1,720,990 research outputs found
Introduction
No full textImagine this: you are sitting in your study, glance flitting like a dragonfly from the laptop screen to the view of fields and trees beyond the window. It's hot, early summer and already the first heatwave has hit, leaving your skin sticky and head fuzzy. The word Anthropocene is an ever-present echo in your mind-the syllables rising and falling over and over like a siren ... A word for an epoch in which humanity's indelible mark has been left in the geological strata of our planet, and whose exact start is still contested, but whose end feels ever more immanent with reports of ecological tipping points, and targets unmet. You've recently survived a pandemic (we do not use these words lightly, you lost people, we all did), and last year saw record temperatures in the UK and parts of Europe and the Americas consumed by wildfires. Already this week, the average global temperature record has been broken twice, with predictions that it will be broken again and again over the coming months. As children, you sat in front of small TVs and watched BBC's Newsround tell you about holes in the ozone layer, animal extinction, polar ice caps melting, oil-slicked birds. You caught your parents watching footage of the Chornobyl disaster and whispering fears to one another, have witnessed the Great Acceleration rush forward in your lifetime, and know of vast floating islands of discarded plastics in the oceans, floods covering one-third of Pakistan, and now long-terms risk to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant as well as global impact through crop loss after the attacks, a few weeks ago, on the Nova Kakhovka dam in Ukraine.</p
Then, now, forever? Researching and writing nuclear landscapes for The Half-Life of Snails
No full textIn a room at the back of the building she finds rows of rusting bunk beds, a floor scattered with dead-eyed dolls and faded clothes. Frozen in time, the websites say, but there is evidence of time passing everywhere: the moulding material, the curling paint, the dried leaves heaped in the corners of the room.-Holloway, 2022 Since the 1986 Chornobyl disaster, the Exclusion Zone has become a tourist site, offering the chance to see a landscape, villages and cities 'frozen in time'. As research for my novel, The Half-life of Snails, I engaged in embodied and psychogeographic research in Chornobyl's Exclusion Zone to explore perceptions of landscapes that act as palimpsests of nuclearity. These are spaces in which time is a recurrent tension, where past events still impact the emotions and behaviours of communities, policy makers and individuals, and where future use of land is marked in centuries-long half-lives. The individual human, too, is a palimpsest, made up of their own unique and layered experiences of place and culture, of interactions and ideas. And we exist in the Nuclear Anthropocene-a moment timestamped by the detonation of the first atomic bomb and the resulting presence of man-made isotopes in the ground (and by extension the bodies of those living there) (Lewis & Maslin, 2015; Miller, 2016)-and therefore bring conceptual perceptions and experiences of nuclearity into interactions with these landscapes. This chapter explores how I negotiate these tensions of time and place, experience and concept, both through my research and creative practice, and in the novel, to show how layers of time-past, present and speculative futures-affect our relationship with landscape and the nuclear industry and can be explored in literature. It touches on the philosophies of landscape and time perception explored by scholars such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Henri Bergson, to contextualise and explain my autoethnographic and phenomenological research practice, and how I recognise the temporal issues at play in this subject and address them within both my creative practice and the final text of the novel.</p
From crime and punishment to future archaeologies: reimagining relationships of waste and value
No full textAwareness of the need for action in the face of the climate crisis is undoubtedly growing. The latest IPCC reports have received more publicity than ever and advocates for sustainability and planetary justice have become globally recognised, household names. Unfortunately, awareness does not, in itself, provide a way of navigating a course among and between intermeshed and not-yet-imagined possible futures. In this chapter, I describe Participatory Speculative Fiction as a method of co-creating visions of place that can bring these possible futures into the conscious imagination and help us choose between them.
I illustrate the method with fictional stories about waste, generated by participants in an ongoing project. The Anthropocene has seen a coupled explosion of consumption and waste; humans now create waste not only at scales never seen before, but also in ways that were previously unimagined. Current patterns and practices of production, distribution, consumption, waste management and disposal have complex and profound consequences for landscape and place (understanding the latter as a post-human relationship rather than a geographical location) that are hard to imagine. I show how stories people create about waste can generate alternative landscapes of the past, present and future, creating a productive desire for one alternative over another
A Psychogeography of the Six Towns: city|walking|poetry
No full textStoke on Trent is a post-industrial city comprised of six original towns, resulting in a polycentric conurbation with six administrative, cultural and civic centres. Each has a town hall, a concert hall and a Victorian park at its centre. The decline of traditional industries, dis-investment and consequent social issues have created a palimpsest of industrial heritage, landmarks and personal stories and histories.
This paper employs the practices of psychogeography to record the experience Psychogeography is a mode of urban exploration developed by the Situationist International group of writers and artists in the 1950s and 1960s. Guy Debord and Asger Jorn were key figures in the movement and they established the key activity of the dérive or drift. The urban drift was a radical political and artistic act that sought to explore how the human body and psyche were acted upon by the forces, fabric and landmarks of the modern city. But they were not just concerned with the iconic spaces of cities such as Paris and Berlin, they were also fascinated by the banal—those aspects of urban experience that are barely noticed by the urban inhabitant but which direct them in their daily lives and journeys. The drift is both objective and subjective, rational and impressionistic—it would not be random, but neither would it be planned. The drift is a method of mapping the sensations of urban wandering while conceptualising the forces which shape urban lives. Michel de Certeau, in his essay ‘Walking in the City’, describes walkers as a potential locus of non-conformist and resistant urban practices whose footsteps generate a ‘chorus’ of ‘pedestrian speech acts’ which combine in ‘the long poem of walking’.
City as fragments; cutting, atomic, grain, syllable, phoneme.
Erosion of dissipating boundaries; entropies, fields and particles.
Walking the city; kinesis and the rhythm of body and breath in space.
Stoke on Trent is unique in that it is a poly-centric city made up of six towns, federated in 1910. Each town (Longton, Stoke, Fenton, Hanley, Tunstall and Burslem) has its own centre with a town hall, library, civic hall and square. Between the main centres are liminal spaces with awkward and often contested identities. The city has a rich industrial history of pottery, mining and steel making, much of it erased or hidden now, but with a palimpsest of economic, social and civic traces apparent along many of its streets, canals and abandoned railways.
This project will combine the insights of psychogeography with urban theory, architectural history, urban planning and poetical responses to urban phenomena through a series of semi-structured walks around each of the six towns.
The result will be a pictorial, historical, mapped and geo-poetic account of Stoke on Trent and its polyvocal identity, as well as an exploration of the practices of psychogeography in a contemporary setting with a significant industrial, civic and architectural heritage
'If the river is hidden'
No full text'If the River is Hidden' a performance of poetry in collaboration with writer Dr Craig Jordan-Baker and flautist Eimear McGeown.
'If the River is Hidden' is a 90 minute performance based on a pilgrimage of the River Bann, Northern Ireland's longest river. The flute by McGeown, shapes a river that is reflected in the long, sinewy poems by Smyth and bridged by Jordan-Baker's lyric essay. Doesn't belonging start with how we use the words we inherit and the first map we fall in love with? But the Bann is not all it seems and more than it seems. Smyth, Jordan-Baker and McGeown, who all share Northern Irish heritage and live in England, ask how to belong in the North. The Bann becomes a metaphor for longing, belonging and letting go of grief as well as the continuity of family and its legends. The road north stands not only for the frequent inaccessibility of the river, but for the path of writing and friendship, which creates a flow that does not depend on water or a specific landscape
Walking with witches:place, people and papercut comics
No full textThis chapter explores the interconnectedness between stories, place and creator and the ways that knowing, walking and feeling a place is so vital to engaging with content. Experience of place inevitably leaves gaps as not everything can be seen and touched and smelled and felt, thereby creating spaces for imaginative engagement. The stories and histories of place are also fragmentary, what remains are often spectral traces of the past in the present. Equally, comics as a medium is built on gaps and elisions, and often manifests on the page as empty space, but one rich with creative potential. The chapter centralises PhD research that connects these gaps by creating papercut comics that tell stories of witch folklore that is deeply connected to specific places, using walking as a creative method.The chapter looks at the first of these papercut stories, one about a Cornish woman called Joan Wytte whose reputation as a witch has posthumously grown with the stories that have developed around her, and who supposedly died in Bodmin Jail in 1813, but was not buried until 1998, after her remains had been exhibited at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle. Her literal envelopment in the land has furthered what Cornish (2020) refers to as ‘the inspirited landscape’ around Boscastle, and the short walk from the museum to her gravestone has become a pilgrimage for visiting witches and Pagans to pay their respects. As Solnit notes, a path can allow one to connect to the stories that are soaked within in, ‘a form of spatial theatre’ (2014: 68).The story emerged from a connection with the landscapes that house them, in turn facilitating a re-imagining of the lore of the land rendered as papercut. Papercut is a technique that utilises both what remains and what is taken away to form the image. The use of silhouette is particularly important as these, like many representations of witches themselves as well as the landscapes that surround them, are recognisable as contour, but the detail remains hidden
Walking and Making:a collaborative autoethnography of our creative recoveries
No full textThis chapter is a collaborative autoethnography that explores the authors’ search for a new way of being in their creative practice to help them move through past experiences with cancer. Building on the work of other autoethnographers who have combined evocative images and text (Sava and Nuutinen, Qual Inq 9(4):515–534, 2003; Scott-Hoy and Ellis, Wording pictures: Discovering heartful autoethnography in handbook of the arts in qualitative research: Perspectives, methodologies, examples, and issues, pp. 127–141, 2008), the method the authors identify starts with discussion and walking, that motivates practice (image and text) and evolves as an autoethnographic cartography whereby poetry, images and maps tell the story of the research. The collaboration is an example of arts-based autoethnography that uses evocative stories to intersect with evocative images of the research process (see also Clark-Keefe, Alberta J Educ Res XLVIII(3):1–27, 2002; Scott-Hoy, Ethnographically speaking: Autoethnography, literature, and aesthetics pp. 274–294, 2002, Qual Inq 9(2):268–280, 2003)
Myth-making and the urban:Alienation, folklore and (re-)enchanting to land
No full textPerformance storytelling in the UK frequently celebrates a vision of pre-industrial literature and heritage – one which, just as in genre fantasy, is intertwined with magical elements and a portrayal of a more harmonious connection between communities and the green landscape. As a storyteller and a fan of storytelling, I wholly recognise the appeal of this antidote to the grimmer excesses of modern life, not least for the identity and belonging it can offer those who grew up in middle-class suburban Britain, and for the inspiration it can offer for environmental conservation. Indeed, many storytellers attempt to address humanity’s current destructive relationship with the environment through the telling of traditional tales: in sharing a pre-industrial perspective on land, and evoking wonder in the growing environment, it is believed we can re-inspire ways of interacting with the physical world that are more imaginative, respectful and (in Weber’s term) ‘enchanted’. Without denying the benefits of ‘eco-storytelling’, in this chapter I highlight the influence of a distinctly British nostalgia and romanticisation on this construction of storytelling, particularly in its privileging of rural/wild space, and suggest that this limits its application. Cultural criticism, mythography and oral history theory jointly imply that story-making remains a key element in how humans apply structure and meaning to lived experience – and (as shown by cultural geographers, collectors of ‘urban legends’ and authors from Garner to Gaiman) this is still true of our relationship with modern, built spaces. I argue that the designation and privileging of pre-industrial traditions – and indeed the distinction between urban and rural space – can be understood as stories in themselves, born of attempts to make sense of industrial urbanisation; but that, rather than undermining efforts to address environmental damage through stories, this understanding enhances our work as tellers of tales, in any medium. It enables a more intimate awareness of the meaning we seek in stories, the distinctions and categorisations we apply to them, and the choices we make in what we tell or listen to, or watch, or read. And it reveals that urban, built space should receive equal attention in re-enchantment through storytelling: not only is there a rich seam of modern folklore here that is underrepresented in UK storytelling work, but stepping beyond our common parameters will open our creative practise to audiences we otherwise neglect – thus promoting social integration, celebrating diversity and engaging directly with the enchantment of those spaces where much of the population live and work
‘There was weather’: Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 and Climate Realism in the Contemporary British Novel
No full textThis chapter analyses the ways in which McGregor’s Reservoir 13 achieves a climate realism through its phenological narrative structure. I argue that the typical coordinates of the realist novel (character, plot, teleology) are almost entirely substituted in this novel by a narrative structure and style which presents humans as just one of many species embedded in a bioregion which is affected by subtly yet perilously shifting ecological patterns. My analysis focuses on the ways in which McGregor’s novel throws the human species into new focus within the context of an Anthropocene era marked by global capitalism and resultant climate change, while maintaining the lyrical quality found in the long tradition of pastoral writing
- …
