Affective Landscapes

Affective Landscapes

More information

  • Venue: University of Derby, Kedleston Road

  • Date: Friday 25 and Saturday 26 May 2012
  • Full conference fee £90 with postgraduate places available at £45.
University of Portsmouth

Friday 25 and Saturday 26 May 2012

Keynote Speakers

Kathleen Stewart, University of Texas Austin, author of Ordinary Affects (2007) and  A Space on the Side of the Road (1996)

Lecture title ' Worlding'

Ben Highmore, University of Sussex, author of Ordinary Lives, Studies in the Everyday (2011) and Everyday Life and Cultural Theory (2002)

Lecture title 'Playgrounds and Bombsites: New Brutalism's Affective Landscape'

About the conference

This conference seeks exciting disciplinary and transdisciplinary proposals from scholars working in fields such as cultural studies, literary studies, cultural politics/history, creative writing, film and media studies, area studies, photography, and fine art, interested in examining the different ways in which human beings respond and relate to, as well as debate and interact with landscape.

In 2009, the one-day symposium 'Land and Identity', held at the University of Derby, brought together a diverse body of academics to discuss themes and intersections across multiple areas of research interest. This follow-up event, hosted by the Identity, Conflict and Representation Research Centre at the University of Derby in collaboration with the Centre for Studies in Literature at the University of Portsmouth, aims to develop inter-disciplinary debates around the idea of 'Affective Landscapes'.

The conference has been inspired by the work of theorists whose ideas examine points of intersection between ordinary life and extraordinary encounters and exchanges with the world around us. It asks how do we 'feel', 'sense', 'know', 'cherish', 'memorise', 'imagine', 'dream', 'desire', or even 'fear' landscapes? How do its 'intensities' register, flow and circulate? What forms do we use to articulate, debate and record these affects?

In addition to the conference, delegates have the opportunity to include in their booking, a related film screening and panel discussion taking place at the QUAD Arts Centre in Derby. The film screening will be Kent Mackenzie's film The Exiles (1968) with an Introduction by Professor Neil Campbell. The film is a semi-documentary about 24 hours in the life of a group of re-located Native Americans in and around Bunker Hill, Los Angeles in the later 1950s. The film is a rich, textured portrayal of life on the streets and bars of mid century LA.

We are particularly interested in proposals examining the following:

  • psychogeography
  • critical regionalism
  • cultural politics of identity and landscapes
  • national identity
  • suburbia
  • edgelands
  • the rural/urban
  • responses to landscape by creative practitioners
  • phenomenology and landscape
  • the body in landscape
  • Ecocriticism
  • landscapes of trauma and memory
  • theories of affect and landscape

Please send proposals of not more than 250 words by Friday 16 December to Dr Christine Berberich christine.berberich@port.ac.uk.

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