Visuality/Materiality: Reviewing Theory, Method and Practice

Co-sponsored by SCGRG

At the Royal Institute for British Architects, London, 9th-11th July, 2009


Plenary Speakers: Professor Elizabeth Edwards, Professor Paul Frosh, Professor Jane Jacobs

Confirmed Speakers Include: Sean Cubitt (Melbourne); Mike Crang (Durham), Nirmal Puwar (Goldsmith’s); Marquard Smith (Westminster); Jacquie Burgess (University of East Anglia); Prof Mimi Sheller (Swarthmore), Ruth Panelli (UCL); Yoke-Sum Wong (Lancaster); Craig Campbell (Alberta); Mathias Broth (Linkoping University), Oskar Juhlin (Interactive Institute); Dean Sully (UCL); Anne-Marie Fortier (Lancaster); Anne cronin (Lancaster); Tim Dant (Lancaster); Teal Triggs (University of the Arts)


Visuality/Materiality attends to the relationship between the visual and the material as a way of approaching both the meaning of visual and its other aspects. The interrogation of image as sign, metaphor, and text has long dominated the realm of visual theory and analysis. But the material role of visual praxis in everyday landscapes of seeing has been an emergent area of visual research; visual design, urban visual practice, visual grammars and vocabularies of domestic spaces, including the formation and structuring of practices of living and political being, are critical to 21st century grammars of living. The relationship between Visuality/ Materiality here is about social meaning and practice; where identity, power, space, and geometries of seeing are approached here through a grounded approach to material technologies, design and visual research, everyday embodied seeing, labour, ethics and utility. This conference is aimed at providing a dialogic space where the nature and role of a contemporary visual theory and practice can be evaluated, in light of materiality, practice, the affective, performativity; and where the methodological encounter informs our intellectual critique. The organisers are keen to encourage contributions based on research experience and practice into specific aspects of visuality and visual critique including concern with:

· What is the relationship between materiality and the visuality?

· How do we develop new theoretical approaches to new visual practices?

· What can we learn from everyday visualities?

· How can we approach ethical practices through visual practices?

· How are theories of materiality, performance, embodiment employed in research on the visual?


REGISTRATION FORMS are at: http://www.geography.dur.ac.uk/conf/visualitymateriality

Geographies of Education

Click image for full sized flyer with details of conference registration

Brighton conference

Many thanks to David Bissell, Kath Browne and Darren Smith for organising a lively and very convivial conference at Brighton over Friday and Saturday. The conference attracted a good audience of around 45 delegates, including some from the US, Australia, and Germany, which allowed for some useful reflections on the status of social geography in different institutional contexts. The relationship between cultural geography and social geography was also addressed at length, with some varied views expressed about how the SCGRG can best serve the needs of a reinvigorated social geography whilst ensuring that it recognises the different traditions of cultural enquiry: whether we are seeing a 'social turn' in cultural geography, a 'spatial turn' in the social sciences or the resurgence of a welfare-led social geography was certainly a matter of debate. If there was any consensus emerging, it was around the idea that there is much good geographical work going on that talks to issues of urgent social and intellectual concern - so perhaps it matters not whether this is labelled social, cultural or socio-cultural!

So an excellent meeting, and as well as excellent position pieces (Uli Best, Linda Peak, Vinnie del Casino, Peter Hopkins, David Conraldson, Tim Cresswell) there were some nice papers that illustrated the variety and vitality of social and cultural research, plus some useful discussion groups on key themes in contemporary research. In due course, we hope to have some of the discussion written up in the journal Social and Cultural Geography.

For what it's worth, here is my introductory, contextual introduction, which was followed by a series of more nuanced presentations. Please leave any comments, thoughts!

Brighton conference

Programme for Brighton conference now confirmed: click on images for enlarged versions

3rd materialities workshop

The third workshop in the RGS(IBG) Social & Cultural Geography Research Group sponsored material geographies series will take place on Friday 13th March at the University of Exeter.

This workshop will explore ‘Material Geographies: interdisciplinary perspectives’ (a topic suggested during the last round of consultation) through invited talks by speakers with other disciplinary backgrounds, small group ‘hands-on’ discussions, and discussant comments by speakers who are now geographers but have brought into the discipline understandings of materiality from their previous lives as artists, curators, and more.

Confirmed speakers:
» Robert Foster (Anthropology, Rochester), author of ‘Tracking globalisation’ in Tilley, C. et al (ed) (2006) Handbook of material culture. London: Sage.
» Dan Hicks (Archaeology, Oxford), co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford handbook of material culture studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press (with Mary C. Beaudry).

Confirmed discussants:
» Nigel Clark (Geography, Open).
» Caitlin DeSilvey (Geography, Exeter).
» Kathryn Yusoff (Geography, Exeter)

This workshop will begin at 11am and finish at 4pm. Further details - including registration forms, accommodation lists, etc. - will soon be posted on the workshop website - http://materialgeographies.wordpress.com/ .

For those in the East Midlands? An invite to a private view of 'A sense of Belonging'

Private View: Friday 16th January between 5pm - 9pm
January 2009

Exhibition to explore refugees sense of belonging

An exciting new collaborative arts exhibition is to open at the Bonington Gallery in Nottingham in the new year.
Sense of Belonging will showcase the work of emerging exiled artists as well as work created out of participatory arts initiatives, and will explore the concept of belonging for refugees and asylum seekers in the East Midlands.
Using film, sculpture, mixed media textiles, painting, photography, music and performance the artists, both individually and collectively, synthesize issues of cultural identity, displacement, relationships to surroundings, personal reflections on the process of exile and belonging with a celebration of the rich cultural contributions refugees and asylum seekers bring to cities and communities.
The exhibition represents the perilous journeys people make to reach freedom both physically and emotionally, the places left behind and what makes people feel a sense of belonging a sense of being home away from home
The viewer is presented with a rare opportunity to witness the double consciousness of transnational belonging, where art may be used as a tool for social and political activism.
The exhibition includes contributions from visual artists Aria Ahmed, Jasim Ghafur and Thaer Ali; sculptors Obediar Madziva and Emmanuel Changunda; filmmaker and musician Gaylan Nazhad; and several community arts organisations Charnwood Arts in Loughborough; City Arts in Nottingham; Long Journey Home; and Soft-Touch Arts in Leicester.
The exhibition will be open from 9 to 30 January 2009, Mon- Friday from 10am to 5pm and Saturday 10th, 17th and 24th, 10am to 4pm.

CFP: Cosmetic cultures

Call for papers

Papers and panel sessions are invited for an international, interdisciplinary conference on Cosmetic
Cultures to be held in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Leeds from the 24
to 26 of June 2009.
Papers on any element of ‘cosmetic cultures’ are welcomed but the conference seeks to move beyond well-
rehearsed ‘Beauty Myth’ arguments. Beauty has often been conceptualised as the concern only of women (or the only concern of women!) and as idealised in ‘whiteness’or ‘Westerness’. Whilst many have found significant evidence to support these
claims, work in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies has already fl agged up the importance of men, masculinities and beauty, both in the ‘West’ and ‘East’ and has disrupted the idea that whiteness alone presents idealised beauty in all parts of the world, or even in this one. Whilst beauty ideals may be important in one sense, this conference also aims to explore beauty practices. The subject’s engagement in beauty practices may be ‘transformative’ in line with current ideals, and undertaken in the clinic, or it may be everyday and mundane, practices in the home or ‘salon’.

Themes will include:
• National beauty cultures and histories and the intersection between local and globalised ideals;
• Beauty practice ranging from ‘spectacular’ makeover cosmetic surgery to mundane beauty
technologies such as diet and exercise, skin tanning/ lightening, hairstyling, hair removal and
tattooing/piercing.
• Intersections of ‘race’, class, gender and beauty cultures and practices; men, masculinities and beauty;
• LGBI and Trans beauties; surgical tourism;
• TV makeover shows;
• Work in the ‘beauty industry’, including medical practices and cultures, beauty salons and cosmetics
marketing and manufacture as well as (fashion and glamour) modelling.

By encouraging participants to explore beauty cultures, practices and politics in their broadest sense we hope to advance current debates and develop an international network of researchers. Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

* Professor Carolyn Cooper - University of the West Indies
* Professor Kathy Davis - University of Utrecht
* Dr Debra Gimlin - University of Aberdeen
* Dr Meredith Jones - University of Technology, Sydney
* Professor Toby Miller - University of California, Riverside
* Professor Elspeth Probyn - University of Sydney

200 word abstracts and panel suggestions should be emailed to: Matthew Wilkinson at m.wilkinson@leeds.ac.uk no later than 1 March 2009. Please mark all emails with ‘Cosmetic Cultures’ in the subject line.

For further info, visit the conference website: http://www.wun.ac.uk/genderstudies/leeds_2009/main.html