The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 6,900 times in 2014. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.
Colectivo Zeta in a performance of ‘Anónimo Ser’, Quito 2013. Photo: author’s own
I’m Sofie, a fourth year PhD student at Royal Holloway, and I had the privilege of presenting some of my research at the last Landscape Surgery session of term. I talked about my work on the production of contemporary dance in Quito, Ecuador, and my interest in how the particular histories and geographies of the city get articulated and negotiated through dancing bodies. After returning from an extended period of ethnographic fieldwork in the summer, I’m currently working through a number of ideas as I try to get my material into shape, so the session was really helpful in thinking through a few of these!
To draw out some of the relationships between geography and dance, I began the session by discussing a draft Geography Compass paper I wrote earlier this year. Within the confines of the article, I wanted to try to take dance beyond its common use as a vehicle for the non-representation/more-than-representation debate to instead explore the complex coming together of the material, historical, and political in dance practice through a focus on its production at three intersections: the body; dance-spaces; and institutions and their networks. Here I wanted to think about the relationships of individual, creative, idiosyncratic dancing bodies to: their corporeal histories of training and performance; particular imaginaries of and relationships to space in practice; and the processes of creation, regulation, moderation, and innovation at work in institutionalised spaces and networks of production and exchange. In drawing out a few of these connections in the paper, I suggest that the geographies of dance involve both dancing bodies and the various spaces, sites, and networks that dance with and through them.
Wilson Pico in a performance of ‘Fervorosos Pasos’, Quito 2014. Photo: Andrea Cuesta
The intersection of bodies, dance-spaces and institutions is also important in my approach to the production of contemporary dance in Quito. During fieldwork my experiences as both an observer of and participant in the contemporary dance scene led me to explore the dynamics at work between diverse actors including independent artists and collectives, national dance companies, state and municipal government, theatres and cultural institutions, training schools, funding organisations and, of course, audiences, in the production of dance practice and their particular articulation in relation to the social and cultural context of the city.
A key part of this research has been thinking about the emergence of practice through dancing bodies. In the session I talked a bit about a chapter I’m working on at the moment, which focuses specifically on the material, bodily aspects of practice. Here I’m interested in the syncretic and negotiated construction of dancing bodies and how particular geographies of the national and international dance worlds might be implicated in this process in Quito. In the chapter I think about various threads of practice that run through contemporary dance in the city as ‘bodies’ that variously overlap and pull apart in different artists’ practice. In the session I illustrated three of these: the narrating body, the festive body, and the sensing body.
In the narrating body I consider the practice of dance-theatre in Quito and explore how certain artists work to shed their everyday bodies in order to inhabit others that narrate particular histories or social realities of the city. In the talk I looked particularly at Colectivo Zeta, an independent group whose works have explored themes of sexuality, gender, and domestic violence among others. I also talked about artists’ engagement with traditional practice in the exploration and experimentation of character and movement in ideas of the festive body, such as in Wilson Pico’s series of works Fervorosos Pasos, which explores characters from popular festivals. Lastly I considered ideas of the sensing body. Here I was interested in the ways practice emerges through intimate and spontaneous dialogue with the body’s own inner rhythms and those of surrounding bodies and spaces. This body has been explored in the work Cultivo de Babosas (Slug’s Garden), by Esteban Donoso and Fabian Barba, and in the work of the collective Movimiento Centrífuga, which focuses on the production of movement in conversation with urban textures of concrete, metal, wood and stone.
‘Entre Líneas de Acero y Mármol’, Fausto Espinosa (Movimiento Centrífuga), Quito 2013. Photo: author’s own
As I write, a number of questions are coming to the fore, including how to relate the nuances of practice and the diverse reality of the dance scene in Quito to the analytical imperatives that come with academic writing. Sharing my work with the group was a great help in thinking through some of these questions, so thank you to everyone who contributed with their very interesting ideas and comments!
Part of my work in Quito involved research into the production of traditional Afro-Ecuadorian dance, a range of practices that articulate very different geographies in the city to those of contemporary dance. I’m going to be posting another entry in the coming weeks that looks at an exchange between these two practices in Carapungo, a northern neighbourhood of Quito, that I organised in collaboration with the dancers Luzmila Bolaños, Tamia Guayasamin, and Tatiana Valencia as part of my fieldwork, so I look forward to talking some more about dancing bodies very soon!
Sofie
TERM 2
Tuesdays 14:00-16:00
11 Bedford Square, Bloomsbury, room F3
20 Jan. Mark Bicton and Harriet Hawkins
Writing Environmental Change – Participatory Practices
3 Feb. Pip Thornton
Language in the Age of Algorithmic Reproduction
17 Feb. George Vassiadis (RHUL Hellenic Institute)
Mapping Diasporas: Goad, Pervititch and the Survey of Egypt
3 Mar. Mike Duggan and Pippa Connolly
Dimensions of the Real and Virtual: Perspectives from an Artist
and a Geographer
17 Mar Katie Boxall, James Cutler, Ben Felderhof, Finn Fordham, Innes Keighren,
Miranda Ward
Texts in Place/Place in Texts*
TERM 3 please, note room change: Senate House SH264
5 May Miranda Ward
Bodies of Water
19 May Anthony Shelton (Director, Museum of Anthropology, UBC, Vancouver),
and Felix Driver
Exhibiting Culture
2 Jun First-year PhD presentations
* HARC-sponsored session
Regrettably, due to restrictions on space, participation in Landscape Surgery events is by invitation only.
Lone Twin, The Boat Project.www.theboatproject.com.
The next in the series of cultural and creative participation in place events happens on the 11th December (6- 7.30 pm, Katherine Worth Building, Studio 1 and 2, Drama Department, Egham, drinks to follow).
This event will focus on the artists’ labour in the course of creation and cultural participation. Professor David Williams will discuss his on-going collaboration with Lone Twin, particularly on The Boat Project, a living archive that is captured in a boat made of donated objects. http://www.theboatproject.com. There will also be two parallel sets of discussions of particularly practice-based projects, these will focus on a range of key questions, including: What are the politics of participation and the labours of cultural participation? How do questions of craft, skills and artistic vision play into these debates? What are the intersection between practice-based research methods and other arts, humanities and social science research methods? How do creative practices enable interventions into the politics of knowledge making and society more generally?
The programme:
6 pm Studio 2
Introduction and Welcome (Helen and Harriet)
David Williams, Professor of Performance Practices
LABOURS OF LOVE: LONE TWIN AND THE BOAT PROJECT
Focusing on The Boat Project, Lone Twin’s large-scale participatory project commissioned for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, David Williams (a long-term collaborator with Lone Twin) will describe the creation of an exquisite 30-foot sea-faring boat built from pieces of wood donated by people in south-east England. The presentation will touch on questions of encounter and exchange, collaborative co-creation, and a mapping of social histories and memory in the construction of this ‘floating archive’ – in particular, of a region’s relations with the sea.
6.30 Parallel Sessions
Studio 1: Chair: Harriet Hawkins
6.30 Jayne Lloyd Walking and Performance in dementia care
6.50 Chelsea Bruno Modular Synthesis Tuning Meditation and Cacophony
7.10 Siobhan O’Neill Tales from the Marsh
Studio 2: Chair: Helen Nicholson
6.30 Matt Smith Open and Closed Hands: The Applied Puppeteer as Meek Hero
6.50 Lucy Harrison Appropriating Technology: The use of hackable technology within composition and sound design
7.10 Nik Wakefield Immanent Encounters in the Lifeworks of Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša
7.30 Wine in Rehearsal Room B (ground floor)
Please do look at the abstracts. HARC Event 11th December
The event is sponsored by HARC @ RHUL and by Creativity Theme @RHUL
Job hunting…not really a task to bring joy to our hearts, but here is something to maybe make the task a little, little easier (every little helps!). Below is a compilation of some crit-geog forum posts and emails from Landscape Surgery friends around the world (thank you Mimi!) that include international websites and jisc-mail lists. There are also some advice blogs. Some of these have been circulated already but I thought it was worth collecting them together in a post.
good luck!!
UK
http://www.jobs.ac.uk/
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/
http://jobs.theguardian.com/
European Union
http://ec.europa.eu/research/mariecurieactions/apply-now/jobs-for-you/index_en.htm
http://www.jobsinacademia.net/Employment/ContactUs.aspx
http://ec.europa.eu/euraxess/index.cfm/jobs/index
Post-doc funding sites
Canada
http://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/funding-financement/programs-programmes/fellowships/postdoctoral-postdoctorale-eng.aspx
Denmark
http://ufm.dk/en/research-and-innovation/funding-programmes-for-research-and-innovation/guide-to-funding
Japan
http://www.jsps.go.jp/english/e-fellow/postdoctoral.html
Australia
http://www.unijobs.com.au/
http://www.seek.com.au
https://www.iag.org.au/communications/iag-list/
Canada
http://www.geog.uvic.ca/dept/cag/jobs.htm
http://oraweb.aucc.ca/pls/ua/ua_re
Japan
First point for most academic jobs https://jrecin.jst.go.jp/seek/SeekTop?ln=1
New Zealand
http://www.unijobs.co.nz/ (There seems to be lots of versions of these globally)
Norway
http://en.academicpositions.no/
US
http://www.higheredjobs.com
http://jobs.aag.org/home/index.cfm?site_id=15004
Global
Environmental sciences: http://www.aess.info/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_id=939971&module_id=167704
http://www.envirosoc.org/listserve.php
Climate change: http://disccrs.org/
Academic resources:
http://academicjobs.wikia.com/wiki/Geography_2014-2015 (Really helpful resource for finding out about jobs and if interviews/ references have been requested- although I did find out upon reading this that I hadn’t been shortlisted for a job as a word of warning).
http://academicjobs.wikia.com/wiki/Academic_Jobs_Wiki
http://www.regionalstudies.org/opportunities city and regional research vacancies
http://academicjobs.wikia.com/wiki/Geography_2014-2015
http://www.jobs.ac.uk/careers-advice/working-overseas/1192/applying-for-an-academic-job-in-the-us-differences-and-similarities/
http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2011/oct/19/academic-job-seeking-united-states
I was interviewed for a comment piece in the Guardian recently, which was published today. The article aims to describe the ways in which digital maps have changed the way we experience life in the city. Whilst not reflecting the entirety of my research, the piece does highlight some of my key findings so far: for instance how location-based services can be used to simplify the complexities of navigating the city, and what it is that digital maps do differently to paper maps in an urban context. I include the link below:
Mike Duggan (PhD Candidate)
At last week’s landscape surgery we (Ella and Mel) presented an early draft of a paper that forms part of a collaborative research project called “Precarious Geographies” (a podcast of the session can be found here).
The idea for this project emerged from discussions we had early on during the PhD about our research projects. Ella’s work is on temporality within pop-up culture and Mel’s work looks at the criminalisation of squatting and the impacts of coalition housing policy; so both of our work looks, in different ways, at precarious spaces in London, and in particular at the ways in which precarity is produced, experienced and resisted.
Within the project we are organising a workshop in London to be held on February 10th and three sessions at the AAG in Chicago in April next year. We are also writing a journal article which aims to provide a conceptual grounding for the expansion of the term ‘precarity’ into geographical studies.
The project starts from the premise that, while there is an established body of work on precariousness, such analysis is often focused on precariousness as a temporal phenomenon linked to uncertainty, and orientated towards studies of labour economies. There has been little substantial exploration in geography of the role of place in instigating, advancing and exploiting precarity, although the importance of considering place within precarity is evident; for example, in processes of gentrification, localism policy, and housing benefit caps. Such considerations are particularly pertinent at a time of austerity politics; which brings into focus questions around how far and in what ways everyday precarities are exacerbated and created via varying political and socio-economic mediums.
Following on from Judith Butler’s assertion that, while precariousness is common to all life, precarity is politically induced (2009) ‘Precarious Geographies’ seeks to understand the stratagems behind both the exploitation of precariousness, and the instigation of precarity.
In particular, we talked through the reciprocal ways in which subjects produce places and places produce subjects which/who are either precarious or are able to withstand or induce precarity. We then went on to discuss the ways in circulations of geographical representations can heighten or diminish visibility and in so doing can either reduce or increase precarity of place. Lastly we explored the ways in which precarity is inherently destructive and instrumental in the unmaking of places, but also holds the potential for remaking place – as precarity can also expose and illuminate structural injustices.
It was an early draft of our paper on precarious geographies which we presented at Landscape Surgery on November the 25th alongside a fascinating paper from Dr Mara Ferreri from the School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London. Mara’s work addresses temporary urbanism through an attention to the relationship between work and life precarity in the cultural and creative sectors and temporary occupations of vacant spaces in cities. In the paper, she drew on her doctoral research into community-oriented pop-up shops, as well as on more recent work into the phenomenon of ‘property guardianship’ (with the Property Guardian Research Collective) and into the grass-root interim uses strategies in and around the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, to discuss the emergence of policy mechanisms and cultural formations around the phantasy of flexible urban living. Precarity of place can be seen as a coping strategy and a mode of acting for individuals and groups increasingly subjected to – and encouraged to embrace – dynamics of labour and life uncertainty.
We had wanted to present and circulate our paper in order to receive feedback on this early version as we are looking to eventually publish the article in a peer reviewed journal. We found the presentation very useful (albeit a little intense!) and have been left with plenty of food for thought as we work towards a redraft, particularly in defining the particular purchase of precarity as a term in contrast to other expressions of marginality, informality, vulnerability and victimhood. Thanks to everyone who gave us such constructive and critical feedback, the comments we received from you all were invaluable to improving our work and progressing our project.
We’ll shortly be circulating further information about our upcoming workshop. We have confirmed our keynote speakers; James Rhodes from the sociology department at Manchester University, who will be discussing urban decline in the US rust belt, and Louise Waite and Hannah Lewis from the Geography department at Leeds, who will be discussing their recent ESRC-funded project ‘Precarious Lives’. In the meantime, please do get in touch if you’re interested in presenting a short paper as part of the workshop. We look forward to seeing you all there!
By Ella Harris, Mel Nowicki and Mara Ferreri
Landscape Surgery 