George Revill

Landscape, mobility, practice

This paper is an edited transcript of a panel discussion on ‘Landscape, Mobility and Practice’ which was held at the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) Annual Conference in September 2006. In the paper the panel engage with the work of geographers and others who have been drawing upon theories of practice to explore issues of mobility and how we encounter, apprehend, inhabit and move through landscapes. The contributors discuss the usefulness of conceptions of landscape vis-à-vis place and space, and different traditions of apprehending, practising and articulating the more-than-representational dimensions of landscapes. The panel discuss the entwining of issues of power and politics with different representations, practices and understandings of landscape/landscaping, and a number of the panellists position their thinking on the politics of landscape in relation to recent work on the politics of affect.

cultural geographies in practice: Performing French folk music: dance, authenticity and nonrepresentational theory

We can best understand music by being in the middle of it... the starting point must be how we (and that includes you and me) actually use, internalize, or otherwise care about music, whether by going to concerts or discos, relaxing to it in the sitting-room, or whistling it at work. It avoids prescriptive judgements inherited from another age, about what we (and that means you) ought to listen to and how. It assumes that to study music is to study your own participation in it - to study yourself...

Practices of music and sound

The study of music has undergone something of a transformation in the past ten years. From a substantially empiricist and elitist endeavour, the practice of musicology has broadened out to embrace social and cultural theory, creating a series of vibrant debates in which geographers have played an active part. Since the mid-1990s, a growing body of geographical scholarship has explored a range of issues around music, listening and politics (Jazeel 2005; Leyshon, Matless and Revill 1995; Smith 1994). Key themes from this literature include the links between music, historical geographies of citizenship and the nation-state (Gold and Revill 2006; Leyshon, Matless and Revill 1998; Revill 1995, 2000a, 2000b), music practices and the transgression of hegemonic spatiality (Kong 1995; Valentine 1995), musical performance, reception and the production of space and place (he mid 1990s Kong 1995, 1996; Saldanha 2002; Smith 1997, 2000; Waterman 1998), and music practices and the geographies of affect and emotion (Anderson 2004a, 2004b; Wood and Smith 2004). Such work in geography intersects with an impressive range of studies in sociology, cultural studies and anthropology which examine the spatiality of musical practices in a multiplicity of cultural and historical contexts (e.g. Bull 2000; DeNora 2000; Leppert and McClary 1988; Martin 1995; Stokes 1994; Swiss, Sloop and Herman 1998). Within musicology itself, a growing literature acknowledges the impact of critical and cultural theory (see Clayton, Herbert and Middleton 2003). Much of this work addresses the very issues which have recently engaged social and cultural geographers. Including, for example, postcolonial critique and subaltern politics (Radano and Bohlman 2000), the gendering of knowledge (McClary 1987) and embodied performances (Cook 1998; Savigliano 1995; Washabaugh 1996). Thus it is (Smith 1994; Leyshon et al. 1995) easy to conclude that the study of music has joined other forms of art and culture in the Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 6, No. 5, October 2005

How is space made in sound? Spatial mediation, critical phenomenology and the political agency of sound:

This paper examines some of the processes and practices that make sonic spatiality distinctive and sets out theoretical and conceptual resources that might better enable us to understand these processes. It draws on the notion of political agency in order to animate the processual making of sonic space as socio-material relationality. Developing an approach to sonic mediation compatible with a critical phenomenology of the auditory, the paper sets out four interrelated sets of sonic effects central to the making of sonic spaces. It shows how these address a politics of difference which engages affective and representational political processes.

Cultures of Transport: Representation, Practice and Technology

It is argue that the so-called cultural‘ (and spatial‘) turn that has remodelled so many other areas of the humanities and social sciences over the last two decades might help answer Armstrong‘s plea for an innovative, even controversial, transport history. Such a strategy would not merely bring the discipline into line conceptually and methodologically with what has long been going on elsewhere. By focussing on the practical limits and historical capabilities of transport technologies, the renewed historiography would have something of relevance and value to say to these other fields.

Vernacular culture and the place of folk music

This paper focuses on an evening event at the Community Centre, Jacksdale, Nottinghamshire, UK in 2001 featuring a group called The Chase, performing folk music and dance from France and other European countries. It raises a series of issues concerning the relationships between folk culture and modern everyday life. These questions intersect with debates concerning authenticity, tradition, working-class culture, community and sense of place. The paper develops the concept of vernacular culture within a dynamic and plural conception of place as a means of theoretically locating folk music within modern everyday life.

Exploring Landscapes of Fear: Marginality, Spectacle and Surveillance

The aim of this paper is to understand the motives and effects of landscape adjustment during a period of heightened security consciousness. In this paper, the authors review aspects of the fear-landscape nexus in relation to the environments of everyday life, past and present, with particular reference to three important themes—marginality, spectacle and surveillance. In so doing this paper charts these three themes and clarifies the terminology of fear in order to identify some of the complementary ground between this term and landscape construction and reproduction.

Interpreting the Dust Bowl: Teaching Environmental Philosophy through Film.

Abstract This paper describes an experiment in using film in teaching environmental philosophy to geography students, which employs a 20‐minute clip from the opening scenes of The Grapes of Wrath (directed by John Ford, 1940). Use is made of the ambiguity of the films interpretation of conditions in rural Oklahoma during the ‘Dust Bowl’ years of the 1930s to challenge students to apply and illustrate the contrasting viewpoints supplied by a set of widely divergent environmental philosophies. The initial sections of the paper supply a brief note about using film in geographical higher education, before discussing the background to the extract seen by the students. We then provide detailed discussion of the structure and procedures in the classroom exercise, followed by comment on the changes that we have made in the light of experience and student evaluations. The conclusion summarises the lessons that we have learned from this exercise and comments on further use of film for teaching environmental philos...

A Solo Ecology: the Erratic Art of Andy Goldsworthy

This essay draws on an interview conducted with the British land sculptor Andy Goldsworthy (Figure 1) in Penpont, Dumfriesshire, Scotland, in March 1993. Goldsworthy grew up on the edge of Leeds, attended art college at Bradford and Lancaster, and lived in Brough and Langholm before moving to Penpont in 1986.’ We found him in his studio, an old two-storey mill building near his house. Works and children’s toys lay around the floor. The interview was recorded in the small adjoining office. The conversation proceeded in a natural light veering from bright

The landscape assay: exploring pluralism in environmental interpretation

Abstract The ‘Landscape Assay’ is a field study exercise which invites students to explore, understand and gain an appreciation of some of the variety of ways people interpret the world around them. It also aims to give students a deeper understanding of the causes of some environmental controversies. The term ‘assay’ has been chosen for this exercise because it links the exercise with concepts of assessment and judgement without connecting it too closely with established techniques of landscape evaluation. The exercise forms the final element in the module ‘Environmental Philosophy’, a third‐year synoptic course for undergraduate geographers. Different societies have developed an enormous variety of world‐views; the aim of this exercise is to allow students to explore sets of environmental values within the environs of Oxford. The exercise works with the pragmatic categorisation of world‐views or ‘world hypotheses’ developed by Stephen Pepper (1942). These are used throughout the course to provide a simp...