Though geographers have remarked on the aesthetic and political character of a technoscientific biology, there has been an accompanying tendency, following disciplinary trends and social theory more broadly, to read these as being separate issues at the analytic as well as substantive level. Whereas the former becomes read as a matter of artistic practice and appreciation, or visual appraisal, the latter is considered to be the exercise of power through discipline and regulation. Here, I draw upon Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics (2007, Continuum, London) to make a stronger claim for the role of the aesthetic, wherein a political regime is understood to be comprised of a ‘distribution of the sensible’ that orders what can be seen and what can be said about it, that determines who has the ability to see and to speak, that organises the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time, and that locates the identity of the quick and the dead within a grid of intelligibility. Political struggle is necessarily aesthetic insofar as it is an attempt to reconfigure the place not only of particular groups, but also the social order within which they are embedded. For Rancière, artistic practices are but particular ways of making and doing; they can have a distinctly political function, however, in the way that they reorder the relations among spaces and times, subjects and objects. To animate this discussion I draw on examples from critical BioArt that address the more‐than‐human world of Semi‐Living Objects. From overt manifesto to ironic commentary, the practices, understandings and artefacts that comprise BioArt work to challenge the political, economic, cultural and ethical contexts within which a modern‐day technoscientific biology operates.

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Dixon DP, Straughan ER.(2010). Geographies of Touch/Touched by Geography. Geography Compass, 4(5),449-459.Considerable attention within geography has been paid to the physiologies, knowledges and practices that give substance and import to the senses ? sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch ? and the manner in which these work alone, or in concert, to facilitate particular forms of relations between and amongst people, other life forms and objects. This article takes stock of the manner in which touch has entered into these debates and in particular of recent efforts to place touch, touching and being touched within non-essentialist, human geographic analyses. In doing so it draws attention, first, to studies that have used ?non? or ?more than? representational theory to emphasise the role of pathic, or precognitive, experiences of place in the production of proximal forms of knowledge and second, to work that explores the inter-play between the ?interior? psychologies of intimacy and indifference, acceptance and alienation (i.e. feelings of being in/losing/being out of touch) and the ?exterior,? corporeal work of texture and friction, push and feel. We conclude by calling for more critical attention to the work of touch in constructing scaled geographies and the recognition of legal and jurisdictional geographies in determining where, when and how touching takes place, the designation of touching as ?good? or ?bad? and the imposition of penalties in response to touch.Peer reviewe

Can we reconfigure recent work on topological space, so productively brought to bear in an understanding of power in geography, to understand the spatialities of and among flesh, objects and viral life? Here we expand on topology via touch -a 'tactile topology' -that focuses on the material connections among mobile bodies. The engine of topological transformation thus becomes the various materials and forces that grab onto each other, interpenetrating and reassembling at various speeds and intensities, such that diverse proximities and distances, contacts and connections, are made and remade. Grounding our argument via a reading of Steven Soderbergh's 2011 film, Contagion, which tracks the virulent outbreak of a largely fatal zoonotic disease, we speculate on what a tactile topology might feel like, and in particular on what touch implies for the concept of topology.

Da die Geographie des Films mittlerweile erwachsen geworden ist, ist es an der Zeit, nicht mehr nur fachspezifische Fragen zu erörtern, sondern bestehende theoretische Grenzen auszuweiten. Geographischem Interesse für das Thema Film fehlt häufig die notwendige kritische Perspektive; Hauptaugenmerk liegt bislang auf dem geographischen Realismus der Filme und weniger auf der Art und Weise, wie diese Bedeutung erzeugen. Geographen sollten durch den Einsatz räumlicher Theorien Einblicke erarbeiten, die über die reine Repräsentation filmischen Raums hinausreicht und vielmehr materielle Niederschläge lebensweltlicher Erfahrung und alltägliche soziale Praktiken in den Fokus rücken. Mit diesem Essay fordern wir mehr kritische Filmgeographien. Indem wir dieser Forderung nachkommen, beobachten wir, wie eine Reihe traditioneller und auftauchender geographischer Betätigungsfelder-Landschaft, Raum/Räumlichkeiten, Mobilität, Maßstab und Netzwerke-neu bewertet werden müssen und auf diese Weise nicht nur Disziplingrenzen der Geographie ausweiten, sondern auch die der Filmwissenschaften. Summary: To the extent that the geographic study of film has come of age, it is important to not only tie it to disciplinary issues but also to push theoretical boundaries. Geographic concern is often lacking a critical perspective, focusing primarily on the geographic realism of films rather than how they produce meaning. Geographers needed to elaborate insights through critical spatial theories, so that our studies are not only about filmic representations of space but are also about the material conditions of lived experience and everyday social practices. With this essay, we argue for more critical film geographies. In doing so, we note how a series of traditional and emergent geographic 'primitives'-landscapes, spaces/spatialities, mobilities, scales and networks-are reappraised and push disciplinary boundaries for geography and film studies in general.