Non-representational theories Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This paper investigates the affective and performative aspects of the right to the city with a focus on the materialisation of this right, its corporeal coming into being. In elaborating the idea of an affective right to the city, I will refer to Judith Butler's performative theory of assembly, along with findings drawn from ethnographic research conducted among individuals experiencing homelessness in Melbourne, Australia. My research suggests that the materialisation of the right to the city is embodied in the social, material and affective occupation of urban spaces. This work reveals how the body's inhabitation of place, and the affordances of the material environment, mediate the performative expression of the right to the city. It also calls for a shift from a juridical conception of the right to the city to an affective one, more accommodating of the social and material contexts in which this right is enacted. I conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of this affective conception of rights for performative studies of homelessness in urban space.

- by
- •
- Homelessness, Gilles Deleuze, Assemblage Theory - Manuel De Landa, Affect (Cultural Theory)
- by Edward Swenson and +1
- •
- Semiotics, Anthropology, Thing Theory, Materiality (Anthropology)

Feminist geographers have criticized affective and non-representational geographies for not taking into account social differences. This paper brings feminist accounts of emotion and affect into dialogue with affective and non-representational geographies in order to develop a feminist more-than-representational geography. In a first step, three shared commitments of a non-representational research agenda are presented: (1) a focus on everyday practices and the body, (2) a focus on the unconsciousness, and (3) affect as a more-than-human force. In a second step, I summarize feminist geographies‘ critiques of non-representational geographies. Drawing on an ongoing research project on the transnational market of surrogacy, I then discuss the benefits and challenges of a more-than-representational agenda for geographical research.

- by Caro Schurr
- •
- Emotion, Feminist Theory, The Body, Mexico (Anthropology)

While retaining hierarchical structure externally, Artaud moved from representation to non-representative, purely physical but at the same time paradoxicaly metaphysical theatre. This research focuses on the concept of non-representative body - body-hieroglyph, dancing and screaming body - and its relationship to language. An ambiguous Artaud’s relationship with Wetern philosophical tradition is marked by his turning away from the ,,logos” which brings us to the authentical conception of a word as ,,mythos”.

The idea of ‘doing’ tourism anthropology is one that prompts reflection on a number of issues relating to this so-called sub-discipline, not least those that invites us to consider the merits of its negation: of ‘undoing’ some of the shibboleths that have attached themselves to the subject area. In this paper we argue the case for a critical re-evaluation of a discourse and state-of-the-art that is often re-drawn through recourse to the navigational tropes of ‘turn’ or ‘new directions’. While we are in no way suggesting that new analytical frameworks in the anthropological study of tourism should somehow be resisted, or that their ‘novelty’ precludes them from having intrinsic value and efficacy, couching debates in the language of ‘turns’ or ‘re-orientations’ can at times inhibit consideration of the benefits of consolidating, re-evaluating, or re-situating anthropological perspectives on tourism. Accordingly, there is a need to delineate more clearly a sense of intellectual lineage and methodological specificity, and to bring into sharper relief what it is that distinguishes (or aligns) the anthropology of tourism from (or with) perspectives developed in fields of cultural geography, for example, or business and marketing studies, disciplines that have all sought to claim purchase on ethnographic approaches to the study of tourism. The flipside of the ‘doing’ coin is the related problem of delineating what it is that constitutes the object of study itself: tourism and the tourist. (Un)doing tourism anthropology, therefore, also entails a process of ‘undoing’ the tourist: of paying greater recognition to the ways in which tourism mobilities converge, overlap, rub up against, or dissolve into the landscapes, spaces and everyday practices that anthropology more broadly has long set out to explore. Drawing on a lineage which, theoretically and ethnographically, encompasses developments in experiential and phenomenological anthropology, we argue that doing or undoing tourism anthropology is in part the practice of reinforcing the anthropos while at the same time looking critically askance at the category of ‘the tourist’.

- by Les Roberts and +1
- •
- Tourism Studies, Anthropology of Tourism, Tourism (Anthropology), Tourism and Culture (Anthropology of Tourism)

The task of studying the impact of social class on physical and mental health involves, among other things, the use of a conceptual toolbox that defines what social class is, establishes how to measure it, and sets criteria that help distinguish it from closely related concepts. One field that has recently witnessed a wealth of theoretical and conceptual research on social class is psychology, but geographers' and sociologists' attitude of diffidence toward this " positivistic " discipline has prevented them from taking advantage of this body of scholarship. This paper aims to highlight some of the most important developments in the psychological study of social class and social mobility that speak to the long-standing concerns of health geographers and sociologists with how social position, perceptions, social comparisons, and class-based identities impact health and well-being.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.11.037

- by Dragos Simandan
- •
- Critical Theory, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Medical Sociology

This article applies the multiscalar ‘staging mobilities’ framework from the emergent subfield of mobilities design to analyse an enduring European rail travel phenomenon, interrail. This discussion extends and contributes to tourism mobilities research. Second, the article enriches previous studies of rail travel, by exploring how interrail travel is embedded in, and (im)mobilised by socio-material environments and institutional design decisions. More precisely, it explores the affordances of three objects that shape interrail mobility: the interrail pass, the RailPlanner application and seat reservations. To reach these aims, the research design intertwines multi-sited ethnography, netnography, survey and interviews. The conclusion offers theoretical reflections pertaining to the role of mobilities designs and methodical hybrids in tourism mobilities research.

- by Szilvia Gyimóthy and +2
- •
- Cultural Geography, Mobility/Mobilities, Tourism mobilities, Material Culture Studies

The entry begins with a definition of geography and with a description of what the discipline shares with the other social sciences and what makes it distinctive among them. Terminological clarifications are provided with regard to the relationship between human geography and physical geography, and between human geography and urban geography. After a brief history and overview of human geography’s engagement with social theory, the entry offers a discussion of the politicization of contemporary human geography and of how this phenomenon is reflected in theory building and concept development.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118430873.est0464

- by Dragos Simandan
- •
- Critical Theory, Discourse Analysis, Landscape Ecology, Sociology

This paper draws out linkages between non-representational theory (NRT) and pragmatism. In doing so it sets NRT in a much wider, historical anti-representational movement. This should add momentum to its progress, and open up the considerable pragmatist and neo-pragmatist heritage as a resource for dealing with questions about methods, politics and ethics that NRT raises. Firstly I outline pragmatism and NRT to ground the discussion. Secondly the convergences between pragmatism, poststructuralism and the later work of Wittgenstein are considered. After that I go through a series of working principles which can underpin what is being termed anti-representational theory. These include; the primacy of life and action, pluralism, materiality/spatiality/temporality/relationality, anti-essentialism, creativity, collectivity, fallibilism, and disorder in method. I conclude by considering anti-representational knowledge production through radical incrementalism underpinned by witness and narrative.

The Tourist Gaze (Urry 1990, 2002) is one of the most discussed and cited tourism books (with about 4k citations on Google scholar). Whilst wide-ranging in scope, the book is known for the Foucault-inspired concept of the tourist gaze that brings out the fundamentally visual and image-saturated nature of tourism encounters. However, some recent literature has critiqued this notion of the 'tourist gaze' for reducing tourism to visual experiences-to sightseeing-and neglecting the other senses, bodily experiences and 'adventure'. The influential 'performance turn' (see Edensor, 1998; Coleman and Crang, 2002; Haldrup and Larsen, 2010 amongst others) within tourist studies suggests that the doings of tourism are physical or corporeal and not merely visual and it is necessary to regard 'performing' rather than 'gazing' as the dominant tourist research paradigm (Perkins and Thorns, 2001). Yet we argue here that there are in fact many similarities between the paradigms of gaze and of performance. They should 'dance together' rather than stare at each other at a distance. This paper rethinks the tourist gaze in the light of this performance turn and of a Goffmanian dramaturgical sociology by examining the embodied and multisensuous nature of gazing, as well as the complex social relations and fluid power geometries comprising performances of gazing. The Foucault-inspired notion of the tourist gaze can be enlivened, made more bodily

- by Jonas Larsen
- •
- Sociology, Geography, Tourism Studies, Tourist Behavior

Focusing on the efforts of Nairobi’s water utility to reduce leakage in the city’s expansion of water infrastructure, this study offers an organizational assemblage perspective on infrastructure. Drawing on the concept of assemblage and its uptake in science and technology studies and cultural anthropology, infrastructure is the material form of emergent systems through which the flow of nature, goods, ideas, people and finance is organized over space and time. Nairobi’s water infrastructure brings together a diverse set of features, including pipes, meters, GPS technologies, smartphones, engineering reports, Excel spreadsheets, landlords, plumbers, African chiefs, thieves, foreign experts, politicians, accountants, engineers, the everyday lives and ethnicities of the people of Nairobi, climate conditions, hydraulics, urban topographies and the fluids sludge and water.
Based on a thick performative description of three praxiographic studies, condensed from a four-year ethnographic case study that included eight months of onsite fieldwork in Nairobi, I describe the engagement of Nairobi’s water utility in three technoscientific practices of water leakage and loss management: measuring, tracking, and demarcating water flow and leakage. Through a creative non-fictional writing process, including ficto-critical storytelling, inspired by a postcolonial and feminist understanding in science and technology studies, I empirically and politically account for how a technoscientific intervention enacts the pacification, visibility, and formalization of infrastructure.
My practical ontology framework helps me to understand how the organizing of infrastructure enacts the recursive dynamic of ontological multiplicity and stabilizing, a key concern in assemblage thinking and actor-network-theory. This dynamic is not only experimental, but entangled in organizing practices of governing fluidity, managing invisibility, and operating messiness. I also give the uptake of the concept of assemblage thinking in the turn to infrastructure in social theory empirical depth. This study suggests an empirical and conceptual way forward for organizational research to deploy infrastructure thinking.

- by Tim Lehmann
- •
- Organizational Theory, Practice theory, Ethnography, Water

This paper offers new theoretical and empirical insights into the emotional and spiritual geographies of religion in therapeutic landscapes designated for marginal and vulnerable populations. Drawing on original empirical work conducted in a Pentecostal Christian therapeutic community in the UK working in the area of addiction and rehabilitation, this paper investigates the spiritual landscapes of Pentecostal worship, and considers the emotional, spiritual and therapeutic sensibilities residents attach to, and experience during, practices of worship and prayer. By examining the complex intersections between belief, embodiment and performativity of religious practice, I illustrate how the distinct patterning of worship space can differently open out, and close down, capacities and affective atmospheres of the divine. Attention is given to the different ways in which the residents experienced this worship space, and the extent to which their presence therein created a range of therapeutic - and anti-therapeutic - experiences. Drawing on these narratives, this paper argues how the contingent configuration of care/control might be seen as both constraining and empowering for residents, underlining the importance for geographers of religion to ground conceptualisations of the staging and performance of spiritual landscapes in the divergent sensibilities and ethics of engagement individuals bring to these sites

Myriad lines surround our day-to-day lives, exiting and entering our homes. Wires connect to electricity posts which power and heat our dwellings. Cables hook us to telephone and internet networks. Other lines stretch the world closer to us and our homes closer to the world: paved driveways link us with roads and highways, mains tap us into common water reserves and flow into municipal sewers, satellite beams reach into the atmosphere to download television signals into our living rooms. Together these lines—and possibly many others—constitute extensive and powerful webs of material and cultural significance in which our lives are suspended. These webs are the grids upon which society is pegged, the grids through which our material and social relations are entangled.
Not everyone, however, is reliant on these grids. People who—for a variety of motives—have spun alternative webs have come to know their lifestyle as “off-the-grid.” Off-the-grid dwelling refers to ways of living marked by disconnection from the infrastructural assemblages (or grids) that provide societies with the potential for power, light, and speed.
Grids of light, speed, and power can make our life comfortable and convenient but they are also troublesome companions. Grids deeply shape social relations and entrench them in differential access to power. In light of this, off-the-grid dwelling has recently emerged as an oppositional (but often negotiated and contradictory) everyday life practice. By delinking from one or more grids, an individual, group, or community needs to reinvent a different way of life and practice a different way of living.
Couched in cultural studies, cultural geography, and cultural sociology, this book aims to uncover the day-to-day practice off-grid living across Canada in order to understand why and how a person or community chooses to live off-grid; how off-the-grid dwellers cope with a world increasingly governed by the grid logic of light, power, and speed; what distinguishes off-grid dwellers' technologies and material cultures; how they accomplish comfort and convenience in their everyday life; and in what ways off-the-grid dwelling constitutes a sustainable, environmentally and culturally, lifestyle practice. In order to document the diversity of ways of life off-the-grid, the book unfolds as a series of ethnographic narratives focusing on individuals and groups who dwell in households and/or communities removed from roads, electricity, sewage, garbage collection, natural gas pipelines, water mains, telephone, internet, and television.
In addition to shedding light on off-grid lifestyles, however, this book prompts us to reflect on often taken-for-granted aspects of modern living. It aims to shows us what it means and what resources it takes to do the things we do every day: from bathing and washing and cleaning to cooking and refrigerating, from heating to cooling, from growing and hunting food to disposing of it in garbage cans and toilets, from switching on the light to flicking on appliances.

- by Phillip Vannini
- •
- Sociology, Cultural Studies, Human Geography, Canadian Studies

The automotive world is evolving. Ten years ago Nigel Thrift (2004: 41) made the claim that the experience of driving was slipping into our 'technological unconscious'. Only recently the New York Times suggested that with the rise of automated driving, standalone navigation tools as we know them would cease to exist, instead being 'fully absorbed into the machine' (Fisher, 2013). But in order to bridge the gap between past and future driving worlds, another technological evolution is emerging. This short, critical piece charts the rise
of what has been called 'social navigation' in the industry; the development of digital mapping platforms designed to foster automotive sociality. It makes two provisional points. Firstly, that 'ludic' conceptualisations can shed light on the ongoing reconfiguration of
drivers, vehicles, roads and technological aids such as touch-screen satellite navigation platforms. And secondly, that as a result of this, there is a coming-into-being of a new kind of driving politics; a 'casual politicking' centred on an engagement with digital interfaces. We explicate both by turning our attention towards Waze; a social navigation application that encourages users to interact with various driving dynamics.

- by Alex Gekker
- •
- Mobility/Mobilities, Actor Network Theory, Driving, Maps and Society

My book review of Tim Ingold's Being Alive, Ways of Walking, and Redrawing Anthropology

- by Phillip Vannini
- •
- Cultural Geography, Perception, Mobility/Mobilities, Anthropology of Knowledge

This is nominally a book review of Hutto and Myin’s Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds Without Content (The MIT Press, 2013). But it is a narrowly focused and highly prejudicial review, which presents an analysis of a contradiction at the heart of the book. Radicalizing Enactivism is a powerful and original philosophical argument against representations in cognition, but it repeatedly endorses an old-fashioned representationalism about language. I show that this contradiction arises from the authors’ unexamined, reflexive adoption of traditional linguistic concepts and terminology, which presuppose a representational interpretation of linguistic capacities and phenomena. The key piece of evidence for this analyses is the separability of Hutto and Myin’s substantive remarks on the ontogeny of language-dependent cognitive capacities, which they explain in terms of scaffolding and decoupling, from the representational gloss on those remarks that they present as if it were simply identical with observed empirical matters of fact. They follow a model laid out in Hutto’s earlier work, in which everyday linguistic activity is understood as instantiating abstract public vehicles with representational content (i.e., sentences which express propositions). I argue that this model is susceptible both to pre-existing arguments against representational theories of language and to a variant of their own ‘Hard Problem of Content’. The take-away lesson from Radicalizing Enactivism is that anti-representationalist accounts of language remain unconvincing - even to radicals like Hutto and Myin - because they have no way of explaining the phenomenal experience of literate speakers, wherein words really do feel like instantiations of abstract forms with determinable semantics. I suggest that anti-representationalists can address this by focusing on the ways in which patterns of attention become stabilized and interpersonally regularized as we learn language.

- by Matthew Isaac Harvey
- •
- Semiotics, Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy Of Language

This paper critically reviews the current status of the concept of distance in human geography in order to argue that recent experimentally-driven work in construal-level theory offers ample opportunities for recasting distance as a key geographical trope. After analysing the four entangled dimensions of distance revealed by construal-level theory (spatial distance; temporal distance; social distance; and hypothetical distance), the paper articulates this research program from experimental psychology with geographical work on non-representational theory, geographical imaginations/imaginative geographies, learning as a geographical process, TimeSpace theorizing, and ontogenetic understandings of space. It is argued that the subjective understanding of distance afforded by construal-level theory can rescue distance from its entrenched association with positivistic geography and spatial analysis. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.07.018

- by Dragos Simandan
- •
- Fiction Writing, Critical Theory, American Literature, Organizational Behavior

Recent social theory that stresses the ‘nonrepresentational’, the ‘more-than visual’,
and the relationship between affect and sensation have tended to assume some
kind of break or rupture from historical antecedents. Especially since the contributions of Crary and Jay in the 1990s, when it comes to perceiving the built
environment, the complexities of sensation have been partially obscured by the
dominance of a static model of vision as the principal organizing modality. This
article returns to some prior historical articulations of the significance of motility in
perception, retracing pathways across art history, architectural theory and the
history of neuroscience to argue for an alternative model based on the movement
of the eye. Along with subsystems that deal with balance and orientation, I offer
parallels between spatial motifs of the interior spaces of the body – labyrinths,
vestibules, chambers – and those in artefacts and the built environment that
contribute to the heightened physicality of the oculomotor subject.

- by Mark Paterson
- •
- History of the Senses, Haptics, Architectural Theory, Non-representational theory
- by Arturo Sanchez Sanz
- •
- Religion, History, Ancient History, Cultural History
- by Simon Ferdinand
- •
- Cultural Studies, Geography, Cultural Geography, Visual Studies

When people talk about “common ground”, they invoke shared experiences, convictions, and emotions. In the language sciences, however, ‘common ground’ also has a technical sense. Many taking a representational view of language and cognition seek to explain that everyday feeling in terms of how isolated individuals “use” language to communicate. Autonomous cognitive agents are said to use words to communicate inner thoughts and experiences; in such a framework, ‘common ground’ describes a body of information that people allegedly share, hold common, and use to reason about how intentions have been made manifest. We object to this view, above all, because it leaves out mechanisms that demonstrably enable people to manage joint activities by doing things together. We present an alternative view of linguistic understanding on which appeal to inner representations is replaced by tracing language to synergetic coordination between biological agents who draw on wordings to act within cultural ecosystems. Crucially, human coordination depends on, not just bodies, but also salient patterns of articulatory movement (‘wordings’). These rich patterns function as non-local resources that, together with concerted bodily (and vocal) activity, serve to organize, regulate and coordinate both attention and the verbal and non-verbal activity that it gives rise to. Since wordings are normative, they can be used to develop skills for making cultural sense of environments and other peoples’ doings. On our view, the technical notion of common ground is an illusion, because appeal to representations blinds theorists to bodily activity and the role of experience. Turning away from how wordings influence the circumstances, skills, and bodily coordination on which interpersonal understanding depends, it makes premature appeal to reasoning and internally represented knowledge. We conclude that outside its vague everyday sense, the concept of common ground is a notion that the language sciences would be well advised to abandon.

- by Stephen J. Cowley and +1
- •
- Semiotics, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Mind

TV series are increasingly popular media and thus strong carrier for ideology. This thesis analyses the TV series Grimm which is inspired by the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. The dominant ideology in Grimm is an ideology of difference: the American self is established by contrasting it to an opposite. The unknown cultural values of this other fuel the fear of the different other. This is expressed through supernatural beings called "Wesen" which occur in the series and symbolize negative personality traits which are in addition connected with other cultures. More specifically, many characters are depicted as German and Austrian. Therefore, the most common German and Austrian stereotypes will be categorized in this thesis. Also, the thesis investigates how the German language is used to stress this difference. Last, mythological creatures in the series will be compared to the ones described by the Brothers Grimm and it will be analyzed if they hold stereotypes of races and cultures, gender and social classes.

What if there is no God out there, but a divine creativity down here? Through philosophers Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, Mysticism as Revolt explores faith without the transcendent God of Christian orthodoxy. Foucault and Deleuze address some of the most frequently debated issues in contemporary theology; their thoughts on representation, however, deserve an exhaustive exploration. The author allows the most anti-religious aspects of Foucault’s and Deleuze’s thinking to encounter Christian theology, and examines what Christian theology could be without the oppressive features of representational logic, suggesting that contemporary theology should perhaps not leave its metaphysics behind but understand its task differently. A “post-representational theology” would note the creative force of form, dogma, truths, authorities, eternal gestures and church buildings, but it would not believe in their final power. A post- representational perspective, the author argues, could open up a playful yet serious form of Christian resistance: mysticism as revolt. To repeat, parody and play with whatever comes to the fore as eternal, or as the truth of concrete experience – both when reading and when doing theology – in order to make room negatively for those realities, actual but unknown, unthinkable yet possible, that no language could ever capture. Mysticism as Revolt contains unique analyses of Thomas Altizer, Graham Ward, and Katherine Keller and introduces the theology of Emilia Fogelklou for an English-speaking audience.

"Non-representational theory (or as it is sometimes referred to, “more-than-representational” theory) is one of the contemporary moment’s most influential theoretical perspectives within social and cultural theory.
And yet, it is often poorly understood. This is in part because of its complexity, but in large part also because of its limited treatment in few volumes chiefly dedicated to it. Indeed anyone wishing to better understand non-representational theory today has limited choices and is therefore left with a lot of interrogatives. Amongst the most important questions left unanswered are questions of method. All social and cultural theories—if they are to be proven useful—need to be applicable to the scopes of data analysis and representation. In other words, theories must be useful to researchers keen on utilizing concepts and analytical frames for their personal interpretive purposes. How useful non-representational theory is, in this sense, is yet to be understood. This book tackles this very subject and outlines a variety of ways in which non-representational ideas can influence the research process, the very value of empirical research, the nature of data, the political value of data and evidence, the methods of research, the very notion of method, and the styles, genres, and media of research.
"

This thesis develops an alternative, 'Spinozist', framework for describing and explaining cognition, which combines a philosophical perspective rooted in the existential phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty with a number of anti-establishment developments that are currently taking place within cognitive science.
In order to make clear in what ways there is question of an alternative approach, I start by making clear how the orthodoxy within cognitive science can be said to be Cartesian. Of the many Cartesian features that are rejected by the Spinozist, some of the more remarkable ones are
the notions of mind as inner and world as ready-made, epiphenomenalism, the search for cognitive mechanisms (most particularly that of cognition as the manipulation of mental representations).
After setting out the general principles of Spinozism—such as the taking seriously of experience and the body—I turn to a detailed discussion of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. Although in the first instance Merleau-Ponty occupies himself with human existence, from his work a philosophy of the living body can be extracted which is a philosophy of perception and behaviour, of cognition. This philosophy is shown to be applicable to a number of existing fields, such as autopoietic theory, the dynamical approach to cognition and behaviour based robotics, on condition that they leave behind all remaining Cartesian features.
Compared to orthodox cognitive science, several changes are required with respect to the way in which cognition is explained. I propose to adopt an ethological way of explaining behaviour by answering, with two changes: first, to add a fifth, phenomenological question, to the four traditional 'Tinbergen questions' and, second, to replace the question of causation by that of enabling mechanism.
I illustrate the fertility of the Spinozist approach by expanding on a number of themes, among which the question how more abstract modes of cognition can be possible without internal representations of the world.

- by Ronald Lemmen
- •
- Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence, Embodiment, Artificial Life

This is my review of Thrift's 2007 book.

- by Phillip Vannini
- •
- Non-representational theories, Symbolic Interactionism

The logic of representation that underpins most (if not all) photography theories, considers photography as a recording of space and this is done at the expense of those aspects of photography that relate directly to temporality and duration. The automatic privileging of space over time has some significant consequences for the ability of photography to respond to political, social and cultural change, not least because national capitalism is gradually being replaced by intensive, interactive and networked model that operates not according to the spatial logic of borders, territories and classes but according to a new logic that creates sites of intensity in which identity and the legal status of persons is thrown into question (online chat rooms and privately owned public spaces such as Canary Wharf are prime examples). As photography is the dominant form of visual communication everywhere, its inability to represent the changing landscape of citizenship and the reconfiguration of the ‘polis' into privately owned space without the possibility of political action, contributes to the absence of a critical discourse regarding the effects these changes have on people’s lives. In light of such dynamics, I end the chapter by outlining three strategies of photographic intervention that bypass representation and allow to engage directly and materially with the changes brought about by networked and computational technologies through the ability of the technical image to reflect on its own mode of production. These strategies are: erasure, self-replication and repetition. Taken together, these strategies make a case for photographic practice that is alert to its own mode of production and to the productive forces that shape our world.

- by Dr. Daniel Rubinstein
- •
- Photography, Digital Media, Digital Culture, Postmodernism

This paper argues that, in order to take place, space and scale more seriously in the study of our discipline, we have to complement the pervasive understanding of geography as a tradition of thought or an extended conversation with an understanding of our discipline as a tradition of practice, in which the main focus is on the becoming of geographers. It is argued that the theme of 'what it takes to be a good geographer' is a fertile way to study this process of becoming. The four main advantages of this approach are illustrated empirically in the body of the argument by the author's reflections on his socializing within two very different geographical traditions.

- by Dragos Simandan
- •
- Critical Theory, Environmental Engineering, Sociology, Social Theory

An artist and a geographer asked the same question: what is a zoological specimen and how can it be used? Considerable attention has been paid to the ‘finished’ form and display of taxidermy specimens inside cabinets, behind glass
– in other words to their representation. We challenge the priority given to representation by getting under the skin and behind-the-scenes to show how specimens have been entangled ‘in life’ as well as how we have creatively taken
part in their ‘afterlives’. These efforts are aligned with work in cultural geography seeking to counteract ‘deadening effects’ in an active world (Thrift and Dewsbury 2000), and stay alive to the ‘more-than-representational’ aspects of life (Lorimer 2005). The paper documents two of our experimental attempts to revive and
repair zoological specimens and collections, work which was underlain by observations of taxidermy practice. First we show how the creation of a ‘webarchive’ offered an expanded repertoire of interpretation and engagement for an
extremely rare zoological specimen. Secondly, we show how a temporary exhibition in a zoology museum highlighted the transformative potential of crossdisciplinary efforts to re-present zoological material.

- by Merle Patchett
- •
- Cultural Geography, Material Culture Studies, Animal Studies, Archives

This review examines debates situated at the intersection between heritage studies and geography, particularly those that revolve around more-than-representational theories. These theories, the review suggests, advance recent developments within the heritage field concerned with those senses of ‘the now’ so often left neglected by conventional understandings of heritage. The intellectual traditions underpinning this contribution draw primarily from the field of cultural geography, especially those that touch upon the tactile, experiential, aural, emotional and sonic. What this lends to the field of heritage studies is a vigorous and distinct way of conceptualising heritage in terms of the body, practice and performativity, together with an insistence that our engagements with it occur through a range of embodied dispositions and interactions. In other words, it insists that we, as heritage researchers, become more attentive to different possibilities for knowing and doing heritage: the ways in which it makes sense or answers back to a fuller range of people (after Thrift 2008).

This article builds upon emerging work on the geographies of sleep by turning to the sleep-hopeful body. More specifically, it attends to the methodological challenges posed by this work and the question of how spaces and states of sleep-hopefulness might be approached by geographers. Building on existing research on the geographies of biography, personal diaries are offered as a methodological avenue through which the sleep-hopeful body might be thought through. Two private diaries are used to discuss sleep as an affective process. The affective allows an opportunity for thinking sleepy bodies in relation to other non-human objects, things and forces. This opens up questions of how such processes can be known and recorded by the subject. These are held in relation to a wider discussion on the (un)knowing subject. The paper considers how diary entries might be used to get at the spaces and relations of sleep, between human and non-human bodies and the affective forces between them. The article concludes by considering what this approach and use of diaries brings to nascent geographies of sleep, and in turn, how attending to geographies of sleep might add to existing non-representational geographies.

- by Paul Ashmore
- •
- Affect (Cultural Theory), Non-representational theories, Travel Diaries, Sleep

In the last decade, postphenomenological landscape studies and cultural geographies of absence have brushed sides long enough for us to consider the roles of presence and absence in our understanding of landscape and our relation to it. This article extends these insights to the landscapes of cinema, drawing parallels between absence and the cartographic anxiety innate to both cinema and the geographic tradition. In so doing, this article shows how absence and the anxiety of loss inform our understanding of and emotional desire for geographic realism. To illustrate this point, the article analyzes the 1975 Academy Award–winning film, Dersu Uzala, directed by Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, as well as the conditions of the film’s production. Through the film’s diegesis and formal construction, we see that the performative act of conjuring the absent other through technological representations is an act that iteratively constitutes anew the self–other relation that is lost.

- by Laura Sharp
- •
- Cultural Studies, Social Theory, Emotion, Geography

We offer a free-flowing, reflective, creative ecology of narratives on 'voicing waters'. It draws upon a group of research projects, and longer running interests, in the research/writing trajectories of Owain as a cultural geographer, delving into various aspects of nature-society relations, Luci's artistic explorations of hidden waterways in her home city of Bristol (UK) and Antony's eco-creative research practice situated largely in diverse water landscapes. These interests, attuned to sensory experiences of water, intersected in a project called Towards Hydrocitizenship and in tidal landscapes of the Severn Estuary (UK). We also draw upon a participatory research project with non-humans, including workshops with trees and water conducted with a small group of artists and scholars-'in conversation with water'.

Taking as its starting point the spatiotemporal rhythms of landscapes of hyper-mobility and transit, this paper explores how the process of ‘marooning’ the self in a radically placeless (and depthless) space – in this instance a motorway traffic island on the M53 in the north west of England – can inform critical understandings and practices of ‘deep mapping’. Conceived of as an autoethnographic experiment – a performative expression of ‘islandness’ as an embodied spatial praxis – the research on which this paper draws revisits ideas set out in JG Ballard’s 1974 novel Concrete Island, although, unlike Ballard’s island Crusoe (and sans person Friday), the author’s residency was restricted to one day and night. The fieldwork, which combines methods of ‘digital capture’ (audio soundscapes, video, stills photography, and GPS tracking), takes the form of a rhythmanalytical (Lefebvre 2004) mapping of territory that can unequivocally be defined as ‘negative space’. Offering an oblique engagement with debates on ‘non places’ (Augé 1995) and spaces of mobility, the paper examines the capacity of non places/negative spaces to play host to the conditions whereby affects of place and dwelling can be harnessed and performatively transacted. The embodied rhythmicity of non places is thus interrogated from the vantage point of a constitutive negation of the negation of place. In this vein, the paper offers a reflexive examination of the spatial anthropology of negative space.

- by Les Roberts
- •
- Mobility/Mobilities, Space and Place, Embodiment, Anthropology of space