Literary and Visual Landscapes Autumn 2022 (hybrid)

A hybrid interdisciplinary seminar series hosted by the University of Bristol

Literary and Visual Landscapes (LVL) is a seminar series for bringing together a diverse range of scholars and students from the environmental and geo-humanities. LVL provides a platform for academics, early career researchers, and postgraduate students to communicate ideas and inform each other’s work. Previous seminar topics have explored a wide range of methodologies, theoretical approaches, and artistic and empirical frameworks. This autumn, LVL is bringing together scholars researching across a wide range of spatial and temporal contexts, with an emphasis on how different creative practices and modes of knowledge production (especially film) engage with embodied, extractivist, and wider Anthropocenic landscapes.

Join us on Wednesday afternoon (16.30 UK time) in G16, Cotham House or via Zoom on the following dates:

12th October - Dr Polly Atkin

‘Pining Earth: on weather, landscape and bodies in pain’

Polly Atkin lives in Cumbria. Her first poetry collection Basic Nest Architecture (Seren: 2017) is followed by second, Much With Body (Seren: 2021), and a biography Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband: 2021). She is working on a memoir exploring place, belonging and disability.

Polly has taught English and Creative Writing at QMUL, Lancaster University, and the Universities of Strathclyde and Cumbria. In 2019 she co-founded the Open Mountain initiative at Kendal Mountain Festival, which seeks to centre voices that are currently at the margins of outdoor, mountain and nature writing.

9th November - Dr Mark Bould (UWE)

'Climate Change in Suburban Science Fiction'

In The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture (2021), I argue that contemporary culture is riven with anxieties about the catastrophic anthropogenic termination of Holocene climate stability. In this talk I will discuss three recent suburban sf films in which these unconscious concerns are clear. Marjorie Prime (Almereyda 2017) is as close as sf gets to Amitav Ghosh’s argument that literary fiction is fundamentally incapable of addressing climate change, but an uncanny moment reveals how hard bourgeois fiction must fight to maintain its constitional exclusion of the world. The Tomorrow War (McKay 2021) populates the gap between the textual conscious and unconscious with metaphorical alien invaders that stand-in for climate change until abruptly they don’t anymore. The Purge (DeMonaco 2013) exemplifies the current recirculation of narratives derived from colonial adventure fiction, and thus even more directly links climate change – and suburban development – to the long history of capitalism-colonialism.

Mark Bould is Professor of Film and Literature at UWE Bristol. His books include M. John Harrison: Critical Essays (2019), Solaris (2014), SF Now (2014) and Africa SF (2013). The founding editor of Science Fiction Film and Television journal, he now co-edits the Studies in Global Science Fiction book series. He has received lifetime achievement awards from both the Science Fiction Research Association and the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts.

7th December - Dr Nagar Elodie Behzadi (University of Bristol)

'Animating extractive landscapes: Towards feminist decolonial methods?'

Feminist and decolonial scholars have long advocated for challenging the oppressive/extractive nature of geographical methods and methodologies by rethinking conventional modes of knowledge production and dissemination. This includes an engagement with ways of writing ‘beyond the academic text’ such as creative methods (e.g., film making, animation). Scholarship on resource extraction has recently taken up this call by recognising how creative method(ologie)s offer occasions to ‘expand what is visible, say-able, and knowable within geographies of extraction’ (Behzadi and Murrey, 2021. Extracting us, 2020). Yet, critical resource scholars as well as other political geographers still have much to learn to decolonise their method(ologie)s. At times, the use of certain methods coined as ‘decolonial’ and/or ‘feminist’ also risks reproducing the extractive character of other more conventional method(ologie)s. This paper engages with this tension by exploring two attempts to animate an extractive landscape beyond the ‘academic text’ in the context of ethnographic research with stigmatized coal miners in Tajikistan (2014/5). Here, I draw on the production of a animated ethnographic documentary short film on a female coal miner (Nadirah: Coal Woman), and the creation of a short ethnographic video-documentary on extractive violence and exclusion (Komor: Journeys through the Tajik underground) based on my own research in this coal extraction landscape. This focus will allow me to engage critically with notions of representation, co-production, participation and emancipation as a way to think about the (im)possibility(?) of decolonizing geographical methods.

Negar Elodie Behzadi is a lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Bristol. She is a feminist political geographer and political ecologist interested in how intersectional forms of exclusions are produced and reproduced through place and time. Her work ethnographically explores questions of resource extraction in Tajikistan, and childhood and migration in France. Negar also uses art-based methodologies and has co-directed two ethnographic films.

Please note, Zoom links will be circulated the day before each event.

This series is generously funded by the Centre for Environmental Humanities and the Departments of Geography and English.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Cotham House, 29 Cotham Hill, Bristol, United Kingdom