Landscape Surgery hosts a number of reading groups, including the Collections and Encounter Reading Group, the Historical Geography Reading Group, and the Techno-Futures Reading Group.
Techno-Futures Reading Group
Academic year 2019/20
22nd Oct. Human-technology relations
Heidegger, M. (2010[1954]) ‘Question concerning technology’. In: Heidegger: basic writings, London: Routledge, pp. 213-238.
Simondon, G. (2018[1958]) ‘Introduction’. In: On the mode of existence of technical objects, Minneapolis: Univocal, pp. 9-18.
5th Nov. Cybernetics
Wiener, N. (1961) ‘Introduction’. In: Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine, Massachusetts: MIT Press, pp. 1-29.
Tiqqun (2015) The Cybernetic Hypothesis, Massachusetts: Semiotext(e). [section I and II]
19th Nov. Gender and technology
Plant, S. (1998) Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture, London: Fourth Estate, pp. 3-44.
Laboria Cuboniks (2018) Xenofeminism: a politics for alienation. https://www.laboriacuboniks.net/#firstPage
Collections and Encounter Reading Group
Academic year 2019/20
3 March 2020 — Lucie Carreau, Alison Clark, Alana Jelinek, Erna Lilje, and Nicholas Thomas’s edited collection Pacific Presences: Oceanic Art and European Museums (2018)
Academic year 2018/19
29 January 2019 — Elizabeth Rodini’s “Mobile Things: On the Origins and the Meanings of Levantine Objects in Early Modern Venice” (2018).
6 November 2018 — Margot Finn and Kate Smith’s edited collection The East India Company at Home: 1757–1857 (2018).
Academic year 2017/18
8 May 2018 — Lawrence Dritsas’s “From Lake Nyassa to Philadelphia: A Geography of the Zambesi Expedition, 1858–64” (2005) and Luke Keogh’s “The Wardian Case: Environmental Histories of a Box for Moving Plants” (forthcoming).
12 December 2017 — Kapil Raj’s “Networks of Knowledge, or Spaces of Circulation? The Birth of British Cartography in Colonial South Asia in the Late Eighteenth Century” (2017) and James A. Secord’s “Knowledge in Transit” (2004).
6 November 2017 — Nicholas Thomas’s The Return of Curiosity: What Museums are Good For in the 21st Century (2016).
Historical Geography Reading Group
Academic year 2016/17
6 December 2016 — Bethan Bide’s “Getting Close to Clothes: Fragmented Object Biographies from the Museum of London’s Fashion Collection” (2016, unpublished), Mariana Françozo’s “‘Dressed like an Amazon”: the Transatlantic Trajectory of a Red Feather Coat” (2012), Jody Joy’s “Reinvigorating Object Biography: Reproducing the Drama of Object Lives” (2009), Laura Peers’s “‘Ceremonies of Renewal’: Visits, Relationships and Healing in the Museum Space” (2013).
Academic year 2015/16
23 February 2016 — Daniela Bleichmar’s “Learning to Look: Visual Expertise across Art and Science in Eighteenth-Century France” (2012) and Janet Vertesi’s “Seeing like a Rover: Visualization, Embodiment, and Interaction on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission” (2012).
Academic year 2014/15
2 December 2014 — Denis Cosgrove’s “Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo Space Photographs” (1994) and Benjamin Lazier’s “Earthrise; or, the Globalization of the World Picture” (2011).
Academic year 2013/14
3 June 2014 — Adriana Craciun’s “The Franklin Relics in the Arctic Archive” (2014) and Sarah Mill’s “Cultural-Historical Geographies of the Archive: Fragments, Objects and Ghosts” (2013)
4 February 2014 — Chapters 15, 17, and 18 of David Harvey’s Paris, Capital of Modernity (2003).
3 December 2013 — Chapter 2 of Bruno Latour’s Pandora’s Hope (1999)
Academic year 2012/13
25 March 2013 — Christopher Pinney’s Photography and Anthropology (2011)
4 December 2012 — Ian Hacking’s The Taming of Chance (1990)
19 September 2012 — Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of a Plague Year (1722)
Academic year 2011/12
20 June 2012 — Laura Walls’ The Passage to Cosmos (2009)
27 March 2012 — Erik Mueggler’s The Paper Road (2011)
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