Fear in paradise: The affective registers of the English Lake District landscape re-visited

During the summer of 2004, the artist Graham Lowe and I undertook a research project entitled Nurturing Ecologies within the Lake District National Park (LDNP)at Windermere. This landscape, considered as an icon of “Englishness,” is revisited through the embodied and sensory experiences of post-migration residents of Lancashire and Cumbria in an attempt to unravel multiple relationships embedded in visitor engagements with this landscape and thus disrupt the moral geography of the landscape as embodying a singular English sensibility, normally exclusionary of British multi-ethnic, translocal and mobile landscape values and sensibilities. The research led to the production of a series of drawings and descriptions made in visual workshops by participants, and a set of forty paintings produced by the artist. These paintings are examined in this paper as representing the values, sensory meanings and embodied relationships that exist for migrant communities with this landscape. These groups include the Asian community from the Lancashire town of Burnley and a “mixed” art group living in Lancashire. The initial drawings and subsequent paintings produced operate as a testimony to the Lake District landscape as a site for engendering feelings of terror, fear as well as representing a paradisiacal landscape

A day in the life of a Geographer: ‘lone’, black, female

This piece is a narrative representation of the experience of being black and female in the discipline of Geography in the UK and beyond. The aim is to share an ethnographic research on race in Geography, based on day-to-day experience in the academy. The piece expresses some of the morphologies of black geographical life in everyday academia. The material has originally been shared in coaching and mentoring relationships with me. The quotes included have been sanctioned for use in this particular piece and were sent to me in individual emails in January 2017

Decolonising museum cultures: an artist and a geographer in collaboration

There is much published research and strategic rhetoric on decolonising the discipline, the academy, and institutions of social and cultural importance. However, very little literature examines the stepping stones in the process of materially challenging, changing, and decolonising institutions themselves. This paper emerges as an outline of axes or episodes of dialogue in a collaborative journey between the artist Rosanna Raymond and myself, since 2005. We outline the issues encountered: some of these are intrinsically the legacies of imperial museology and the paradigms through which we evaluate and exhibit the cultures of racialised “others.” The episodes act as a means of understanding the politics and ways of decolonising that are possible. The collaboration enables the potential for interdisciplinary “ways of seeing” that counter colonial frameworks. The paper unravels the effect of imperial accounts of “other” cultures at museums, explored here through “Maori” and “Polynesian” curatorial practices and representations at the museum

Rancière and the re-distribution of the sensible: The artist Rosanna Raymond, dissensus and postcolonial sensibilities within the spaces of the museum

Through aesthetics we can articulate affective politics and demonstrate new ways of ‘doing’ progressive politics (Rancière, 2004).The paper explores the politics and practice of dissensus, within the museum with artist Rosanna Raymond. The paper argues that the museum space when critiqued through a postcolonial perspective and artistic practice, can be a vehicle for political change. Using Ranciere's account of 'politics' the paper outlines how a 'redistribution of the sensible' might be possible, that is inclusive of Maori space-time, self-determined cultural values and geoaesthetics

Iconographies of identity: visual cultures of the everyday in the South Asian diaspora

Much geographical writing has focused on the iconography of landscape painting and it's role in the formation of exclusionary national discourses of citizenship. This essay is an examination of visual cultures and their role in the socio-political and geographical 'positioning' of South Asians in Britain. Visual cultures are figured as central to the processes of identity-making, and belonging, in operation in diasporic homes. They are examined as prisms through which idealised, real, imagined and iconographical landscapes of belonging are refracted. The metonymical, and multisensory nature of these visual cultures are investigated through ethnographic research with South Asian women in London

Investigations into diasporic 'Cosmopolitanism': beyond mythologies of the 'non-native'

No description supplie

Diaspora and home: interrogating embodied precarity in an era of forced displacement

This chapter aims to situate the conceptualisation of ‘diaspora and home’ within contemporary geopolitics and experience of forced migration. In effect the aim is to evaluate the conceptualisation through the current Syrian refugee crisis. Diasporic migrations are attempted in a more and more precarious world (Waite, 2009); one where structures of ‘home’ and ‘citizenship’ are precarious materialities, post-migration. The chapter outlines the political actions that are shaping the possibilities for migrants and the rendering of their ‘rights’ ‘status’ and ‘access’ to safe haven as being continually in flux, and remade. Forcibly displaced peoples, despite there being no guarantee of settlement, are risking death, disconnection and indeed a loss of a ‘liveable life’ in the process of migration. To outline the ways in which new-grammars of conceptualising diaspora-migration in a precarious world, the chapter ends with an account from artist-activist projects. The projects cited capture the very nature of diaspora in process in refugee camps and sites of shelter for refugees coming from Syria. Political interventions by artists situated at refugee camps at Calais (France) and Lesbos (Greece), highlight the dehumanisation of FDPs. The artists cited here are at the vanguard of witnessing a new holocaust of the 21st century; one that results from a cultural and political erasure of our responsibilities towards those migrating away from suffering, wars, and genocide

Rancière and the re-distribution of the sensible: The artist Rosanna Raymond, dissensus and postcolonial sensibilities within the spaces of the museum

Through aesthetics we can articulate affective politics and demonstrate new ways of ‘doing’ progressive politics. This article explores the politics and practice of dissensus within the museum with artist Rosanna Raymond. The article argues that the museum space, when critiqued through a postcolonial perspective and artistic practice, can be a vehicle for political change. Using Ranciere’s account of ‘politics’, the article outlines how a ‘redistribution of the sensible’ might be possible, one that that is inclusive of Maori space-time, self-determined cultural values and geoaesthetics