Last week, I moved most of my everyday stuff to Oslo, where I will be a guest researcher at the University until the end of this year. The last days I was in Berlin, most of the time cleaning the apartment and packing the rest of my belongings. But I also took the time to participate in the performance festival Abwehr, organized by Svenja Moor and Shahram Entekhabi (officially as a discussant but in truth more as a photographer – which suited me fine). The locations of this festival Wachturm and Kunstfabrik were excellent and I think the whole thing worked out really fine. You can read more about this festival in Stralau-Blog (in German). You can also see more about this festival. In my ipernity album.
Tomorrow, I will buzz off again. This time going to the annual conference of the Royal Geographical Society in London. I’ve been there last year and enjoyed it quite a bit. This year, Katie Walsh and I will host a session, to which I am looking forward very much. Except for the fact that we have been put into the last time slot of the conference: Friday 16:50–18:30. I wonder how many people will make it through a whole week of dense and stimulating sessions, beverage-laden evening programmes and then still attend some session late Friday afternoon, when they shcould be heading home to tea and biscuit…
On Saturday, though, I will finally enter port: Oslo. *sigh* And there I will stay with only one interruption until the end of the year. That’s what I call a welcome prospect!
Posts Tagged ‘London’
Buzzing around before settling down. (For a while.)
Tuesday, August 28th, 2007Tags: berlin, conference, London, oslo, RGS, travel
Posted in berlin, oslo, social science | No Comments »
Moving through the terminal – Investigations into material practices.
Monday, January 30th, 2006My proposal for the session on Landscape, Mobility and Practice
has been accepted, allowing me to participate in the annual conference of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) in London. Following is the abstract on which my presentation will be based:
This presentation will accompany people who use railway and ferry terminals, demonstrating how the materiality of these terminals interacts with people’s movements, their bodies and perceptions. The terminal itself is located at an intriguing juncture between travel and rest, between movement and pause. It is both a place of rushing through and of lingering or loitering. Based on ethnographic observations and many hours of video recordings, both subtle details of bodily arrangement and spatial relations on the scale of the terminal as a whole are examined from a phenomenological perspective. How do the practices of people in the terminal reconfigure the socio-spatial constellations that permeate these places? How does the rigidity of walls, rails, gangways and doors participate in the production of localised normalities? These questions will be answered by examining sensual experiences and material practices. Perceiving their environment by sight, hearing, smell and touch, opening doors, managing bodily movements, interacting with machines, displays and people – a wide array of subtle but powerful practices produces the dynamic socio-spatial setting that is the terminal.
I am very happy to finally be visiting London – the city about which I read more than about any other city, but that I never visited in spite of the relative ease of getting there. So many novels, so many remembrances about a place I have never seen with my own eyes…
Tags: body, London, materiality, movements, perception, place, presentation, RGS, terminal
Posted in social science | No Comments »