Keynote: Professor John Wylie (University of Exeter)
In recent decades, the ‘spatial turn’ in critical theory has heralded an increased focus on geographical tensions across the humanities. Considering the nature of spaces and places allows us to elucidate the complex dialectics that lie beneath physical appearances, revealing how locations can become both ‘real-and-imagined’ (Soja, 1996) due to conflicting representations. Landscape is thus an important locus of ideological world creation and contestation. Likewise, mythologising is a tool for political cosmopoesis. This conference aims to analyse the two together to ask how and why a landscape becomes ‘mythological’, and what happens during this process.
Scholars such as Doreen Massey have observed the tendency of spatial theorists to privilege spatiality over temporality (2005). We believe the focus on mythologising, a theme deeply concerned with time, will reintegrate the two, shedding exciting new light on how we inscribe meaning onto space. As a result, this conference will explore the unique spatio-temporal processes by which a landscape is mythologised.
The Mythological Panoramas conference will bring together postgraduate and early career researchers from across the humanities and social sciences to elucidate this complex subject. The theme invites inter-medial and inter-generic dialogue, with mythological landscapes manifest in, to name a few, art, cartography, film, theatre, and literature of various genres.
Approaches and considerations may include, but are not limited to:
- The materialisation of ephemeral or imagined spaces
- The narrative impact of landscape on mythological story-telling
- The psychological impact of mythologised spaces
- The mythologising effect of the unknown
- Questions of landscape, reality, and hyperreality
- How mythological landscapes manifest themselves across diverse media
- Cartographic imaginations and issues of mapping
- The geographies of mythology
We welcome abstracts of 300 words for 20 minute papers from graduate students and academics at any career stage. Please also include a 100-word biography in your submission. Abstracts should be sent to mythologicalpanoramas@gmail.com by 7th July, 2018. Successful paper presenters will be notified by the end of July.
Some travel grants of up to £100 will be available for speakers. Please indicate if you would like to be considered for one of these when submitting your abstract.
Organisers: Elizabeth Chant (elizabeth.chant.17@ucl.ac.uk), Connie Bloomfield (connie.bloomfield@kcl.ac.uk), Abigail Walker (abigail.walker@kcl.ac.uk)
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