for interdisciplinary exchange, each case is presented as a two-page spread. This includes not only text but images, information about the author(s) or group, and various websites for further reading. FoAM & partners’ entry, #38, can be found on pages 90-91 and attends to the related notions-projects-experiments of resilience and resilients. One of the recommended websites takes you to a curious and unsettling image, of two resilients perhaps, with an unexplained mathematical equation below. The book is interesting to flip through, as there is always the chance of stumbling across an arresting image or interesting title. Indeed, it was described by the editor, Marleen Wynants as a sort of street art on recycled paper. The book-launch itself was a fairly muted affair, with perhaps fifteen contributors asked to speak about their respective pieces. Although I had not been involved in the writing of the text, I prepared a short introduction. In the end, though, I was not asked to speak! Those who attended were provided with a complimentary copy of the book and invited to free drinks.

The fourteenth Pecha Kucha in Brussels followed on from the book-launch and, as with these sorts of events, provided a variety, not just of content but also of style and delivery. The full list of presenters-performers is available online, but the order changed from that which was planned. Notable highlights include: Allie Pasquier’s presentation on pedagogy and play, Jean-Yves Wilmot’s discussion of the working practices of his pâttiserie, and Théâtre Carbonique’s witty enactment of the difficulties of understanding and explaining environmental change. The micro-lectures were in both French and English, and took the (now) traditional Pecha Kucha format of 20 slides, and 20 seconds for each one (resulting in talks under seven minutes long). The tagline, {creativity * conversation}, seemed rather apt.

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Detail of FoAM's book library

While at FoAM, one of the projects I worked on was the reorganisation of the library space.  Before starting, it was worth having a read of FoAM’s library page:

In FoAM’s studio in Brussels, we collect books, media and materials related to our activities and interests. In our multi-sensory library, visitors may read, view, listen and touch snippets of the culture that FoAM’s collaborators cherish. The most traditional part of the library is our hard-copy section including books, magazines, zines and pamphlets. It is an eclectic collection of scientific and philosophical texts, artistic anthologies, richly illustrated design books, software manuals and recipe collections, futuristic science-fiction, or even obscure facsimiles of alchemical manuscripts and botanical guides.

Having worked in the new media field over the years, we have collected a small selection of contemporary digital audiovisual works – DVDs, CDs (and even a few CD-ROMs), containing experimental films, abstract computer-graphics, compositions, electronic and computer music, generative animation, artistic portfolios and other curiosa.

Our latest addition to the library is a rarity cabinet of material samples – textiles, plastics, composites, active materials, etc. Visitors can browse through the samples, or through books about new materials, as well as consult manufacturers’ brochures. This materials library is the only one in Belgium freely accessible to artists and designers seeking inspiration and information in this domain. The library and it’s adjacent working space offers a place for concentrated work, providing researchers a much needed break from fast-paced professional life. It is accessible by appointment only, one person or small group at the time, allowing visitors to concentrate on their studies, without distractions.

I spent several hours browsing through the book collection, making notes, taking photos, finding distractions, enjoying digressions. I even came across the catalogue and book for Obrist & Vanderlinden’s ‘Laboratorium’ which seems to be almost impossible to find. Other books which caught my eye included a collection on curating, a text titled ‘Media Ecologies’, another called ‘Sensorium’, and a chapter in yet another on speculation and serendipity. I drew up some provisional categories or themes and, with Christina, developed an emergent classification:

Architecture

Art | Art organisations | Curating

Biology | Botany | Gardening

Cooking | Food

Design | Fashion

Fiction

Futures | Resilience | Sustainability

History | Politics

Manuals | Maps

Philosophy

Poetry (digital, mathematical, literary)

Some worked better than others, and it seems likely that the ‘Futures | Resilience | Sustainability’ section is just too large and needs to be more specific. Another problem was that we had hoped to integrate fiction within the other categories but this proved too difficult given the time. It made me remember how useful it is to have ‘tags’ when working online, as so many things can fall between or across categories.

Opposite the book library is the aforementioned material library, which is smaller but steadily growing. And alongside both of these is the libarynth:

a parafictional, semifunctional (deeply intertwingled) collection of documents, notes and randomness in the smouldering rubble of babel. it has been mostly reconstructed from material with escaped the libarynth greyhole event, however there are some old pages that may reappear in the near future, stochastically. current pages can be edited as you like, you can also create new pages… .

If you fancy losing yourself, feel free to explore this smorgasbord of thoughts, reports and writings. There’s a handy little trace tool which keeps a record of the connections and links you’ve followed but there’s no starting point as such. Just search for something and see where it takes you…

]]> http://www.spacesofexperimentation.net/brussels/foam-libraries/feed/ 0 http://www.spacesofexperimentation.net/brussels/honey-for-stories/ http://www.spacesofexperimentation.net/brussels/honey-for-stories/#comments Wed, 06 Oct 2010 13:16:26 +0000 Thomas http://www.spacesofexperimentation.net/?p=2001

Stories for honey

There was an open invitation to attend a honey shop opening the day after the foraging and cooking. This is a project developed by Christina Stadtlbauer, of FoAM, and seeks to exchange stories for honey. More specifically, stories  about bees! And for every minute of story, you receive a small amount of honey (c. 6 grams). Christina is an urban bee-keeper, among other things, and is absolutely fascinated by bees. Her website is full of information. As the shop had only just opened, there had not yet been many people drop by to tell stories. It was also perhaps quite intimidating, as although there were drinks on offer, there was also a video camera pointing at one of the seats.

This project is supported by another lab in Brussels, who have close ties with FoAM, called Nadine. They have a specific page on the project, or honey-shop-residence. What was really interesting was that there is an explicit naming of the space as a laboratory, and that there is a working definition:

Arts laboratories are places where innovative – and thus, daring – work is supported. As forerunners for the major culture houses, they are an indispensable part of the contemporary artistic landscape. Arts laboratories support the work of artists whose artistic quality they believe in. The laboratories support the production of new work by providing a place for artists to research, create, develop and present their work.

Furthermore, the term art laboratory (or kunstenwekplaats, or lab-art, depending on the language of choice) is a rubric with its own website:

An artlab is a type of organisation that is focused on providing a framework for the artist’s creative process. The unifying theme of the artlabs covers a huge diversity, comprising various types of activity: experimental laboratories, artist collectives and alternative management offices.

Experimental laboratories and artist collectives provide opportunities for artistic investigations, experimenting and creative achievements. Rather than being confined to acting as a workplace, this forum may also cover a content-based/artistic input, support for the production process and business advice,… tailored to the artist’s profile. These fertile grounds offer facilities for artists to develop their artistic ideas, take risks and work according to a process-oriented approach rather than focusing on results. The presentation is of secondary importance but it has to be factored in, because the relationship with the (future) public is a key ingredient of the artistic process.

Acknowledged as other types of artlabs, the alternative management offices lend support to artists in terms of financial management, distribution and the promotion of their works.

The Arts-lab.be portal site keeps artists and the general public informed about the variety of services the artlabs provide. In its role as a platform, Arts-lab.be is responsible for organising creative thinking sessions, exchanges of experience and knowledge, while adopting positions in the light of these initiatives. Promoting artistic, production and organisational cooperation, the platform acts as a consultation body concerning the various types of activity the network represents.

City Garden - Kanal Labs

I had a very early start on the Saturday in order to attend the event ‘Kanal Labs: Traingulated’ planned for that day. After struggling to find the right tram to get me from the Eurostar terminal to FoAM, I showed up a little before midday. I met Christina and Weitske, as well as Lina, and had a cup of tea. Christina got out a large map and explained that we were to go foraging for food in a nearby wasteland. Leaving my bags in the entrance, we headed out not long after and made our way over to the area near Tour & Taxis (you can see it on Google Maps). Funnily enough, its tagline is ‘An Urban Experience’! Weitske pointed out the plants that we might collect and we set up about foraging for edibles. Although we had forgotten to bring a trowel or scissors, we came across a small strange metallic structure which could be unscrewed, and fashioned into two digging tools. We collected evening primose, rosehip, some plums, carrot flowers and more.

We had a late lunch and then set about preparing the food for the evening. The idea was that FoAM would serve detoxifying appetizers flavoured with plants from the canal zone, intended to combat urban afflictions. The kitchen: a space of experiments, unexpected combinations, and collective work. I helped out where I could and also had my camera to hand. Often, one of the group would be documenting the event and so I suppose I was documenting the documenters at times. People who are part of FoAM continued to arrive as the afternoon turned into evening, and two of them dressed up as ‘food doctors’. Their uniform: a white lab-coat with a mouth-mask around the neck. I was struck by the similarity of the outfit to those worn at the ‘Experimentality’ conference I attended earlier on in the year, and how this plays to familiar imaginations of science. They were to provide a sort of ad-hoc clinic, filling in forms of what ailments people had, sending these up in a basket to FoAM (several floors up) and then, a few minutes later, hand their patients a particular dish that would help. The basket was operated by a child of one of the FoAM collective and added to a ‘family feel’; one where everybody was comfortable and at home in this studio-lab-space.

I went down to see the doctors in action, on the terrace of another lab, Okno, and had been asked to take some photos of the event. On my way down the stairs, I noticed that the whole complex had a large number of cultural-, or creative-spaces which I looked up the following day. There were a lot of people out and about, and it seemed as if the Kanal Festival (organised by Platform Kanal) was proving to be a success. A little further down the street from the Kanal Labs, was a reconstruction of Checkpoint Charlie; a suggestion that Brussels was a segregated city, divided by its canal (a programme of events is available here). When I returned to FoAM, the pace of activity in the kitchen had slowed and later, we had a few drinks to celebrate. There were lots of questions from the others, many of whom I had met at the Luminous Green gathering, about what I would be doing… to which I had no answers but only smiles.

Kanal Labs: Triangulated

Start: 2010-09-18 19:00 Europe/Brussels

End: 2010-09-18 21:00 Europe/Brussels

Location:

FoAM & Open Green, The Mill, Koolmijnenkaai 30-34, B-1080 Brussels, Belgium

Three Brussels art labs invite you in Koolmijnenkaai 30-34. OKNO opens their rooftop garden and Open Greens-project to all. You can taste urban honey and drinks made of plants from the garden. You can nibble on FoAM’s detoxifying treats to help you fight urban afflictions, spiced up with plants from the Kanal area. Q-O2 invites the sound artist Pierre Berthet for a concert using waterdrops as an instrument.

After a day of walking between various urban gardens alongside the canal, FoAM will serve a range of detoxifying bites, especially crafted to eliminate toxins and pollutants from the human bodily ecology. The aperitif combines ingredients, methods and performance-eating techniques that can assist your body in fighting some of the most prominent urban afflictions, including allergies, stress related disorders, diabetes and cancer. In collaboration with OKNO and Irma Firma, the cooks will incorporate edible plants gathered and grown in the Brussels’ Kanal area.

http://f0.am/festival_kanal

Bright lights, Brussels

I’m just back from a short residency with the transdisciplinary lab, FoAM. Whilst my plans for a study/stay were fairly vague – as it wasn’t clear what might be possible – I had been keen to go there for some time and to be involved, or help out, with a project. It had also been discussed that I might take a more informal role: more an observer than a co-experimenter (an on-going tension). I was also keen to chat about the working practices and processes, and get to know the spaces in and with which FoAM were working. Although emails had been sent back and forth, and I attended Luminous Green at the end of July, things only fell into place late on. This culminated in me being offered a more-than-generous residency.

The dates, 18-24 September, were arranged and the Eurostar tickets were booked. I had a vague idea of what would be happening from the ‘events’ part of FoAM’s website (soon to be overhauled). Whilst there, I would meet an AI researcher who also had a residency, as well as be around for the writing of a funding proposal and a small post-Luminous Green publication, as well as other on-going projects. With the suggestion that there was “plenty of stuff going on and much help needed (primarily writing and editing though, not sure if that’s interesting for you)” and that there would also be time for chatting, I was very keen to visit. The posts that follow will try to gesture towards some of those activities, and examine the notion of a ‘geographer in residence’.

Notes on a draft

Gail Davies has an editorial in the current issue of Geoforum called ‘Where do experiments end?‘ It’s a very interesting paper, exploring the changing nature and scope of experimentation with reference to the Office of Experiments’ (OoE) ‘Dark Places‘ project. Check it out.

Davies, G. (2010) Where do experiments end? Geoforum, 41(5): 667-670

On the lawn at the RGS-IBG 2010 Conference, London

The RGS-IBG annual conference was in London this year, at the beginning of September. A three-day event, with sessions starting at 09:00 and running through right into the evening, combined with a daily commute, meant I was exhausted by the time it came to a close. I attended a variety of different sessions, met up with a number of familiar faces and was lucky enough to make some new acquaintances. I also tried to make the most of being in London, and was able to visit the Science Museum, an interesting but half-finished exhibition at the V&A and an event over at Tate Britain.

I

Where to start though? Looking back at my scribble of notes, what I propose to do here is make some very brief comments on what caught my attention during the conference, and include all the calls for papers of those sessions (as they the online programme is only due to reamin online until the end of September). Having recently re-read Latour’s (2005) Reassembling the social, I thought it might be interesting to go along to a session on actor-networks. However, as the discussant Peter Jackson noted, there was a noticeable theoretical eclecticism! Unfortunately, it didn’t feel like this was very productive. The next session I attended was the launch of Peter Adey’s new book, Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects. Adey opened and closed the session, first introducing aspects of the book and then responding to those who had read his book. These included Ben Anderson and Tim Cresswell, among others, who were full of praise for the book. Anderson was interested in the relational configurations in the book, the on-going composition of relations, and had some questions on method. Firstly, he noted that the book is organised around events rather than specific types of connections, resulting in surprising juxtapositions. How then, he asked, to learn to attend to resonances between events that are drawn out?  Secondly, how is Adey theorising the process of change and the irruption of the new from within this relational account? Cresswell had fewer questions but remarked that the mundane is much harder to account for, and to write. He also noted that the book was an example of geography that is happy to be theoretical. I took a break after lunch, and then sat at the back of the room for a session on anarchist geographies. It was all rather tame though. The closest I came to being surprised was when I nearly fell off my chair; it had only three legs. I did a little writing in my notebook, then listened closely as Hilary Ramsden talked about her research on clown activism. I liked her comments on temporary wrong-footings, and the play on misunderstanding and mistake. Indeed, her paper was quite simply disarming.

II

The session on theorising the sea was interesting, in particular the paper that considered the surfed wave as a relational place, both unstable and provisional. There was an uncomfortable silence after another paper in the same session though, and I was trying to work out if it was because it didn’t offer much in the way of questions, or if it was because the presenters were Israeli. Perhaps both. I couldn’t find anything in the programme that was very appealing for the next session, and so I wandered over to the V&A. There they had an exhibition, called Architects Build Small Spaces, which had finished earlier on in the week. I asked about it and found that parts of the exhibition were still on-site and could be visited. These structures were explorations of notions of refuge and retreat and although I wasn’t convinced that small spaces “can push the boundaries and possibilities of creative practice”, I did rather like the ‘Ark’ project, a beautiful bookcase-tower-archive. I spent the first part of the afternoon at a session that I had expected would be about affect and emotion but turned out to be more about well-being. David Conradson’s consideration of therapeutic practices for affective modulation was fascinating, and I found some of the terms he used very thought-provoking: relational ecologies, orchestration of feeling and affective field. His paper was on the techniques for summoning stillness and how places of retreat operate. I found there to be an interesting overlap between this paper, the exhibition I had just been to, and my participation at the Luminous Green (LG) gathering. Louisa Cadman’s presentation on the art of living well attended to the idea of staying with the present, of staying with the problem. Hers was more a story than an argument and there was a noticeable unease with the audience as to how to engage with it. As for myself, I found myself listening to experiences that were unsettlingly similar to those from LG. Instead of a mint-leaf, she spoke of a raisin. But the same tenets of non-judgement, of awareness, of presencing even, were all there. I was surprised then, to find that some of what I had liked so much about LG was perhaps not as specific to that event as I had first thought. The last session was all about surfaces. Rachel Colls spoke of bodily, and in particular placental, surfaces, which was remarkable. Drawing on Luce Irigaray, the placenta was a device for re-thinking the ways we live together, of new forms of relating. Alan Latham’s paper on jogging as a way of thinking with, and about, surfaces was an exercise in thoughtful self-experimentation, and Hilary, mentioned earlier, told a story of walking in Detroit. There was lots going on, following a finger-walking introduction (which had to be seen to be believed!): Hilary reading, a friend walking her fingers over a projector, and a slideshow of pictures and quotes that seemed to have little to do with what was being read. The person doing the walking of fingers, Libby Straughan, was up next with a talk on taxidermy. There was a visceral video of her practising taxidermy which was hard to watch but nonetheless fascinating. I was more concerned by the seemingly conflictual citations of psychoanalysts and those who are rather less interested in that sort if thing. A certain ontological dissonance perhaps? The last paper maintained the high level of the session, with a lyrical tale of the Aberfan mining disaster, a scrutiny of the surface.

III

The sonic methods session had some technical difficulties but this did not prevent the papers from going ahead. Many of the participants had also attended the ‘Experimenting with Geography’ workshop earlier on in the year but here I was able to hear more about their work. Jonathan Prior’s soundwalks were very interesting, especially the ways in which he encouraged a holding of attention through détournement. His soundwalks are available to download from his blog. The next two sessions attended, both before and after lunch, were on geography and the future. Nick Bingham presented a story of a food inspection of a Chinese restaurant, highlighting the ways the future can be folded into the present. Ben Anderson and Pete Adey had a paper on governing emergencies, and discussed the interval of peril. An emergency, they argued, is only over when the potential to surprise had been exhausted. Sam Kinsley talked about futurity in the making, and explored the notion of communities of practice. He contended that ubicomp (ubiquitous computing) remains anticipatory, always looking to a proximate future. Gail Davies gave a very interesting talk about experimental temporalities (and temporalities of the experiment). I agreed with her argument that experimental practices enact more than one future . Derek McCormack chose to surprise, engaging with the futures of inflation (financial rather than balloon). I  had a giggle when he talked about practising thrift (!) but I was intrigued by his thoughts on the pre-disciplining of the imagination. Leila Dawney invoked a particular set of philosophers (Stengers, Simondon, Nancy, Spinoza) to discuss on-going presencing or becoming. She was especially interested in the imaginative capacities of the body, arguing that imaginative constructions of the future highlight some of the relations in the present. The final paper came from Jamie Lorimer, who spoke of enginnering new ecologies and cosmopolitics, of learning to live with others. Interestingly he also touched upon diagrams, which could anticipate and summon forth futures. I decided to leave on a high, those sessions proving very stimulating, and made my way over to Tate Britain for the ‘The Real Thing‘:

Urbanomic present an evening event at Tate Britain with contemporary sound, video and sculptural work, and other interventions exploring the emerging philosophical paradigm of Speculative Realism and its impact on contemporary art practice.

Although fairly ambivalent about Specualtive Realism, I did follow the recent discussions on its merits on the Crit-Geog mailing list. Moreover, I was interested in how artists might explicitly explore this sort of philosophy and in particular, the question of engaging with realities that exist before, after and outside of human experience. There was a lot to see and to listen to and unfortunately I didn’t manage much in the end. But I did stumble across Mike Nelson’s (2000) The Coral Reef, which had nothing to do with the event, but has really stayed with me since. I’ve included a video below, before the list of CFPs, but I would recommend you visit the installation rather than watch this!

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Can we have political Actor-Networks?

Charlotte Chambers & Katherine Smith

Over the past twenty years, theoretical contributions employing the term actor-network theory (or ANT for short) have enjoyed huge popularity within the social sciences, and particularly human geography, to the extent that some of the original contributors to this body of work have expressed concern at its translation into a specific, almost concrete, academic space (e.g. Law, 1999). Attempts to reclaim the term as something less fixed and more problematic have been made (e.g. Latour, 2005; Law & Hassard, 1999). It is contended, however, that because actor-network theorists tend to have their sights firmly fixed on micro-level analysis, none of the various interpretations (or translations) of ANT have, so far, dealt adequately with the agency of political context in mediating interactions of actors and networks.

This session incorporates a range of papers which employ or engage with elements of ANT, each of which illustrates or questions the centrality of political context and address the question of whether it is possible for ‘actor-network theories’ to engage with politics beyond the micro level. Drawing on topics as diverse as environmental justice, health inequalities, financial services corruption and Tuscan wine production, this session will provide a provocative discussion about one of the most widely applied theoretical lenses in contemporary human geography. The first paper, by the session organizers, will outline some of the key difficulties and debates on this topic.  The second will respond to this directly by arguing ANT is already a viable approach for critical, politically engaged analysis. The final two papers will each present examples of politically critical, empirical geographical work in which ANT is employed, providing further insights into the possibilities and difficulties in using ANT in politically sensitive research. The broader aim of the session is to promote a better understanding of how ANT might be usefully developed and applied within the social sciences to better understand situations that are as complex and politically sensitive as the post-crisis global economy and environment upon which this conference is focused.

RGS-IBG/Wiley-Blackwell Book Series panel. Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects: author meets interlocuters panel

Kevin Ward

Anarchist geographies: Place, identity and participatory approaches

Adam Barker, Jenny Pickerill & Gavin Brown

Anarchist theory has had much to say about the importance of place, especially in critiques of how territory is claimed by power – whether the state or corporate interests – but also in proposing different ways of relating to land. Such theory needs to be engaged with by geographers not only in enhancing our understanding of place and identity, but in supporting social justice activism which seeks to challenge these power relations. Ecologically-based concepts such as bioregionalism and examinations of place-based autonomy have brought diverse groups together in discussions of how land is related to and used to sustain non-hierarchical more participatory social forms.  However, anarchist theory has not included much commentary on how place relates to political, social, and cultural identities.  This session seeks to engage with the various ways – contested, overlapping, and often incomplete – that place informs identities, both for anarchist individuals and communities, and for groups that anarchists may find themselves working with (or against).  As anarchists in practice seek to work within localized networks of activists in the anti-globalization movement, or in partnership with Indigenous peoples and communities, anarchists must consider the full range of implications for the development of senses of self and ‘other’, production of cultural and social meaning, and formation of political identities tied to place. Such an approach also asks geographers to develop a more participatory approach in understanding how place is understood and the construction of place and identities through the processes of activism.

This session seeks to consider (but should not be limited by) the following questions:

- How are variations within anarchistic identities tied to locality and place-specific struggles?

-What are the implications for international solidarity, geographically-dispersed affinity, and other networking concepts that must account for place-based identities?

- Do ties to localized identities strengthen or weaken opposition to globalizing power?

- Can experiences on, in, and with, specific places be used to help form particular anarchistic identities?

- What challenges are posed by identities such as those of some Indigenous communities which are place-based but also claim particular and inaccessible relations to places?

- What do the ethics that inform participatory approaches add to understandings of anarchist geographies?

Theorising the Sea

Jon Anderson & Kimberley Peters

The oceans and seas cover approximately two-thirds of the Earth’s surface, not to mention the watery worlds which lie below, forming the largest percentage of our planet. Rachel Carson wrote of the sea, “it lies all about us” (1950, 216), yet it has strangely failed (until recently) to gain much attention in social and cultural geography. The sea is a space often invisible, forgotten (Lambert et al, 2006), marginalised, ‘out there’ (Steinberg, 1999) mystical and strange (Westerdahl, 2005). Yet paradoxically, it has been, and remains, fundamental to the making of the world as we know it (Lavery, 2005, Rediker, 2007). As a “scholarly turn towards the ocean” currently develops (Connery, 2006), this session seeks to consider how we might theorise the sea – this strange, liquid, undulating space which is often credited as being entirely different from the land (see Jackson, 2005, Langewiesche, 2004, Steinberg, 1999). In particular, this session will endeavour to theorise oceanic, maritime and sea spaces not only in terms of interconnections and networks, but also as spaces of power, society, imagination, emotion, materiality, mobility and enchantment. This session invites papers concerned with (but not limited to) the following themes:

- The tensions, contradictions, relationships between the land and sea

- The sea as a ‘place’

- Materiality and sea

- The sea as space of emotion

- Ocean and seas spaces as magical, mystical and enchanted

- Society and the sea

- The fluid, undulating, mobile nature of the sea

Geographies of (dis)ability, (ill) health, emotion and affect

Louise Holt, Jennifer Lea & Hannah MacPherson

This session aims to explicitly connect work on the geographies of (dis)ability, ill health and wellbeing with research on emotion and /or affect. Over recent years, the interest that human geographers have shown in the emotional and (broadly conceived) affective realms has increased substantially, making an impact in most areas of the discipline. From the emotional responses that shape and arise from embodied relationships with particular spatial settings, to the ‘logics’ of affect that shape configurations of economic, social and cultural life, the emotional and affective realms are increasingly being called upon as legitimate ways of knowing the world.

It was critical geographies of disability and chronic illness (e.g. Dyck 1999, Moss 1999, Chouinard 1999) that proved one of the most willing to ‘admit emotions into [the] production of geographical knowledges’ (Davidson et al 2005, 4). Despite that starting point there has been limited sustained dialogue. As such, this session calls for papers that explicitly take this dialogue forward by investigating aspects of the multidimensional and varied relationships that exist between (dis)ability, health and wellbeing and emotion/affect.

What are surfaces?

Isla Forsyth, James Robinson, Hayden Lorimer & Peter Merriman

Geographers have held a long-standing concern with describing and understanding the Earth’s surface and the social and environmental interactions which it enables or constrains, some employing creative methods to produce myriad explanations of surface pattern, processes and peopling (Harrison et al. 2004). However, critical reflections on different understandings of ‘the surface’ have been relatively neglected in contemporary geographical study, with emphasis being placed on geographical concepts such as ‘place’ or ‘landscape’.

Commonly, and metaphysically, we come to know the world, and figure our place in it, as surface-dwellers, moving over ground, across bodies of water or occasionally taking to the air to see patterns of life and habitats from on-high (Cosgrove 2001; Ingold 2008). Meanwhile, much of the commonplace, metaphoric language of the surface is deeply pejorative: beauty is said to be skin-deep or someone is warned they are skating on thin-ice. If surfaces are objects of attraction, they are also subject to our suspicion and distrust.

This session asks what a serious consideration of the superficial might allow, hinging on the question ‘What are surfaces?’ We welcome proposals for papers which have a theoretical and/or empirical focus which critically address different social, cultural, historical and physical engagements with surfaces: human and nonhuman; topographical, topological and technological; imagined, visualized and inhabited; material and metaphoric; reproduced, modelled and designed.

Sonic methods in human geography

Michael Gallagher & Jonathan Prior

This session brings together researchers who are actively using sound to explore geographical issues, providing a platform for methodological development to complement the growing interest in the geographies of sound and music (e.g. Anderson et al, 2005; Cameron and Rogalsky, 2006; Wood et al, 2007). Papers will cover topics such as:

- Sonic research methods: soundwalking; deep listening; multi-sensory ethnography; acoustic mapping; sound design and architecture; acoustic ecology; field recording; sound art and experimentalism.

- The interface between academic research and creative practice in the sonic arts.

- Cartographies of sound and other forms of representing sound.

- Experimentation with different forms of sonic dissemination: blogs, podcasts, performances, radio broadcasts, etc.

Geography and the Future

Ben Anderson & Peter Adey

How are futures governed, enacted, invoked and known? And how might geographers respond – analytically, methodologically, and politically – to the making of geographies through the future? Addressing these questions requires that we explicitly conceptualise the relation between space-time and futurity. However, with some exceptions, including work on figuring futures (Kitchen & Kneale 2002; Pinder 2005), experiencing futures (Kraftl 2007) and practices such as planning, Social and Cultural Geography has rarely explicitly engaged with the category of the future (compare with the amount of work on the past, memory and haunting). This is not to say that the future is absent from geographical work. On the contrary, recent research on climate change, trans-species epidemics, terror, obesity, financial crises and other risks, threats and hazards has shown how acting in advance of the future is an integral, if taken-for-granted, part of specific substantive geographies (e.g. Adey 2009; Anderson 2010a, b; Amoore 2009; de Goede & Randalls 2009; Evans 2009; French & Kneale 2009; Hannah 2009). Carbon is traded, birds are culled, bodies are measured and banks are saved on the basis of what has not and may never happen; the future. We also find hints of the complicated interrelations between past, present and future across a wide range of work within Social and Cultural Geography. A simple list of just some ‘future geographies’ gives us a sense of the sheer variety of ways in which futures may be related to and made present. Futures are: traded in futures markets, promised in contracts, created by birth, commodified by finance capital, secured against, invested in by savers animated by a Calvinist work ethic, divined by fortune tellers, promised in the context of new technologies, coaxed into being by theorists of diverse economies, projected by certain utopians, deterred by nation states, regularised through clock time, prophesised by evangelicals, and destroyed in war, to name only some relations to the future (see Adam & Groves 2007; Anderson 2010a).

The sessions consist of a series of papers that think the relation between geographies/geography and the future by describing how futures are theorised, known, governed and enacted in relation to the following themes:

1. Theorising the future and spatiality/temporality (the future as not-yet, a mystery, virtual, difference, outside, becoming, event).
2. Figuring the future (‘the future’ understood as catastrophe, crisis, disaster and or in terms of progress, providence, or promise)
3. Enacting futures. (How are futures embodied, experienced, told, narrated, imagined, performed, wished, planned, (day)dreamed, symbolized, and sensed? And how are future made present through specific affects, materialities, and epistemic objects).
4. Governing the future (different anticipatory logics such as risk, insurance, preemption, precaution, preparedness or anticipatory techniques such as scenarios, exercises or risk modelling).