cultural geographies

This paper argues that we need to challenge transcendent modes of evaluating creative practices in geography, both in order to question dominant ways of thinking about creativity and to cultivate a broader playing field on which to transform concepts and practices of aesthetics. This is important because the intervention of creative research must be coupled with a framework that can amplify it and make it count thereafter, or we risk returning to a familiar conceptual apparatus over the greater challenge of developing how creative practices make us think differently. In doing so, the paper presents five propositions for immanent evaluation elaborated through Gilles Deleuze, which are crucial for exploring a plurality of ‘aesthetic justifications’. Empirically, the paper draws on an exhibition entitled Sounding the City, which the author curated in Bristol, UK, in August 2014. The aim is not to explore the politics of curation, but to experiment with a mode of presenting research that supports the propositions for evaluation staged in the paper.

What can memes teach us about shifting popular-cultural understandings of nature? While a certain form of environmentalism with proclivities for dour, self-righteous, sentimental, or apocalyptic tones is often taken to be hegemonic, Nicole Seymour argues that a more irreverent ‘low environmental culture’ should not be occluded. Humor and irony can serve as emotional registers for environmental media that provide openings for the emergence of playful environmentalisms perhaps more amenable to a diverse audience. Such ‘bad environmentalism’ mobilizes humor by transgressing the emotional norms of piety within environmentalism. This article deepens the concept of bad environmentalism through an examination of the emergence of ‘nature is healing’ memes during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Implicitly critical of nefarious arguments that the death-dealing pandemic would provide a ‘pause for nature’ and thus that ‘humans were the real virus’, the formal and easily reproduced ‘nature is healing’ genre subverts conventional understandings of ‘the natural’ as well as the naturalization of social order and political economy. In particular, I extend Seymour’s argument – and pop cultural studies of the environment – by parsing five modes through which the ‘nature is healing’ genre plays ironically on differing understandings of the natural. These are the out-of-place in nature; nature out-of-place; drawing attention to a naturalized social order; naturalizing social transformation; and absurdity in the natural world. Close attention to different modes of humor provides insight into the ambivalence of affect within ecological and political movements; ‘bad affect’ can, after all, produce careful and critical aesthetics. Such research demonstrates the utility of a widened and potentially counterhegemonic repertoire of affective responses to environmental and political crisis.

The Anthropocene problematic calls for imaginative aesthetic experiments fostering more-than-human thought and sensibilities. In this thought experiment, I draw on a sensing device in conjuring a thermal imaginary that decenters the human, espying a glimpse of a strange and uncanny world-without-us. The imaginary is a speculative performance in elemental attunement – becoming-molecular, becoming-imperceptible in the generative potentia of planetary heat – opening a pathway in rethinking bodies and worlds as emergent in, and through, forces elemental and cosmic in scope. The thermal imaginary accentuates the elemental as exorbitant, anonymous, and nonpossessable, an earthly plenum beyond any final capture, possession, mastery and control. Elemental alterity, the very strangeness of the earth, rises in the thermal imaginary as a summons, a calling from the “outside,” gesturing toward an immanent ethics of radical openness working in, and through, earthly bodies always already exposed and vulnerable in the force of the elemental. We must be open to the elemental summons, expanding capacities for what a body can do, moving beyond spinning reductive and redemptive Anthropocene narratives for saving this world. There can be no new bodies and worlds to come in the absence of an elemental ethics worthy of the earth itself.

In this article we critique resilience’s oft-celebrated overcoming of modern liberal frameworks. We bring work on resilience in geography and cognate fields into conversation with explorations of the ‘asymmetrical Anthropocene’, an emerging body of thought which emphasizes human-nonhuman relational asymmetry. Despite their resonances, there has been little engagement between these two responses to the human/world binary. This is important for changing the terms of the policy debate: engaging resilience through the asymmetrical Anthropocene framing shines a different light upon policy discourses of adaptive management, locating resilience as a continuation of modernity’s anthropocentric will-to-govern. From this vantage point, resilience is problematic, neglecting the powers of nonhuman worlds that are not accessible or appropriable for governmental use. However, this is not necessarily grounds for pessimism. To conclude, we argue that human political agency is even more vital in an indeterminate world.

The aim of this article is to demonstrate that some pertinent questions posed by diverse forms of more-than-human geographies can be explored innovatively and imaginatively by an encounter with Michel Serres’ philosophy. I explore some central ideas that run through more-than-human geographies, with a particular emphasis on those generated by feminist new materialists and decolonial thought. A snapshot of three potentially productive encounters with Serres’ investigations is explored: the audacious alignment of modern physics with Lucretian atomism; a non-representational philosophy of sensations that teases out the intimate relations between the body and thought; and diverse lessons from recent discoveries in science of the commonality of all living and inert matter. I argue that all three contribute to a philosophy that increasingly turns towards the formation of a decentred universal humanism. To clarify Serres’ distinctiveness, I contrast the latter with those who advocate a decolonial pluriversality. Overall, I indicate ways in which Serres’ thought confirms and challenges more-than-human approaches to geography and discloses inventive trajectories of thought.

In response to State violence during the so-called ‘Chilean social explosion’ [estallido social], the Valparaíso Coordinator of Cultural Action [Coordinadora acción cultural Valparaíso] (CAC) in collaboration with other cultural groups of Valparaíso as well as other artists who spontaneously improvised during the performance organized on 31 October 2019 an ‘artistic candlelight vigil for human rights’ that passed through the center of the Chilean coastal town of Valparaíso, one ostensible effect of which was to rewrite the affective geography of Valparaíso in response to the violence that had erupted in the city during the 2 weeks prior. This article examines the relationship between this candlelight vigil, the revolutionary autonomist foundations of the Chilean social explosion, and the affective geography of Valparaíso, in addition to developing a broader theorization of the relationship between narrative, revolution, the politics of autonomy, and affective geography through this analysis. In the end, this article makes a double intervention: (1) The ‘artistic candlelight vigil’ in Valparaíso on 31 October 2019 memorializing the victims of State violence was an effective catharsis of the discordant affects held by Chilean protestors during the social explosion. (2) This example of catharsis demonstrates a new resolution to the relationship between narrative, revolution, and affective geography by proposing that art can work through the discordant affects of a polity in order to arrive at an autonomous urban communality from below.

Studying buildings can be a rich entry point into emerging cultural geographies. The archipelago of Chiloé in southern Chile is experiencing rapid change since the country’s extreme turn toward neoliberal governance in the 1970s. Once a rural, communal, and sea-faring region, it has been transformed by industrial aquaculture in recent decades which has driven a new urban landscapes and consumer-oriented lifestyles. This paper offers findings from an ethnographic study of changing consumption geographies, from iconic tourist sites linked to the region’s rich heritage geographies, to the new corporate retailers and shopping malls. Specifically, the new shopping mall clashes with the heritage and tourist landscape of colonial era churches and other unique heritage architectures that have captured the attention of tourists and investors. We glimpse a dynamic architectural geography in flux, as an array of buildings pulls the population in multiple directions at once, making it an ideal case study of the competing forces of what Deleuze and Guattari called de- and re-territorialization, an appropriate analytic for understanding the powerful forces of commodification.

After being captured from the streets of Moscow, Laika was the first living creature to be sent into Earth’s orbit by the USSR in 1957. The 2019 film, Space Dogs, tells the story of Laika’s spectral return to Moscow, and searches for her ghosts in the city’s street dogs 60 years later. Combining archival material with contemporary documentary footage ‘filmed at dog’s level’, the film reanimates Laika’s spectral afterlives. Drawing on a series of in-depth conversations with the film’s directors, writers, and director of photography, we provide critical reflections on filmmaking practice for animals’ geographies. We offer a three-part typology which frames these contributions: attunement, which focuses on the affordances of filmmaking practice for attuning to the lives of nonhuman lifeworlds; perspective, which documents how filmmaking practice allows for more-than-human urban space to be viewed from alternative vantage points; and narration, which enables filmmakers to experiment with affective modes of representing animals’ lives, offering audiences alternative spatiotemporal experiences. Finally, we reflect on the potentials of filmmaking as a fruitful practice, method, and output for animals’ geographers.

This article proposes a critical reading of the short story, Il campo di granturco [The Cornfield], by Cesare Pavese. Methodologically and epistemologically, it tries to highlight the existing consonances between literature and geography with regards to three key concepts – the border, the landscape, and the territory – that form an indissoluble connection between human beings and the world. In geography, border, landscape, and territory are regarded as key cognitive mediators within the interaction between the Self and the world. What purpose, then, does reading Pavese from a geographic perspective serve? Why do his works matter within the context of cultural geography? Pavese’s Il campo di granturco, I argue, contains an example of what Augustin Berque calls ‘Thinking through Landscape’, which is an essential requirement of any relationship between the self and the world. Additionally, reading Pavese from a geographic viewpoint provides us the chance to propose a reflection on the role of dialog in the self/world cognitive relationship. The paper’s main objective is to contribute to current geographical debates on the self-world interactions.