“Consider raindrops: you can feel them on your head – but you can’t perceive the actual raindrop in itself. You only ever perceive your particular, anthropomorphic translation of the raindrops. Isn’t this similar to the rift between weather, which I can feel falling on my head, and global climate, not the older idea of local patterns of weather, but the entire system? I can think and compute climate in this sense, but I can’t directly see or touch it. The gap between phenomenon and thing yawns open, disturbing my sense of presence and being in the world.”
Timothy Morton (2013) Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 11
For 2024 the Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group has selected ‘Perceiving Climate Change’ as our year-long theme.
The subtle, but inexorable, changes brought by climate change are hard to sense. Has it really got colder, wetter, windier this year? Empirical data can give some pointers, but data sits at a distance from bodily sensation and the rhythms of living. Perhaps what we notice most deeply is that which we carry in our bodies, rituals and the stories that we share and circulate. But what if the phenomenon sits outside human timescales, sensory ranges or language?
Across our 2024 series of events we will ask, “how can humans notice the subtle but fundamental processes of climate change?”, and we will examine from a range of perspectives how people are striving to make climate change intelligible to human senses and cognitive processes. Starting with an examination of how scientists, artists and others find ways to detect and narrate changes in the cryosphere, subsequent sessions will explore the challenges and creativity of noticing climate change in the realms of ‘heat’, ‘water’, and will then turn to considering the resulting (or absent) sense of a ‘climate emergency’. Hosted in conjunction with the Royal Geographical Society (Yorkshire & North East Regional Committee), this series of events will foster an exploratory, interdisciplinary conversation and we very much welcome participation from all disciplines.
Here are the presentation details for our first event:
Rob Storrar (SHU, DNBE – glaciologist)
Measuring how water affects glacier changes from space and with drones
We are all familiar with images of retreating glaciers, and of icebergs calving dramatically into the ocean. But there is more to glaciology than simply noticing that glaciers are melting. As the climate warms, glaciers and ice sheets experience more and more melting, and this produces huge volumes of water that drain across, within and beneath ice. The addition of liquid water can cause glaciers to accelerate (potentially speeding up ice loss and sea level rise), but it can also cause them to slow down. Being able to predict which of these will predominate is clearly important for understanding future sea level rise. However, understanding how water moves through glaciers is a complex business, since it involves studying processes that occur beneath 100s or even 1000s of metres of solid ice. It has impacts that are felt at a huge range of scales: from centimetres to thousands of kilometres, and from hours to thousands of years. This talk will explore how we can use 3D models created from satellite imagery and drone surveys to advance our understanding about how water behaves underneath ice, based on ongoing projects in Iceland and Greenland.
Niall Gandy (SHU, DNBE – Palaeo-glaciologist)
Ancient to Modern, Digital to Physical: Connecting the Dots of Ice Sheet Science
Greenland and Antarctica are facing gargantuan change over the next century as we warm our climate. We are pushing these ice sheets away from many millennia of remarkable stability, towards collapse at an uncertain rate. It is obviously important to understand the magnitude and pace of this change. One way to reduce our uncertainty is to study ancient ice sheets of the last ice age, examining periods of rapid change help us better predict future behaviour. At Sheffield Hallam University we have been running computer simulations of these ancient ice sheets, and have reproduced ancient “instabilities” – collapse events which could cause rapid sea level rise over the course of just a few decades. This work can help us improve the accuracy of simulations predicting future change, but actually joining together the perspectives (from ancient ice sheet to future change, and from digital simulations to real physical change) is an outstanding challenge. This talk will examine which barriers still exist, how they can be removed, and the potential benefits of doing so.
How can an Icelandic glacier guide’s perspective on glacier change, climate and sustainability make a difference?
Visiting a glacier is a unique and special experience, and one that thousands of tourists are able to do each year in locations around the world. However, a single visit to a glacier can make it hard to understand how they are changing. This talk provides the perspective of the owner of a glacier guide business (Glacier Adventure) in SE Iceland. The talk will explore the daily-seasonal-annual changes that can be observed when visiting glaciers regularly, and the longer timescales and experiences of living with glaciers. It will also explore how glacier tourism can be used as a powerful educational tool, and stimulus to help people to think more about climate change, and why they might want to try to live more sustainably. https://glacieradventure.is/team/haukur-ingi-einarsson/
Lise Autogena (SHU, Professor of Cross-disciplinary Art / Director of Narsaq International Research Station (NIRS), Greenland)
Greenland – what next? Local Perceptions of the retreating ice.
In Greenland, the melting glaciers is already impacting on traditional ways of life and Greenlanders are experiencing a huge influx of climate researchers from around the world who come here to understand the wider impacts of the changes to the arctic climate. The melting ice also drives a growing international interest in Greenland as a site for exploitation of natural resources, in particular the mining of minerals critical to the global energy transition away from fossil fuels. This growing geo-political importance is perceived by many Greenlanders as an opportunity for diversifying local income sources to build financial independence for a new decolonised Greenland. However, many in Greenland are also concerned with the potential impact of international mining activities on the fragile arctic ecology, which could have long-term consequences for the Inuit way of life. This talk will focus on local perceptions in South Greenland, where a legal dispute with an international mining company is currently threatening to destabilise the entire Greenlandic economy, raising concerns about the country’s vulnerability in dealing with geo-political interests.
Registration is via our Eventcube site: https://shu-spg.eventcube.io/, and our second free online event in this series, Perceiving Climate Change #2: Water (25 April 2024, 7-9.30pm) is also now bookable there (with presenter details for that to follow).
“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.”
Ernest Hemingway (2014 [1944]). “By-Line Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades”, Simon and Schuster, p.343
Since 2012 the Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group has been convening interdisciplinary conversations about the study, experience, management and use of a diverse range of places. Our contributors include artists, architects, geographers, creative writers, managers and engineers. Since 2020 our playful and informal sessions have run online, and have been recorded for posterity here, ranging across topics such as haunting, covid, place making and homeliness.
In July, the SHU SPG’s first session in its 2023 series of online talks themed around contemporary ‘exploration’, investigated the motives, means and modes of exploration of modern ruins, as recorded and digested here. For our fourth event we will be continuing our exploration of exploration by hanging out with mountain bikers.
For ‘Exploring #4: On Your Bike’ our presenters will be:
Introduction: Mountain Biking, Culture and Society
Jim Cherrington (Sheffield Hallam University, UK)
Via an innovative reading of mountain biking, this introductory presentation will outline the importance of the collection. Following some important definitions, the chapter introduces the reader to the notions of dominant, residual, and emergent structures of feeling, suggesting that these three modalities allow scholars and practitioners to move beyond static and essentialist readings of subculture. Subsequently, it suggests that the tensions and conflicts relating to mountain bike culture serve to highlight some of the most important issues of our catastrophic times, and that important lessons can be learned from studying these disagreements. Finally, the presentation briefly sketch the book’s themes, with new insights offered on the significance of mountain bike culture in relation to identity, bodies, ecology and the cultural politics of lifestyle sports.
Riding with Red Bull: Downhill MTB, digital Media, and DIY urbanism
Jacob Bustad and Oliver Rick (Towson University, USA)
This presentation examines the intersection of digital media and urban sport and leisure practices through a focus on point-of-view (POV) videos of downhill MTB racing, specifically the Cerro Abajo races in Valparaiso, Chile. In our analysis, we discuss how these videos function as part of the wider marketing and advertising efforts of GoPro and Red Bull (Kunz et al., 2016) and reflect transformations within the relationships between corporations, athletes, and fans in the contemporary sport industry, especially in regard to ‘niche’ sport cultures such as downhill MTB. We argue that these videos demonstrate a particular type of ‘GoPro gaze’ (Vannini & Stewart, 2017) that incorporates not only the representations of active bodies and the sights and sounds of branded global sport competitions, but also depends on the unique urban environments of the race route and emphasises the ways in which this form of branded content includes representations of do-it-yourself (DIY) urbanism (Finn, 2014).Air pollution as ‘slow violence’ during multi-day mountain bike trips
Clare Nattress (Leeds Beckett University/York St John University, UK)
Bikepacking consists of multi-day, self-sufficient, journeys by bike, that usually take place off-road, and is a phenomenon which has increased in popularity in the last 10 years. This presentation represents one of the first attempts to unpack contemporary multi-day mountain bike experiences, whilst identifying key themes in past and present scholarship. The presentation uncovers how mountain biking can be a performative art methodology to investigate, reveal, and disseminate the problem of air pollution. Multi-day mountain bike trips are cycled to collect data using a technological sensor, as well as employing artistic and embodied methods such as the concept of attunement. In doing so, the artist elucidates the ability to convey embodied experiences of dirty air through sensorial, affective, and more-than-cognitive registers. This research therefore calls attention to human and non-human bodies not only as victims of slow violence but also, conversely, as crucial sites of knowledge production
Escaping to Find Yourself: Portrayals of Authenticity in Mountain Biking Multimedia
Jeff Warren and John Reid-Hresko (Quest University, CAN)
How do the historical trajectories of ideas of authenticity, and the sociopolitical conditions that frame them, inform contemporary mountain biking multimedia, and what can this media tell us about mountain bikers and the broader contemporary mountain biking sportscape? In this presentation, we investigate these questions by examining two exemplars of mountain biking multimedia. We argue that these films do not simply reflect mountain biking experiences but are co-constitutive of experiences in ways that both solidify and perpetuate particular constellations of authenticity and also reproduce socioculturally-situated forms of inequality. In other words, mountain biking films do not just give us something to watch but give us ways to experience mountain biking. Throughout our analysis, we call for mountain bikers to critically rethink problematic ideals of authenticity and strive to understand one’s place within political and societal constructs and consider the ethical implications of our actions.
George Leigh Mallory, on why he wanted to climb Everest (New York Times, 18 March 1923)
Since 2012 the Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group has been convening interdisciplinary conversations about the study, experience, management and use of a diverse range of places. Our contributors include artists, architects, geographers, creative writers, managers and engineers. Since 2020 our playful and informal sessions have run online, and have been recorded for posterity here, ranging across topics such as haunting, covid, place making and homeliness.
In July, the first session in the Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group’s 2023 series of online talks themed around contemporary ‘exploration’, focussed on the motives, means and modes of exploration of modern ruins, with a resulting write-up here. This Autumn we will be continuing our exploration of exploration with sessions on subterranean delving in caves, abandoned mines, and sewers; and on engagements with rock by climbers and quarry lurkers.
The events are free to attend, and open to all. Details of each event is set out below. To register for a place at either or both events please signup via our Eventcube store: SHU-SPG (eventcube.io).
Exploring #2: Going Underground (7-9.30PM, Thursday 26 October 2023)
Exploring the forgotten mines of England and Wales.
“Why do you explore those mines you go down? You must be mad!” one for my explorer friends asked me a few months ago. For once, I didn’t have an immediate answer, so I mulled it over. It started a few years ago after my friend showed me pictures of a small ganister mine he’d found in Wharncliffe Woods. It was fascinating. Another world. A lost world I had no awareness or knowledge of. So fascinated by it, I went out and explored it myself and immediately got the bug. Since then, I have explored the vast and cavernous slate mines of North Wales and the spatially-challenged lead mines of Derbyshire, amongst others. So returning to my friend’s question. When you are underground it is a place of absolute solitude and peace. I guess it’s a form of escapism. Then there’s the geology. And the social history. These mines were peoples’ livelihoods and sustained local communities over decades. And while all traces may have disappeared above ground, underground it’s a different story. In the mine it’s like a private museum. Then, as a photographer, there’s the not inconsiderable challenge of capturing the mines on camera. On next seeing my friend and offering these reasons, he fell silent for a moment. After a brief pause, he then replied: “OK, I’d not thought of it like that”.
Exploring the Natural Underground: A New Sociology of Caving
Kevin Bingham (Sociology & Leisure Studies, Barnsley College)
Challenging the old language of caving and the control and authority of ‘legislators’ over what it means to be an ‘authentic’ caver, Kevin Bingham’s new book views the natural underground as a site of leisure and anthropotechnics. What the book sets out to do from a sociological perspective is reveal the heterogeneity of the natural underground by unpacking some of the ways it can stimulate imaginations, senses and emotions. Viewing the act of caving as something special because it occurs between the rhythms and routines of the surface world and the obscurities of darkness, it is argued that a world can be found that offers richer experiences of living. The experiences are richer because the natural underground can become a place of ontological dislocation. To view caves in such a way is to realise that they lead into the naked convulsions of differends and the magical wonders of the sublime. The book concludes with the suggestion that caving, from a leisure perspective, is in the end all about the art of sublimation. That is to say, the natural underground is for some people about finding pleasure, pain and trauma simultaneously since it grants temporary liberation from the normal temporal, spatial and existential orders found in present modernity. Challenging the old language of caving and the control and authority of ‘legislators’ over what it means to be an ‘authentic’ caver, Kevin Bingham’s new book views the natural underground as a site of leisure and anthropotechnics. What the book sets out to do from a sociological perspective is reveal the heterogeneity of the natural underground by unpacking some of the ways it can stimulate imaginations, senses and emotions. Viewing the act of caving as something special because it occurs between the rhythms and routines of the surface world and the obscurities of darkness, it is argued that a world can be found that offers richer experiences of living. The experiences are richer because the natural underground can become a place of ontological dislocation. To view caves in such a way is to realise that they lead into the naked convulsions of differends and the magical wonders of the sublime. The book concludes with the suggestion that caving, from a leisure perspective, is in the end all about the art of sublimation. That is to say, the natural underground is for some people about finding pleasure, pain and trauma simultaneously since it grants temporary liberation from the normal temporal, spatial and existential orders found in present modernity.
From Caves to Karst and Back: Reassessing What It Means to Study the “Underground” in Venezuela, Cuba, and Puerto Rico
Maria Perez (Geography & Anthropology, West Virginia University)
This talk revisits two decades of experience accompanying, assisting, and learning from cave explorers both during expeditions to caves large and small and in other spaces where they gather, plan, process, and share what they learn in the field. The caves I have visited with cavers are located in the diverse karsts of Venezuela, Cuba, and, most recently, Puerto Rico. Karst refers to an environment formed by the dissolution of soluble carbonate rock (typically limestone). This process of dissolution forms not only caves, but also sinkholes, towers, and other geomorphological features typical of such processes. During these two decades I have closely followed a particular shift in emphasis from caves to caves-as-part-of-karst-systems. This shift has had major implications in terms not only of cave and karst science and exploration, but also conservation. In this talk, I offer examples of this shift from my research and I reflect on how it invites a reassessment of what we mean when we think of the “underground.” The first point is easy and far from novel, and that is that the term is too simplistic and often unhelpful to understand what’s actually going on (in our experiences) in the world. How easy we forget that the modern default thinking on the “underground” is extremely recent (in the context of human history), and in large part the result of engineering projects that have hardened and flattened the ground in ways inconceivable for most humans only a few centuries ago. My second and more ambitious point is to convince you of the power, purchase, and fruitful applications of a karst sensibility in our investigations. This sensibility, I argue, is most useful not only when challenging a whole slew of dichotomies (i.e., under vs over ground, land vs sea, soil vs water, past vs present, living vs dying, nature vs culture, etc.), but also for inspiring more accurate frameworks to make sense of what makes the appeal of the “underground” so powerful in the first place.
Situationism in the Sewers? Urban Caving versus Urban Exploration
Greg Brick, (Geology, University of Minnesota)
I began exploring natural and artificial caves in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area of the state of Minnesota, USA, in 1988, culminating in my 2009 book, SUBTERRANEAN TWIN CITIES. I made early use of the phrase “urban caving” to describe this activity, in a 1992 article in the NSS NEWS. I took it as a point of pride never to go underground without investigating some geological or hydrological enigma. With the advent of urbex (urban exploration) websites in the late 1990s, however, the local caves and tunnels were suddenly flooded with a new generation of urban explorers. Because of ample subterranean resources in these cities, much local urbex focused on infrastructural exploration, rather than the usual aboveground industrial “ruins.” Latter-day urbex has been explained by some researchers using postmodernist theory. The very term “exploration,” however, is fraught with colonial baggage. It’s even questionable whether urbex fits the trendy “transgressive” label. Urbex is a highly gendered practice, most participants being young white males, whose online self-promotion and pursuit of “spectacle” (now with YouTube monetization!) were readily assimilated by consumer capitalism. Situationism, on the other hand, a French movement often cited as a forerunner of urbex, could prove fatal to someone underground. Guy Debord himself would soon be lost in the Paris catacombs or sewers if he had “drifted” randomly through the confusing labyrinths. I argue that much scholarship on urbex by cultural geographers applies more readily to aboveground urbex. We should make this distinction when assessing the academic literature.
Exploring #3: On the Rocks (7-9.30PM, Thursday 16 November 2023)
Quarry Woman: Pixelated Extraction as Material Reckoning
Victoria Lucas (artist)
Victoria Lucas is an artist based in Sheffield, UK. She is one third of the art collective Heavy Water, 0.5 Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Central Lancashire and part-time PhD Candidate in the Art, Design and Media Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University. Recent exhibitions include PostNatures, Graves Gallery, Sheffield (2023); Aggregate, Freelands Foundation, London (2022) and Heavy Water at Site Gallery, Sheffield (2021). Her artistic research lingers at the edges of materiality and culture, as an interrogation of how the technological dissolution of boundaries might reorientate female subjectivity in the context of an ecological crisis. Lucas uses technology specifically to deconstruct and reconstitute post-industrial sites as artworks, as a method of exploring the web of interrelations between the material, biological, cultural and historical subjects encountered. This research is realised through the production and distribution of artworks incorporating video, photography, storytelling, performance and sculpture. This ecological approach to artistic practice is contextualised by the post-industrial landscapes of Northern England. In the craggy rock of post industry and at the conceptual edges of human-centred culture, the skins of ontological categorisation are permeated through a collaborative, subversive process of material reckoning. Technology becomes a co-conspirator; nature a mentor. Through lingering with nature in the aftermath of material extraction, Lucas visualises new aggregates that de-centre the human subject as part of a post-humanist entanglement of matter.
The Tale of The Journey to The Dead Engine in The Shed at The Bottom of Heaven’s Walls: being a poetic voyage into the depths of Dinorwig Quarries
Mark Goodwin (poet and climber)
The Tale of The Journey is a sound-enhanced version of a long poem that remembers a collaborative exploration made by a poet, photographer and climber. The original text version of the poem is published in Mark Goodwin’s Rock as Gloss (Longbarrow Press, 2019). This sound-enhanced version is a mix of on location field-recordings, including Mark performing the poem amongst the slate slabs & rubble of Dinorwig Quarries in North Wales, in January 2018. In January 2009 poet Mark Goodwin, photographer Nikki Clayton and internationally renowned rock-climber Johnny Dawes shared a trip down into Dinorwig Quarries. These vast holes of haunting slate consist of forty galleries, hundreds of feet deep, extending over an area of seven hundred acres. They are a climbers’ playground … and the many tunnels, inclines, winding-houses and vertiginous rusting ladders offer exhilarating and bewitching opportunity for exploration. However, the slate-ancient sadness and pain this place contains is sharp ¬– for these mountainside holes were where many Welsh people struggled and suffered to extract slate … this place killed people. Since his teens (in the 1980s) Mark has had a go at making poems from this ruptured ground … and has also given time to audio-recording its rich sound-sculptural atmosphere … dripping water, cronking ravens, and sliding slate-scree. The Tale of The Journey is one of his more successful struggles with this intricately layered place of deep rift and play.
“Whose consent do you have to name this in this way?”: Gender and the politics of land in outdoor rock climbing route names.
Jennifer Wigglesworth (Outdoor Recreation & Tourism Management, University of Northern British Columbia)
In outdoor rock climbing, the ‘first’ person who successfully ascends and sets up a route – the first ascensionist – gets to choose a name for it. Some first ascensionists use misogynistic, racist, homophobic, transphobic or ableist names for routes, and these naming practices extend across North America, Australia, and the United Kingdom (Climb the Gap, 2022). This issue is a complex one – the first ascent (FA) tradition is made possible by settler colonialism – with a long history (Loeffler, 1996). Discriminatory route names were rarely challenged because of the widely accepted tradition of FA naming rights; however, in the summer of 2020, the advocacy around renaming routes gained momentum alongside transnational calls for racial justice. In this presentation, I use an analysis informed by feminism, anti-racism, and settler colonialism to discuss the implications of naming practices within a shifting cultural terrain. I revisit data I collected in 2018 that examined climbers’ reactions to misogynistic route names, and I document significant route name changes that took place in Canada and the United States since the summer of 2020. I argue that the politics of naming routes cannot be divorced from a settler-colonial logic that has long used (re)naming land as a strategy for nation-building. Furthermore, I demonstrate that the successful renaming of discriminatory routes is one way to support different ways of exploring rock faces. It is my hope that this talk contributes to a larger discussion about the intersection of gendered and colonial power and how they shape landscapes and recreation practices.
The Quarry: conversations on mobile geologies
Sarah Bowden and Jean Boyd (Art & Design, University of Gloucestershire)
A local quarry here in Gloucestershire has been of interest to us, as a site for investigative field trips and the ongoing critical reflections these provoke. The quarry is both an extraction site for blue lias clay and gravel, sedimented over immense periods of geologic time, and a landfill site, sedimenting new forms of material strata. Through conversation and images we will offer a call-and-response dialogue with the quarry and each other, to consider the contrasts that the site encompasses: of geologic and human histories and their timescales. We will move between perspectives; analytic, interpretive and speculative. Our points of focus are the following: Sarah questions extraction and circulation as economic dynamics maintaining flows of matter, capital and fossil debt between past and future. She will consider how mapping, surveying and image-making enable extractive apprehensions of landscape. Jean will discuss the site as an intercalation of storied matter; a mobile geology of deposition and distribution, construction and ruin. The quarry is lively and has stories to tell.
“I am interested in what library scientists call the “information-seeking behaviours” of artists—how and why arts practitioners pursue research, often in the form of primary source archives, objects, and interviews, but also from sources as diverse as statistical records, song lyrics, scientific data, archaeological reports, amateur film, architectural plans, found documents, unpublished recordings, and so on. While not necessarily new, this desire to examine, extract, and enfold “real world” information into artistic practice is a phenomenon that, in my twenty years as an artist, curator, art historian, and now MFA director, I have seen intensify significantly in recent years.”
We were introduced to Rebecca Duclos’ notion of ‘compulsive browsing’ by Jane Wildgoose during her joint presentation with Harry Willis Fleming at Sheffield Hallam University’s Space & Place Group’s recent ‘In Ruins’ event, the first in our ‘Exploring’ season.
Our season of four events seeks to investigate the motivations and methods of a range of enthusiastic explorers of otherwise mute portions of the environment: broken buildings, underground spaces, rock faces and bumpy trails. The connecting thread is that in each place something is being sought there by the explorer – a desired mix of visceral experience, a curation of an event and some sense of attaining a truthful and/or creative discovery through material engagement with a place and its fragments. In short, a pursuit of a harvest of something needed from the chosen place, via a ‘compulsive browsing’.
The ‘Exploring’ series sessions will enquire into that meaning making – that animation (or re-animation) of the mundane.
For our first session we focussed on engagements with ruins. Enthusiastic photographer and urban explorer Denzil Watson guided us through the rooftops, culverts, passages and broken shells of Sheffield’s abandoned places. Denzil’s rich and engrossing account showed his sustained engagement with the city’s ruins over the past four decades. In his images the recent, the eternal-seeming and the now-gone all intermingled, summoning both a local-ness (for those in the audience familiar with this city) and a universal-ness, for those who were not.
Next, Portuguese architect, academic and curator Ines Moreira chronicled her encounters with modern ruins in both her home country and in Eastern Europe. In doing so the tone of the event started to change. Ines questioned the desirability of the relics of war, totalitarianism and calamity that her projects had foregrounded. Variously she showed her ruin-sites to be implicated in networks of dark purpose, to be semantically unstable and/or to be on-the-brink-of-forgetting-and-erasure. A sense of ruins’ fractured sense of loss, meaning and futurity was brought into the arena. Ines confessed to having come to feel exhausted through her ruin gazing.
These revelation of the emotional labour entwined in the prolonged act of gazing upon others’ (and/or common-heritage) ruins set the stage nicely for Harry Willis Fleming and Jane Wildgoose’s joint presentation on the entropic interaction of their two arts practices, and of the emotional labour of more personalised ruin gazing. Harry articulated a recovery-drive of sorts, related to his attempts to restore (virtually) his ancestral home, North Stoneham House. Jane introduced her attempt to recreate a Cabinet of Curiosities. Each them problematised the compulsive browsing sitting at the heart of their each working with ruined remainder. Harry moved on the explain his Bervie Brow Research Station – created in the abandoned ruins of an Aberdeenshire nuclear bunker. Meanwhile Jane chronicled how she had increasingly come to question the ethical acceptability of the fragments assembled in her ‘Wildgoose Memorial Library’, leading to the decision taken to inter her artefacts in the bunker’s subterranean strongroom. In effect to sequester them; to sever them from the accessible world of now, to further restrict their meaning and integrity. In short to ruin them, but at the same time to stall their entropy.
“Seemingly sleepy, old fashioned things, defaced houses, closed-down factories, the debris of shipwrecked histories still today raise up the ruins of an unknown, strange city. They burst forth… like slips of the tongue from an unknown, perhaps unconscious, language”
De Certeau & Giard (1998) ‘Ghosts in the City’ in The Practice of Everyday Life, Vol. 2, Minnesota University Press, p. 133.
The urban fabric is constantly changing. New buildings appear and for a while are the focus of attention and intensive use. Meanwhile, old buildings fall into disuse and thereafter decay. Many old buildings are replaced before they reach the status of ruins. Some ruins sit in the urban fabric only for a short – transitional – period, whilst others linger for longer. But only certain ruins become the focus of attention; most remain unnoticed or unremarked.
My research over the last twelve years has sought to examine the practices by which certain abandoned, dilapidated structures are made the subject of meaning-making: how they come to be noticed as ruins.
My research’s focus has largely been upon the physical remnants of defence networks, and in particular upon military (or civil defence) concrete bunkers. Mostly this research has been carried out in the UK, and has examined the material and semantic fates of various Cold War-era bunkers.
I’ve considered how seemingly nondescript concrete structures have become the chosen object of considerable fascination for some, and how – within certain communities of enthusiasts – images, exploratory accounts, fragments of narrative, histories and specifications have become valorised and circulated, almost as a currency.
But – as noted above – only some ruins come to attract this attention, and most buildings fall out of use unremarked. In my contribution to the Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group’s online session ‘In Ruins’ on 6th July 2023 (7-9pm):
I’ll be reflecting on the (semi) randomness of why some places get valorised, some become objects of concern (generally ruins are seen as unsettling to the good order of the urban environment and its populace), but others pass unremarked. Certainly one driver for valorisation is nostalgia – whereby particular ruins (as representative of culturally precious events or former activities) become the cherished objects of cultural (and material) desire and/or preservation.
But there is – of course – another route by which a ruin can arise through nostalgia. Here the spur is a direct connection by an individual to a site now found in ruin. This can be a particularly potent ruin-attachment, but it struggles to be communal or to transcend the viewer’s own direct knowledge.
Let me explain with an illustration. I used to be an office worker. I started work in 1990. Whilst in the final year of my degree I watched the office building that I was shortly to start working in being erected (as an extension to an Edwardian terrace of ‘chambers’-type buildings). On my walk to Uni I could look step by step at the new building’s steel frame of the new office as it was assembled. Over a sequence of weeks I saw the building take shape, becoming complete and enclosed. A few months later I started working in it. As a trainee I rotated around various departments and worked in various portions of the building: I fully inhabited it. It was a site of highs and lows; great days and horrible days, a sequence of events played out in the rooms formed solidly by the enclosing of that steel frame.
Finding myself many years later, back at that site, the now-abandoned building functioned for me like an giant advent calendar. Looking at each window summoned a memory of a particular interaction, emotion, learning-step (or mis-step). Just as Tim Edensor (2005) has noted (in relation to nostalgic impulses related to encounters with industrial ruins): “one conception of walking around a ruin might be to construe it as a walk through memory, a walk which produces a compulsion to narrate that which is remembered” (160).
But, coming upon the ruins of that building – all shuttered, graffitied and overgrown – also jolted sense of my past living on in some physical sense beyond my having eventually moved on to live and work elsewhere. It felt like I had turned my back and entropy had taken over. Not in the sense that I personalise this – my departure didn’t cause this building to fall into decay – but in the sense of a realisation that the world had carried on there without me, in way different to what I had been expecting: it has proceeded as change rather than stasis. It emphasised to me that going back in time is never the same as going back in space.
The prominent city-centre location of this building and (it appears from local newspaper reports) the delay between my former employer having vacated this building and permission being granted for erection at this site of (yet another) student apartment block, suggested to me that this modern ruin might make it into the ‘eyesore’ (or something-needs-to-be-done-about-this) category of noticed ruin.
But soon after that encounter, I came across the office-ruins of the building I had moved on into (in a different city) in 2000. This ruin was more in the unremarkable camp – it posed no disordering threat to its locality, but peering inside it was a corruption of the place that I have known and worked within. That experience also emphasised the rupture between travel in time and travel in space. The view that confronted me is the opening photograph above. When I had worked there, the floor had always felt unquestionably solid and sturdy, and the ceiling had drawn no attention to itself. Desks, phones, computers, suits, voices would have bounced around the now voided-space.
No-one will rhapsodise over the death of an office. It’s not a species of property that has heritage or other communally-nostalgic value. Enthusiastic communities of office-ruin aficionados are unlikely to proliferate online.
But ruins can be personal too.
Reference: Edensor, Tim (2005) Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality(Berg: Oxford)
“The fetish, then, not only originated from, but remains specific to, the problem of the social value of material objects as revealed in situations formed by the encounter of radically heterogeneous social systems.”
William Pietz (1985) ‘The problem of the Fetish – 1’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9(9): 5-17
Don’t get excited. This short blog post isn’t about fetishism in the sense of deviant sexuality. It’s about a brief encounter (alone) with a sofa and how in that moment two very different systems of meaning coincided and momentarily surrendered me to the special power and poignancy of that furniture. Pietz identifies the anthropological notion of the fetish – of certain material artefacts imbued with special powers – as forged at the meeting-point between two very different social systems. Whilst his encounters of concern are cross-cultural, mine are paradigmic: concerning the prosaic realm of soft furnishings and the emotionally loaded realm of grief.
The story begins a few days after the death of my grandmother. I’m tasked with the job of taking her false teeth to the undertakers. As a family we can’t decide whether she’d want to be cremated with her teeth in or out. This is a question that has no logical resolution. Wearing her dentures was her day-time practice. In the public realm she would wear her teeth (and would be incomplete with out them) but at night she took them out before going to bed, and therefore being at rest didn’t involve having her teeth in. But being at her funeral would place her in the public realm (so logic said ‘teeth in’). But she would not be visible in her casket, and was otherwise dressed for – eternal – sleep (so other logic said ‘teeth out’). We couldn’t decide what was right. But we didn’t regard her dentures as the kind of memento that would be readily cherishable. So we decided to put the decision into the hands of the undertakers – literally: give them Nan’s teeth and let them decide.
So, there I was walking towards the undertakers, a small bag in hand carrying my grandmothers’ dentures. Maybe I was reflecting on the public/private dichotomy of false teeth. Maybe I was thinking about what to have for lunch. I don’t recall. I was simply in a normal place, in a normal mode of ‘getting on with life’.
I entered the funeral parlour. Those are the correct words for such a place, but they don’t carry the right connotation. ‘Funeral parlour’ summons up images of gloom, solemnity. Something faintly Victorian. Instead the room into which I stepped from the street was far more domestic in tone. It felt like a living room. It was quiet. And for a moment no one was there. Then a young woman appeared. She spoke slowly, in a manner designed to communicate a modern solemnity. She was young, but damn good at her job. As she spoke (and I have no recollection of the words she used to invoke her pleasantries) she created a calm, caring impression that melded with the design of the room. In my memory everything in that room was larger than you would normally find. I’m sure that is a distortion of my recollection. But as she talked I surrendered into the role of grieving relative. My flippant thoughts of Nan’s dentures and of category-confusion faded away. Via the young lady’s hushed intonations, I was invited to think of myself as someone who – on that day needed special care and attention, and as she spoke I surrendered into that.
I was invited to sit down on the sofa behind me. The young lady said she was going to take my package through to her colleagues and she needed me to stay for a moment. Again, I forget why. Maybe a receipt needed to be handed over.
But as I stooped to sit my body started to echo the surrender that was already working its way through my mind. My body committed itself to the support of the chair (as we do – without poetic thought – every time we choose to sit). And as my bum connected with the sofa the super-sized embrace of this cleverly chosen furniture kicked in. I could feel myself sinking into the upholstery, it wrapping its arms around me. It held and consumed me. It was the softest, biggest, deepest, most relaxing sofa I’ve ever sat in. And for a moment I felt truly cared for.
The moment passed, of course. The young lady returned. Perhaps she gave me a receipt. I leant forward and departed the sofa, stepping back into the street. No small bag in hand, but with a feeling of calm certitude.
I’m both impressed and shocked by this moment of calm surrender – and of the momentary power of the sofa and its circumstance over me. It was appropriate and helpful to be mesmerised in this way by the skilful setting of a place and a person – but in how so many other ways might artful interactional design create an atmosphere conducive to getting me to surrender so willingly and completely. Had a sales proposition been woven into that moment of surrender, I fear that I might have signed up to anything.
“In the history of mankind the Industrial Revolution in Britain was a unique phenomenon whose repercussions have spread throughout the world. We live today in a society whose economy is essentially industrial, our prosperity is based on the fruits of industrial activity and our surroundings, both urban and rural, are largely the result of over two centuries of progressive industrialisation. Industrial archaeology is concerned largely with those surroundings. In simple terms it is the examination and analysis of the physical remains of the Industrial Revolution period.”
Neil Cossons (1975) The BP Book of Industrial Archeology, David & Charles: Newton Abbot, p.15
I have the BP Book of Industrial Archeology in my hands. It speaks of a different time, in at least two senses. It purports to speak of the Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth century, but it also speaks of the time when the book itself was written. With its confident talk of ‘mankind’, the uniqueness of Britain’s industrialisation and of a faith in industrial progress it is alien to the sensibilities of the early Twenty-first century.
But what strikes me most is the book’s association with BP, as the oil industry garners less than two pages of consideration in the works’ 500 pages of industry-by-industry exemplification. At that coverage is largely confined to the working of shale-oil deposits in West Lothian in the late 1800s. Meanwhile gas is addressed only in relation to municipal processing of coal at local gas works. The rise of crude oil importation and processing is not considered part of the book’s story, it is too contemporary. And the North Sea oil field – at the time of the book’s writing – was yet to send any oil and gas ashore.
All history-writing is selective, and reflects the preoccupations of the era in which the history is written. Industrial archaeology emerged first as a hobbyist pastime in the 1950s, and then reached a peak of popularity in the late 1960s / early 1970s. David & Charles (the publishers) had a lucrative business in publishing accessible ‘laymans’ guides to fuel this ‘serious-hobby’. And meanwhile BP (and Shell) were keen to support (to fuel in a literal sense) this ambulant pastime. The book has gazetteer sections: it is nudging the reader to get out and explore (and to consume petrol in the process).
The last decade, or so, has seen a boom in oil-related books, and whilst most take the form of an angry indictment, some are more concerned to summon a curious lament or nostalgia, and here I’m thinking of Marriott & Mccalister 2021’s Crude Britannia: How Oil Shaped a Nation (Pluto Press). Both types of book seek to spotlight a phenomenon that we have lived along-side but have paid little heed to: the petrochemical estate, its shaping impact upon the UK (and global) landscape and its strange ability to lie unseen, in plain sight. But Marriott & Mccalister’s book, and the road-trip around the vanished footprint of the UK’s oil and gas industry that it presents, is not all that can be said (or noticed) about the oil and gas industry and its legacy. And I guess that’s the point that Just Stop Oil would make – that their protest actions at art galleries are about forcing oil and gas back into consciousness.
But for me the punctum moment was stumbling upon the ruins of the Rhosgoch oil terminal on Anglesey. Opened in 1974 the terminal stored pumped crude from the then-supersized oil tankers that were too big to navigate down the Mersey to Shell’s Stanlow refinery. So until 1990 their oil was stored and pipped from this rural site. But the site was closed in 1990 and lay vacant for many years. When came upon it, I wandered in and found the footings of multiple large tanks, and orderly lanes between them. With all tanks and pipes long gone the effect was of a strange embossing – a rural landscape faintly indented with hints of a previous super-ordered arrangement of space. But the site was completely open, isolated and context-less.
(I acknowledge – of course – that oil and gas installations leave behind legacies of soil and groundwater contamination which are a much less wistful residues of former industrial activity.)
Last year my conscience was niggling me – I was feeling that I needed to address my knowledge gap around oil and gas, having been engrossed watching the Norwegian drama series State of Happiness (about their North Sea Oil era). So, I set out to read books that would bring me up to speed with the shaping impact of the Twentieth century’s dominant fuel (oil and gas): the petrochemical century and its’ hiddenness. In part there was a desire to knit make sense of time passing – for in the 1990s and early 2000s I’d had some association with BP facilities in South Wales, including its refineries and large petrochemical complexes spread along the Severn estuary.
Those places, when visited in the 1990s had felt a bit tired and speaking of an earlier optimism via their faded 1960’s design. But in their solidity I had assumed them to be eternal. I had no clear sense of what these locations must have been like before oil came, or that these mammoth complexes, with their gantries, pipes and tanks, might ever cease to exist. And yet, as an environmental lawyer I’d been a very small part of the creeping de-industrialisation process that would in due course (after I can left South Wales) culminate in the elimination of these sites.
Marriott & Mccalister chronicle this passing surprising well. I say surprising for two reasons. First, because I initially found their book too complicated by their attempt to weave reference to references to songs into their narrative. Secondly, because I thought that I would get a deeper insight and understanding from less psychogeographically inclined works. But how wrong I was. The histories of the oil industry that I found and read were dull, dull, dull. A succession of competitive commercial rivalries, imperial misadventures and mergers. My family laughed and me when I told them that I’d found these books boring. “Well, obviously”, came their reply.
But this begs a question, what makes the story of (for example) coal something that can be culturally embraced as an epic story of local and national identity, but oil and gas slithers into the shadows getting little purchase on consciousness?
Marriott & Mccalister suggest that the Oil and Gas industry likes this ability to have hid in the shadows, and that has served it well, largely. All the odder then that BP chose to sponsor an industrial archaeology book in the 1975s – I suspect that there is little chance that it would choose to do so now.
‘The truth of the matter, as Marx sees, is that everything that bourgeois society builds is built to be torn down. “All that is solid”—from the clothes on our backs to the looms and mills that weave them, to the men and women who work the machines, to the houses and neighborhoods the workers live in, to the firms and corporations that exploit the workers, to the towns and cities and whole regions and even nations that embrace them all—all these are made to be broken tomorrow, smashed or shredded or pulverized or dissolved, so they can be recycled or replaced next week, and the whole process can go on again and again, hopefully forever, in ever more profitable forms. The pathos of all bourgeois monuments is that their material strength and solidity actually count for nothing and carry no weight at all, that they are blown away like frail reeds by the very forces of capitalist development that they celebrate. Even the most beautiful and impressive bourgeois buildings and public works are disposable, capitalized for fast depreciation and planned to be obsolete, closer in their social functions to tents and encampments than to “Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, Gothic cathedrals”‘
Marshall Berman (1987) All that is Solid Melts into Air: The experience of modernity, London: Verso p.99
2022 was a pretty full-on year for the Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group. Somehow we managed stage seven workshop online events, three on our originally proposed theme of ‘Changing Places’ and a further four on the spin-off ‘Changing Campuses’ theme.
The Changing Campuses theme carries on into 2023 via a series of events which Jill Dickinson (now At University of Leeds) is leading with Sam Elkington (University of Teesside) for the Society for Research in Higher Education, on the theme of the future of learning landscapes. The three hybrid sessions are 1) Assemblages (22-2-23); 2) Networks (26-4-23) and 3) Flexibilities (14-6-23). Full details are here: https://srhe.ac.uk/landscapes-of-learning-for-unknown-futures-prospects-for-space-in-higher-education/
Meanwhile, as a follow-on to the Changing Places theme the SHU SPG’s theme for 2023 will be ‘Creative Destruction’. This post is a call for proposals, in order to see how much interest there is in engaging with this theme, both within SHU and beyond. The level of interest will then shape how this year’s series of online events is pulled together. So, please send me (l.e.bennett@shu.ac.uk) a proposal by 15 March 2023 if you would like to contribute, for this please provide a title, a paragraph setting out a summary of your project, idea etc and details of by when in 2023 you would be ready to present your contribution.
At our online events (which are free to participate in) each contributor gets 15 minutes to give their presentation, followed by discussion. The focus in our events is on relaxed interdisciplinarity and on the creative power of juxtaposing “presentations that by rights wouldn’t normally appear in the same event, but when they do it gets you thinking”. In our 2022 sessions we hosted presenters from management studies, architecture, education, facilities management, tourism, creative writing, disability studies, film making, sports & leisure studies, criminology, performance, graphic communication, law, museum studies, urban studies, jewellery design and social policy.
Growing out of 2022’s concern to examine through a variety of arts, humanities and social science lenses how places change, this year’s SHU SPG theme seeks to provoke an open (and playful) interpretation of the expression ‘creative destruction’. Perhaps there are four main sense that could be applied to this term:
how the act of destruction has certain aesthetic potentiality (i.e. can be used as a creative resource or object)
how the act of creativity necessarily often requires an (underacknowledged) element of destruction, elimination or subtraction (i.e. you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs)
how an urge to destroy-in-order-to-replace (i.e. to create the new) underpins capitalism and its urban processes
how the entropy in all things cannot be resisted, but can be curated (e.g. DeSilvey’s ‘palliative curation’ of ruins).
Through our call we seek contributions from any discipline that can speak to any of the above (or add new interpretations of the phrase). The only requirement is that the contribution either directly or indirectly applies to the built environment. An indirect contribution could be a presentation concerned (for example) with sculpture as a subtraction process, if the presenter was happy to allow an onward discussion to consider how the act of stone sculpture could be likened to urban subtraction processes. In other words: bring us the stimulus and then we’ll see where it can head onward to.
In disciplinary terms ‘creative destruction’ has a clear meaning in Marxist economics – in its theorisation of capitalism’s destruction drive in the quest for the constant production of new surplus value. Meanwhile in the arts, as expressed by anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin in 1842, “the urge to destroy is a creative passion”. But destruction is more than just catharsis: destruction-based artworks embody a conundrum in that through subtraction, inflicted damage or disassembly the resulting / remaining item is rendered more noticeable, more noteworthy. Thus, destruction creates poignancy for a residual object (and/or memory of the moment of destruction). Meanwhile in the gritty realm of the prosaic, cities shrink through urban editing (de-densification) and buildings a subtracted through the industrial arts of demolition.
Our 2023 theme seeks to develop a conversation about creative destruction, editing-down, subtraction and disassembly that stretches productively across scales, domains and objectives to help inform consideration of creative destruction within urban change processes.
“There is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present where there should be something”
Mark Fisher (2016) The Weird & The Eerie, p61.
Last night we held the final online session in Sheffield Hallam University’s Space & Place group’s ‘Changing Places’ series. The event took the form of an online book launch for the exciting and timely new collection, Sport and Physical Activity in Catastrophic Environments, edited by Jim Cherrington and Jack Black (Routledge, 2022). Featuring contributions from around the world, this collection looks at the ways in which sport and physical activity react to natural and man-made shocks to place, whether by armed conflict, natural disaster or socio-economic turmoil.
The event featured the following presentations:
Jim Cherrington and Jack Black (Sheffield Hallam University)
Sport and Physical Activity in Catastrophic Environments: Tuning to the ‘weird’ and the ‘eerie’
Dani Abulhawa (Leeds University)
Moving toward understanding through open and expressive physical activity: Findings from a preliminary study into the work of Skateboarding charity, SkatePal in the West Bank, Occupied Palestinian Territories
Kevin Bingham (Barnsley College)
An urban explorer’s experiences of meshwork, melding and the uncanny: invisible cities of the rubble
Kass Gibson (Plymouth Marjons University)
Informational Hazards and Moral Harm: Sport and Exercise Science Laboratories as Sites of Moral Catastrophes
Here’s the recording of the session, and my reflections on the event follow.
Jim and Jack opened the event by outlining their conceptualisation of ‘catastrophe’. They see catastrophe as more fundamental than disasters (which can be anticipated, and to an extent planned for). A catastrophe is a circumstance of rupture where we come to feel torn from familiar notions of being, doing, belonging and inhabiting. It engenders a feeling of ‘end times’ and forces us to acclimatise to a new, unsettling, environment and context. A catastrophe puts us in place where it is hard to dwell, and yet we still must strive to live there. So, we learn how to normalise the abnormal, whether that’s the climate emergency, war, socio-economic turmoil etc. In the face of catastrophe, we witness the end of what we were previously able to take as stable, familiar and grounding.
So (they then provocatively ask) what role does sport and physical activity play within these changed places and contexts of dwelling? It seems incongruous to ask: surely sport is for ‘the good times’? But being so deeply ‘of the body’, physical activity conducted within the context and environs of catastrophe melds two things: that heightened phenomenological sense of being alive that exercise can summon and that empirical confrontation with unsettled contexts and environments. In short, exercise and confrontation of catastrophe, both require physically and cognitive exertion in order to accommodate to altered capacities of body and place.
Now, that formula (which is my extrapolation from Jim and Jack’s comments, and they may not like the direction I’m taking this) sets up opportunity for their contributors to explore the presence and actions of moving, adaptive bodies and minds within catastrophic places. Thus, Dani Abulhawa introduced us to the role of skateboarding projects in the West Bank, and specifically of how the act of learning to skate instils a sense of agency, growth, accomplishment and resilience in the individual skater, and also summons that communally via the shared experience of developing these community projects. Meanwhile in his account of his urbex forays into post-earthquake Christchurch’s ruination, Kevin Bingham used Italo Calvino’s motif of ‘Invisible Cities’ to suggest how this destroyed cityscape offered up a site of open-reading, such that this was (but also no-longer was) New Zealand. Instead, the city had become a distorted (and or distortable) place in which (in his words) “our maps and memories are deceiving us”. Kevin detailed his body’s lines of flight, contortion and accommodation to new logics of movement across the rubble where “we were spared the boredom of following the building in the usual way” but instead had to invent your own path of movement across denatured streets and ruptured buildings. And as with movement, so with meaning-making – in this invisible city Kevin would forge new – personalised – frameworks for his aesthetic consumption of this terrain. Kevin is unapologetic about this appropriation of place, and tantalising holds together the eager to explain theoretical realm of his academic training and the reticence of the urbexer’s experiential consumption logics of ‘it is what it is, I do what I do, because I do it’ (that’s not a quote from Kevin). In his account Christchurch was an open-form playscape, evacuated of other humans. But he conceded in the Q&A that not everyone liked that he and his crew had come to the city to play (my word, not his). So, it was interesting that the final presenter, Kass Gibson, then placed moral considerations front and centre of his talk, examining fitness laboratories as sites of moral catastrophy and of how the origins of such lab’s measured and evaluated physical activity lie in the control sciences of prison regimes, military training, time and motion studies etc. In presenting this analysis, Kass presented the body as a changing place and a site of trauma, invoking the haunting title of Jean-Marie Brohm’s 1978 collection of essays: ‘Sport: a prison of measured time’.
The Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group is delighted to announce that for the next event in our ‘Changing Places’ series we are hosting an online book launch for an exciting and timely new collection edited by Jim Cherrington and Jack Black, entitled Sport and Physical Activity in Catastrophic Environments as part of Routledge’s ‘Research in Sport, Culture and Society’ series. Featuring contributions from around the world, this collection looks at the ways in which sport and physical activity react to natural and man-made shocks to place, whether by armed conflict, natural disaster or socio-economic turmoil. Our online book launch event will feature presentations from the editors and three of the contributors:
Jim Cherrington and Jack Black (Sheffield Hallam University)
Introduction. Sport and Physical Activity in Catastrophic Environments: Tuning to the ‘weird’ and the ‘eerie’
Dani Abulhawa (Leeds University)
Moving toward understanding through open and expressive physical activity: Findings from a preliminary study into the work of Skateboarding charity, SkatePal in the West Bank, Occupied Palestinian Territories
Kevin Bingham (Barnsley College)
An urban explorer’s experiences of meshwork, melding and the uncanny: invisible cities of the rubble
Kass Gibson (Plymouth Marjons University)
Informational Hazards and Moral Harm: Sport and Exercise Science Laboratories as Sites of Moral Catastrophes
Places are free, but must be booked via Eventbrite (see below for the link). Registered delegates will be emailed the event’s Zoom link 24 hours prior to the start of the event.
This edited collection addresses a clear gap in the literature, as to date, there is a paucity of scholarly research that directly examines the role of sport and physical activity in the experiences of individuals and communities who have lived through catastrophe (Thorpe, 2015). This is surprising, since the ability of individuals and communities to maintain healthy relationships with their surroundings– most notably, before, during and after catastrophe – is an important point of focus, posing a number of significant questions for sport and physical activity researchers (Rowe, 2020). Namely: What happens when our existing geographical, topographical, sociological and political coordinates are shattered because of war or poverty? How can sport and exercise help us to cope when faced with unprecedented levels of planetary change? Can, and if so how, does life go on in the wastelands left over from resource extraction, industrialisation and economic decay? And what are the consequences of global pandemics for the (physical and mental) health of those whose everyday activities, hobbies, interests and forms of labour are dependent on stable notions of identity, embodiment and place? Here, sport and physical activity may seem trivial to many. However, research on the recent Covid-19 pandemic has shown how involvement in physical cultures provides an important locus of support in times of hardship and pain, as well as an important mechanism for managing the embodied, cognitive, and structural ruptures that accompany unprecedented events.
In attempting to address this lacuna, this session will present a series of case studies from an edited collection entitled: ‘Sport and Physical Activity in Catastrophic Environments’, which will be published by Routledge on November 8th 2022. Key to this approach will be an investigation of both the negative (i.e. death, mental and physical health issues, human displacement) and positive (new social and political identities, increase in environmental awareness, personal growth) outcomes of a range of socio-cultural and political changes, specifically related to the ‘end’ of capitalism, socialisation, ‘nature’ and morality. By allowing for interdisciplinary contributions that are located at the juncture of sociology, geography, social psychology, political ecology, philosophy, and the arts, an analysis of how participants in sport and physical activity respond to the complexities of the environment will be provided. In so doing, the sessions will explore the cognitive and affective sensibilities used by both individuals and communities to experiment with new social, cultural and political identities as well as how these processes are adapted in times of chaos. In this way, we hope that the session will make a meaningful contribution to empirical analyses of sport, physical activity, and the environment, while also examining how such analyses might help in developing practical resilience strategies for those most affected by catastrophic change.
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