Cultural geographies of the future, or looking rosy and feeling blue

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 17, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 211-217

  Wylie, John ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EXETER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY; PSYCHOLOGY;

EID: 77951196000     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474474010363852     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. This conference, organized and curated by Heike Roms and Mike Pearson of the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, University of Aberystwyth, was the annual conference of the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council Landscape and Environment Programme. For further details, including details of participants and abstracts, and links to the programme as a whole see: http://www.landscape.ac.uk/2009conference.html
2. And further, with this in mind, although the 'in practice' section of this journal is an excellent and clearly very successful initiative, I would like to see the symbolic barrier currently bracketing it off from the 'proper' articles dissolved.
3. Again I am being a little UK-specific here. See, for example, D. Fuller and K. Askins, 'The discomforting rise of "public geographies": a "public" conversation', Antipode 39(4) (2007), pp. 579-601.
4. Mrs Kinpaisby, 'Taking stock of participatory geographies: envisioning the communiversity', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33(3) (2008), pp. 292-299.
5. Harriet Hawkins, Shelley Sacks, Ian Cook, Eleanor Rawling, Helen Griffiths, Di Swift, et al 'Organic public geographies: "making the connection"', Antipode, forthcoming.
6. For example, while I write this piece, an advert arrives via an email list for an ESRC-sponsored seminar series: '"Engaging geographies": geographies and policy'. One of the papers, by Danny Dorling, is entitled, 'Can we draw a road-map out of obscurity and irrelevance or would the world be better off without "Geographers"?'. I worry sometimes that prominent geographers who name elements of the discipline irrelevant are potentially creating a self-fulfilling prophecy - in that their arguments may be used in turn by governments and other sponsors seeking to cut funding to what they view as 'irrelevant' academic research.
7. I am referring here, amongst other things, to the 'REF' (Research Excellence Framework), due for implementation, I believe, in 2012 or 2013. Of course many may be entitled to observe that cultural geographers working in larger universities in the UK have had things fairly easy up until recently, given relatively benign economic conditions, and, crucially, the premium that the previous RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) regime placed upon certain types of published output, the putative effect this had on substantive research monographs notwithstanding.
8. See J. Derrida, '.that dangerous supplement.' in Of Grammatology (trans. G.C. Spivak) (Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1974) - and.
9. in my example I am also drawing explicitly on Royle's discussion/explanation of 'the supplement', see N. Royle, Derrida (London, Routledge, 2003).
10. I am thinking specifically here, for example, of another recent UK conference, sponsored by the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group of the RGS IBG, and held at the University of Brighton in January 2009. I was unfortunately unable to attend this event but it was evident from the promotional material and the call for papers that a certain tension between 'social' and 'cultural' had been identified as an issue to address and debate.
11. For example, C. Hamnett, 'Contemporary human geography: fiddling while Rome burns?', Geoforum 34(1) (2003), pp. 1-3.
12. Apologies to some Exeter colleagues for my recent surreptitious canvassing on this issue.
13. S. Whatmore, 'Materialist returns: practising cultural geography in and for a more-than-human world', cultural geographies 13(4) (2006), pp. 600-609.
14. See J. Wylie, 'Non-representational subjects?', in B. Anderson and P. Harrison, eds, Taking-place: geography and non-representational theory (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2010).
15. H. Lorimer, 'Cultural geography: the busyness of being "more-than-representational"', Progress in human geography 29(1) (2005), pp. 83-94.
16. From Peter Jackson's Maps of meaning (London, Routledge, 1989).
17. onwards, this would involve an extremely long list of books and papers, but in addition to Whatmore, 'Materialist returns', we could selectively mention: M. Rose, 'Gathering "dreams of presence": a project for the cultural landscape', Environment and planning D: society and space 24 (2006), pp. 537-554.
18. C. DeSilvey, 'Salvage memory: constellating material histories on a hardscrabble homestead', cultural geographies 14(3) (2007), pp. 401-424;
19. S. Harrison, S. Pile and N. Thrift, eds, Patterned ground: entanglements of nature and culture (London, Reaktion Books, 2004).
20. T. Ingold, 'Bindings against boundaries: entanglements of life in an open world', Environment and planning a 40(8) (2008), pp. 1796-1810.
21. W. Connolly, Neuropolitics: thinking, culture, speed (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
22. S. Daniels, 'Marxism, culture and the duplicity of landscape', in R. Peet and N. Thrift, eds, New models in geography, Vol.2 (London, Unwin Hyman, 1989).
23. D. Mitchell, 'There's no such thing as culture: towards a reconceptualisation of the idea of culture in geography', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 19 (1995), pp. 102-116.
24. I am grateful as ever for recent conversations with Paul Harrison, J.D. Dewsbury and Mitch Rose, via which this central issue has become clearer to me.