Sandscapes: Geographies of flux and flow
Session Organisers: Dr Julian Brigstocke (Cardiff University), William Jamieson (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Sand is the stuff of power. It is a vital material in modern construction. It transgresses borders and thresholds. It connects the elemental to the global. It is at home in land, sea, and air. Yet within human geography, little attention has been paid to the material life of this imaginatively potent material. This session addresses calls for a multiplication of materiality within the discipline (Anderson and Wylie 2009; Whatmore 2006), by delving into the multiplicity of sandscapes that pervade our lives in the context of a global shortage of sand (Peduzzi 2014).
Sand, a seemingly mundane material, is an active substrate of the spaces of modernity, and constitutes a vantage point from which to read and write landscapes that are urban, coastal, nomadic; wet and dry; dispersed and fragmented; eroded and reclaimed; political and cultural. What aspects of the production of space slip through our fingers? How do we develop new ways of reading and writing everyday spaces that are intimately entangled with an inherently itinerant material? This session invites papers that engage with the materiality of sandscapes, examining how sand might reinvigorate debates around: Â
new materialism in human geography;
affective and more-than-human geographies;
new ways of reading and writing landscape;
the materiality of geopolitics;
transnational and migratory geographies;
landscapes of displacement;
planetary urbanization
 Please send your abstracts of no more than 300 words to
by the 9th of February 2018.
Many thanks,
Will
William Jamieson
PhD CandidateGeography Department Royal Holloway, University of LondonTwitter: @drbillblack