Archive for March, 2009

Presentation: Landscape, the body, and the route. The socio-materiality of road stops between erosion and fatigue.

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

Next month Lars Meier and I will go to Cardiff to participate in this year’s conference of the British Sociological Association. I will be presenting as part of the stream Space, Mobility and Place, which sounds like a good context. Following is the abstract:

In this presentation, I want to use digital video recordings and photographs to analyze the corporeal dimension of what is happening in one of mobility’s borderlands. Based on research that has been done at rest stops of the Norwegian Tourist Route, I will discuss the multiple social and material layers that permeate each other at these sites. Symmetrically analysing material aspects on the one hand and social aspects on the other hand (i.e. material: built structures, erosion, and “natural events” like snowfall; i.e. social: social class, fatigue, and “social events” like experiencing a place as a picturesque landscape)–, I want to demonstrate two things: (1) How the corporeal embeddedness of actors in their material surroundings is an inextricable, temporally constituted part of what is labeled as The Social. Thus the challenge to a restricted understanding of the social – as it has been put forward in Science and Technology Studies or in Non-Representational Theory – is taken up in empirical field work. (2) How disruptions in flows are an essential and productive part of everyday practices, even if they arise as irritations. Thus it will be displayed that mobility, speed, and the non-places of flows have another side, a dark side that is, actually, quite multicolored.

I am really looking forward to visit Cardiff for the first time. Maybe even more exciting will be to compare the British sociology crowd with that of the German sociology conferences, and with the British geographers.

First conference in Oslo: Routes, Roads and Landscapes: Aesthetic Practices en route.

Friday, March 6th, 2009

Time for some news regarding my new position in Oslo. First: the website of the project is finished and ready for you to browse. I have now changed all the institutional homepage links on my website to the Routes project. I decided to take this step since I do not have a real personal page that I can easily update at the TU Darmstadt anymore.
conference posterSecond: we (that is the participants of the routes project) have already come up with a conference which will take place in Oslo this fall: on September 24th/25th.
I am really looking forward to this conference, which we have just announced on the routes website. I am quite certain that the conference will be a success – we were very lucky in getting almost all the people we wanted on board for this event. We also have a call for papers, so feel free to submit an abstract.
Other than that, I hope that the routes conference will not overlap with my presentation at the Deutscher Geographentag… bad time scheduling by yours truly…

Leaving Boston and re-enabling comments.

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

Well, well, the stay in Boston has been very nice – new friends and old friends together created a very rich social life. And I even got an article finished! (More about that in another post sometime in the future.)
I had disabled the comment function after a massive spam attack and forgot to turn it on again afterwards. Now comments should be working again!