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Theme: Materialising Geographies
Our scholarship examines the relationship between materiality, technology and geography. Through this scholarship we contribute to understanding: the production, circulation and reception of geographical knowledges; the intellectual and political purposes served by geography’s material forms; and the role of artifacts and technologies in everyday geographies. We conduct this research in both an historical and contemporary frame.
Historical geographies of scientific knowledge, books and instruments
Looking into how geography as a form of knowledge is materialized, through books (their production, circulation and reception) as well as through various kinds of technological instruments and scientific frameworks that measure, represent and investigate the world.
Geographies of architecture
Understanding the socio-technical world of architectural production (designing, visioning, building), lived architecture (meaning, experience, politics), and architectural value (wasting, enthusing, listing, recycling, re-programming).
Materiality and identity
Investigating contemporary materialities as vital aspects of the lived world and play an active part in the performance of difference and the articulation of identity.
Methods
Archives (institutional and home-based), visual methodologies (iconography, video-ing, photography, sketch mapping), ethno-methodology, interviewing, go-alongs and participatory methods, ANT and material semiotics.
Active Projects
- 0 Degrees: The Geography and History of the Prime Meridian (Charles Withers). Funded by Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship.
- Geography, Technology and Instruments of Exploration, c.1780-1960 (Charles Withers and Fraser MacDonald). Funded by the British Academy Small Research Grant Scheme.
- The trans-Atlantic science of Oscar Newman’s defensible space and Alice Coleman’s design disadvantagement (Jane M. Jacobs and Loretta Lees, King’s College).
- Assembling the line: amateur & professional work, skills and practice in digital video editing - with Barry Brown, UC San Diego, and Ignaz Strebel, ETH)). Funded by the ESRC.
- Habitable Cars: the organization of collective private transport (Eric Laurier, Hayden Lorimer, Glasgow University, and Barry Brown). Funded by the ESRC.
- The historical geography of astronautics (Fraser MacDonald).
- Fabricating Scottish bank notes (Jan Penrose).
- Industrial remains and photography (Dan Swanton). Undertaken as part of Waste of the World. ESRC.
- Materialised economies (Dan Swanton). Undertaken as part of Waste of the World. ESRC.
People
This article was published on Apr 8, 2011