Abstract:The final report in this series turns to focus on the emerging intersections between historical geography, archaeology and the law. Whilst staying attuned to the darkest of geographies emerging from the sub-field, this report turns its attention to the creative and critical ways in which the dead are being used to reveal past lives and worlds that have been destroyed and forgotten. Using soil and the archaeological imagination as a pivot, this report centres on the interweaving themes of fragile environments, … Show more
“…She reports on an array of studies that point to such uncertainty and are linked by a concern with ‘remains’ (‘legacies’, ‘spectres’, ‘ruins’ and ‘traces’ are her main synonyms). Such work reaches into ‘the darkest of geographies’, she continues, but is also animated by the ‘hope’ of pulling more propitious and redemptive geographies from the wreckage (McGeachan 2017: 351).…”
‘Doom’, ‘danger’ and ‘disregard’ are palpable sentiments in recent writing by historical geographers and give the subfield some decidedly political intonations. These three words have diverse, disquieting and expectant connotations and are tracked in this report through clusters of research on colonialism, racism, decolonisation, climate change, Earth history and political reaction and populism. This range of historical work within geography provokes more general questions about how the discipline, generally, sees itself today and at a time of profound uncertainty about the meaning and direction of history. At this time, it is easy to be despondent but vital to hope and work for change.
“…She reports on an array of studies that point to such uncertainty and are linked by a concern with ‘remains’ (‘legacies’, ‘spectres’, ‘ruins’ and ‘traces’ are her main synonyms). Such work reaches into ‘the darkest of geographies’, she continues, but is also animated by the ‘hope’ of pulling more propitious and redemptive geographies from the wreckage (McGeachan 2017: 351).…”
‘Doom’, ‘danger’ and ‘disregard’ are palpable sentiments in recent writing by historical geographers and give the subfield some decidedly political intonations. These three words have diverse, disquieting and expectant connotations and are tracked in this report through clusters of research on colonialism, racism, decolonisation, climate change, Earth history and political reaction and populism. This range of historical work within geography provokes more general questions about how the discipline, generally, sees itself today and at a time of profound uncertainty about the meaning and direction of history. At this time, it is easy to be despondent but vital to hope and work for change.
“…Crucially, post‐humanism does not ignore political questions regarding the production of knowledge but seeks to advance these concerns by foregrounding material situatedness and nonhuman powers or agencies. The individual pieces within this themed intervention speak more specifically to conversations emerging around particular research practices, including familiar visual (Brice, ; Lorimer, ; Parr, ; Zylinska, ) and archival methodologies (Gagen et al., ; Lorimer, ; McGeachan, ; Mills, ), to the more recent developments in sonic geographies (Gallagher & Prior, ; Kanngieser, ; Simpson, ), and the often overlooked processes of writing (though for exceptions see DeLyser & Hawkins, ; Boyd, ; Lorimer & Parr, ) and sensing (Ash, ; Paterson & Glass, ). Our approach is to pay particular attention to the ways post‐humanist thought can problematise and invigorate the practice of doing geographical research.…”
Post-humanist theories shaping contemporary geographic research have unsettled the privileged position of the "human" as a common reference to apprehend social life. This decentring of the human demands that we rethink our expectations of, and approaches to, methodological practice and the traditional distinctions made between the theoretical and the empirical. In this introduction and the following interventions, we explore how a material situatedness and attention to nonhuman agencies within post-humanist thought complement and extend existing methodological innovations within human geography. We do so with reference to a series of Masters workshopsa somewhat overlooked space of research-creationeach of which explored the implications of post-humanism on methodological practice. The introduction concludes with three key tenets that were followed in each of the individual workshops, and which set out an ethos for practising post-humanism more broadly. K E Y W O R D S experimentation, geographic method, Masters workshops, nonhuman intensities, post-humanist theory, theory/practice divide 1 | PRACTISING POST-HUMANISM: WHY NOW?Recently, there has been a push to explore more experimental orientations to the "doing" of research and to develop practices that problematise methodological assumptions pertaining to rigour, reliability, and representation within geography (Dowling et al., 2016(Dowling et al., , 2017(Dowling et al., , 2018Vannini, 2015;Whatmore, 2006). In this paper we contribute to these exciting debates by engaging with the way post-humanist theoretical innovations shaping contemporary human geography require us to rethink the empirical demands and methodological responsibilities of geographical research. In bringing the material and affective registers of social life to the fore, post-humanist theories have the potential to reconfigure our relation to research practices in ways that trouble the traditional distinction between the theoretical and the empirical. It is in this potential for capturing novel aspects of contemporary social and cultural life, in excess of human durations, that we situate our concern for the practice of post-humanism within human geography.Responding to the call to experiment methodologically, the turn to more-than-human geographies has done much to broaden the remit of contemporary research to include the agency of the nonhuman in shaping social life. As Bastian et al. (2016, p. 2) note, a key concern here is "to take nonhuman life, and the entanglements of human/nonhuman life seriously" in the production of geographical knowledge. This concern is precisely about the challenge of attending to diverse nonhuman agencies in ways that demand different approaches to the act of doing geographical research. In turning to the relationship between post-humanism and geographical research (Braun,
“…Part of a broader disciplinary concern with “how the past returns through haunting, spectres, ghosts and echoes” (McGeachan, , p. 5), recent focus on the affordances of industrial ruins in geography has caused some impassioned disagreement from scholars outside the discipline. Adopting some of the playful and subversive agendas of the UrBex movement, Edensor's (, ) work drew much attention to the industrial scars that continue to mark landscapes in the form of abandoned buildings.…”
Section: Reading Deindustrialized Landscapes and Materialities Of Memorymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Walkerdine () concludes Thus, to understand the present of [post‐industrial working‐class] communities we need to understand how that affective history shapes the present and how it is also contained in layers of meaning. (p. 702)Historical geographers are well positioned to contribute to the formulation of the “affective histories” of class and should look to the recent innovations currently taking place within the sub‐discipline, as well as more widely, that seek to re‐enact and reimagine the embodied and affective experiences and existences of people, in this case working‐class people and the workplaces and communities they lived (Bender, ; McGeachan, , ). As already noted, scholars of deindustrialization have already begun to shift focus toward the embodied impacts of deindustrialization through concerns of industrial injuries and disease and often evoke the affective intensities of ruination in terms such as loss, mourning, and alienation.…”
Section: The Importance Of History and Future Directionsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…seek to re-enact and reimagine the embodied and affective experiences and existences of people, in this case working-class people and the workplaces and communities they lived (Bender, 2010;McGeachan, 2018McGeachan, , 2017. As already noted, scholars of deindustrialization have already begun to shift focus toward the embodied impacts of deindustrialization through concerns of industrial injuries and disease and often evoke the affective intensities of ruination in terms such as loss, mourning, and alienation.…”
Section: The Importance Of History and Future Directionsmentioning
Sections of the post‐industrial working‐class have made a notable return to media and political discourses in the context of the rise of populism across Europe and the United States. These narratives, which exclude women and BAME working‐class people, suggests the (white, male) working‐class are angry and resentful of being left behind by increasingly globalized political economies, nostalgic for the industrial ordering of work, home, and community. It seems that the political and media establishment are, selectively, understanding what has long been realized by researchers of deindustrialization. In the first, this paper surveys and critiques recent discourses on the post‐industrial working‐classes. The paper then traces the development of industrial ruination as an interdisciplinary area of academic focus, highlighting the themes of memory and temporal factors that have come to dominate the literature. The next section reviews contestations surrounding the affordances of landscapes and industrial ruins for the analysis of memory and history. Finally, the paper proposes interrelated ways to advance future study which historical–cultural geographers are well placed to carry forward. Here, I call for greater attention toward the affective and embodied dimensions of classed experience and the intersectionalities of race and gender in working‐class subjectivities. Further, I suggest there is an imperative to a deeper understanding of constitutive “affective” histories to mediate enduring social inequalities and their political and socially divisive mobilizations.
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