IBG-RGS Social and Cultural Geography Research Group ‘Material

Co-Sponsored by Social/Spatial Theory and Lived and Material Cultures
Research Clusters, Department of Geography, Durham University.
Organised by: Ben Anderson and Rachel Colls (with Ian Cook and Jo Maddern)

Speakers:
Steve Hinchliffe: Working with multiples.
Gail Davies: Captivation and captivity: reflects on the distribution of
animal agency and capacity in the laboratory
J-D Dewsbury: Immaterially There: Exposure, finitude, immanence
Panelists: Paul Harrison, Ian Cook, Jo Maddern, Mike Crang, Divya Tolia-
Kelly (tbc).
When/Where: Department of Geography, Durham. Wednesday 19th December 2007
(10.00 - 5.00)
Cost: Free
(PLEASE CONTACT BEN ANDERSON ben.anderson@durham.ac.uk TO CONFIRM
ATTENDANCE AND DIETARY REQUIREMENTS)

The second workshop in the SCG Research Group workshop series focuses on
the theoretical-conceptual vocabularies that are emerging alongside the
diverse and sometime conflicting materialisms that populate contemporary
Social and Cultural Geography. Workshop one, held in Birmingham in
December 2006, asked what attending to matter/materiality offers or
promises Social and Cultural Geography and began to open up questions of
how materialisms differ in their epistemological and ontological
propositions, claims and commitments and their relation to types of
empirical work. The second workshop develops the focus on the relations
between different materialisms by engaging in depth with four problematics
that have, in different ways, been central to the renewed status matter or
the material have in understanding the social or cultural -
absence/presence, agency/capacity, excess/liveliness, and
multiplicity/singularity.

Through engagements with these four problematics the workshop aims to
contribute in two ways to current work in Social and Cultural Geography on
matter/materiality. First, to think through how materialist theoretical
and empirical work emerges from, relates to and intervenes in particular
problematics. Second, to think through wider questions of how conceptual-
theoretical vocabularies specific to matter/materiality can and do
function. The day will consist of a combination of invited presentation
from individuals working in relation to different traditions of
materialist thought, creative participatory work involving all the
workshop participants and a panel discussion.