Taking Place

Alternate Mondays, 17.15-19.00 in term time
CRASSH, Seminar room SG2, Ground floor
Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, CB3 9DT

Conveners

Beryl Pong  (Faculty of English)
Kavita Ramakrishnan  (Department of Geography)
Vidya Ravi  (Faculty of English)
Philip Sidney  (Faculty of English)
Elsa Treviño  (Centre of Latin American Studies)

Faculty Advisors

Professor Bill Adams (Department of Geography)
Dr Geoffrey Kantaris (Department of Spanish and Portuguese)
Dr Robert Macfarlane (Faculty of English)


What informs our experience of place?  What happens when
we—as scholars, readers, artists, citizens, ramblers—encounter a mountain range, a towpath, a slum, whether physically or on a screen or page?

At a time of growing awareness of the way humans and environments affect one another, ‘Taking Place’ explores the forces that constitute our relationship with place.  Bringing together scholars and creative practitioners from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, we aim to think with and through landscape as we elucidate the interactions between physical and human geographies, and creative, cultural and social practices.

Over a series of talks, panels, reading groups and field trips, the group adopts a wide-ranging approach that combines theoretical rigour with sensitive attention to the material conditions of different environments.  Bringing together fields as diverse as Literature, Geography, Social Anthropology, Land Economy, History, History of Art, Classics, and Architecture, and touching on subjects from natural disasters to walking to cartography, we will cover themes which include:


* the conjunctions and disjunctions between real and imagined locations
* the performance of place, and the reciprocity between landscape and its representation in literature and art
* how notions of place might travel, and the tensions between localism and transregionalism
* issues of belonging, and the forces behind the inclusion or exclusion of people from certain places 


For more information about the group, please visit their external website: http://takingplace.tumblr.com/
(CRASSH is not responsible for the content of external internet site)


 

Administrative contact: Esther Lamb (Grad/Fac Programme Manager)