March 26, 2012, by Matt

Contested Environments: a postgraduate workshop

On  Thursday 7^th June 2012 the School will host the  sixth annual postgraduate workshop to be run by the Landscape, Space, Place Research Group. Jennifer Rich outlines the meeting below:

An environment is a complex site of meaning in which a range of tensions, relations and contestations are sustained, played out, fought, won and lost.  Environments are locations in which identities, meanings and values are expressed, encouraged and reproduced, yet which are simultaneously suppressed, marginalized and resisted.  What binds a group to an environment is its perceived resourcefulness: its capacity to provide food, shelter, minerals, capital, or rather the very stuff – the objects, artefacts and imagery – of our imaginations, identities, histories, narratives and cultures.

So commonplace are contestations in and over environments, that the subject has been high on research agendas across the arts, humanities and the social sciences in recent years.  This postgraduate workshop aims to reflect such interdisciplinarity in bringing together postgraduate research from a range of academic disciplines.  Papers are invited to consider the following kinds of questions:

• How are contestations in and over environments performed, documented and represented?
• Who is brought together in a contestation in and over an environment?
• What are the factors that bind groups in contestations over and within an environment?
• Upon what terrains and topographies are contests fought?
• Through what methods, means and tactics – violent and non-violent – are contestations played out, won and lost?
• Who wins, who loses and what is at stake?

The workshop provides a great opportunity for postgraduates to present related work at any stage of their research within a friendly, informal and supportive environment.  Papers will be followed by a roundtable discussion with responses from Professor Stephen Daniels and Dr. Briony McDonagh from the Department of Geography at the University of Nottingham.  This is the sixth annual postgraduate workshop to be run by the Landscape, Space, Place Research Group.  This year’s event has been made possible through generous support from the AHRC Landscape and Environment Programme and the Department of English at the University of Nottingham.

Abstracts of 250-300 words for 20 minute papers should be sent to Jennifer Rich at lgxjr2@nottingham.ac.uk, by Friday 27^th April.

 

 

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