Conference session report (1)

RGS/IBG paper session, Friday 29th August 2008

Matters of Interdisciplinarity: Archaeology meets Geography

Convenors: Dr. Divya P. Tolia-Kelly & Dr. Richard Hingley (Durham Geography and Archaeology, respectively)

This materiality session successfully brought together archaeologists and geographers to consider both their shared and divergent approaches to understanding landscape. The diverse range of papers promoted lively discussion and highlighted the overlaps between the two disciplines and the importance of taking a broader interdisciplinary approach to research. The papers led us from post colonial readings of landscape and shifting perceptions of ruination and reconstruction of historic landscapes to contemporary emotional experiences and the cultural commoditisation and consumption of landscapes, especially in the heritage sector, via time geography and models of innovation. Some common themes which emerged were issues of ownership of landscape and the nature of rightful encounter and how these are (re)presented in mapping and recording techniques and artistic and literary works that deal with landscapes. Contributors from archaeology, geography, rural economics, and the environmental sector created a truly interdisciplinary and diverse session which fostered a fruitful exchange of theory and method providing new perspectives for all concerned. The discussant was Professor Stephen Daniels (Director of AHRC Landscape and Environment Programme).

Chairs:
Divya Tolia-Kelly & Robert Witcher
Contributors:
Martin Redding (Environment Officer – Witham)
Divya Tolia-Kelly(Durham – Geography)
Robert Witcher (Archaeology – Durham)
Richard Hingley (Archaeology – Durham)
Claire Nesbitt (Archaeology – Durham)
Glynn Kelso (Geography – Queen’s University Belfast)
Adam Wainwright (Archaeology – Exeter)
Nick Winder (Institute for Policy and Practice – Newcastle)
Claudia Dürrwächter (Institute for Policy and Practice – Newcastle)
Victoria Bell (Centre for Rural Economy – Newcastle)

CFP Geographies of Art

Call for papers: Geographies of art: Annual Association of American Geographers Conference, Las Vegas, 22-27 March 2009



Are you critic, collaborator, creator, curator ? Does your research in some way develop a relationship between geography and art ? A look at recent publications and conference programs indicates the growing scope of the interrelationship between art and geography and the increasing range of forms this work is taking as boundaries between geographers, artists and curators blur. The title of this session is broad, and deliberately so, for it aims precisely to consider the breadth of this relationship between geography and art. The intention is to bring together a range of practices, and practitioners, to consider the ideas, methods and conceptual developments that come from this so obviously fruitful relationship. This is a relationship which offers us purchase on so many of the important debates within geography today: creative research and writing practices,
identity performance and practices, landscape, representation and non-representation, affectual and sensory relations, immaterial labour practices, social and political sculpture, the environment, discourses of new materialisms… to name but a few. Alternatively, what do you, as an artist, get from geography and geographers? What value is drawn from collaborative working practices? Your focus may be contemporary or historical practice and it is certainly not restricted to visual art.

Formats may include but are not restricted to : papers, videos, performance works, or sound works. Potential topics may include but are not restricted to:

• the outcomes and practices of collaboration
• social sculpture, art and participatory geographies
• production, consumption and the circulation of aesthetics
• art and, and as, the political
• artistic networks, creative clusters and art schools
• geopolitics and art forms
• art as therapy
• art as practice and performance of identity
• aesthetics and politics
• art and geography’s critique of the visual
• artist as social agent
• art and regeneration
• the internet as art space/ networked art
• art and questions of affect and sensory relations
• the space of the museum/ the museum without walls
• site-specific practices
• environmental aesthetics
• art and landscape
• geography and visual culture

Please direct any questions and abstracts ( 250 words) to Harriet Hawkins at
h.hawkins@exeter.ac.uk, by the 8th October 2008.

Third materialities conference/workshop, Dec, Exeter

Ian Cook (Exeter) is keen to get those who have been involved in previous workshops deciding the form and content of the third SCGRG materalities conference - 'Endgames'.

See http://materialgeographies.wordpress.com/ for both archive of previous workshop content plus details of forthcoming event