Since the last post I've been making fairly steady progress with writing. As I'd hoped, the modest weekly word target I'd set has been well below what I've been managing so I've kept ahead of that pretty consistently. At the same time, as always, I've been rubbish as sticking to planned chapter lengths (by some way) but I'm not worry about that right now and just carrying on with writing (i.e. sticking to the write now edit later approach I want to get better at). That means I've pretty much drafted the first two chapters - the introduction and 'NRT and Geography' - and so I'm now writing the 'Geography and Practice' chapter. That's proving to be a little more of a trudge than the previous two given the nature of the material I'm covering - it's not an introduction chapter but it's also potentially fairly broad / abstract so not easy to built up a story / make it accessible and / or avoid getting side tracked into length discussions of things that aren't that important to cover at this point in the book... Hopefully, in the end, it's going to work its way through discussions (and critiques) of performativity / events, rhythm, habit, passivity as well as give some context to 'the practice turn'.
The School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol
One thing away from writing that I did last week was take a 'fieldtrip' to Bristol. In the 'NRT and Geography' chapter I'm talking a bit about the background to NRT's emergence. That means covering some of the intellectual background / context for NRT emerging - the usual comparisons to New Cultural Geography as well as some less commonly discussed comparisons to, for example, Humanistic Geography, Structuration, Time-Geography etc.. However, I'm also trying to take seriously something Tim Cresswell talks about in his review of Ben Anderson and Paul Harrison's 'Taking-place' book - that there is a history to be written about the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol when it comes to NRT.
I'm not quite sure where this will go at present. I partly got the idea from some things I've read about the 'Berkeley School' - where 5 or 6 generations of that work has traced onwards from Sauer based on his PhD students, their students etc., though that's on a much large scale and longer time frame. I'm doing a bit of that here though it isn't quite so straightforward in terms of who to include or discount in that.
That said, as part of this I have been looking a bit into both who was at Geography at Bristol alongside Thrift around the time NRT emerged, the PhD students and other postgrads he worked with at that time (and, hopefully, who they in turn supervised for PhDs), and so on. Effectively, I'm trying to gain a sense of the range of work being done that relates to NRT both at Bristol and beyond as people moved on, what was being thought about in that place at that time, and so on. I was lucky enough to bump into Mark Jackson who provided me with a copy of a book the School published to mark the University's centenary year (which, I'd forgotten, includes an image that I appear in - it was 2009 / the year I finished at Bristol and I now remember a whole-School photo being taken...). That includes a full list of all higher degrees awarded and staff present in the School so will be really useful.
Mostly, though,, I spent an afternoon in the Wills Memorial library going through all the dissertations produced for the MSc Society and Space degree. That degree was set up by Thrift (and others) and has become known for producing a lot of academics. Mark also provided me with a list of all graduates from that a while ago and I've been going through it to identify as far as possible who went on to academic jobs and what they're doing. However, the dissertations give much more of an insight into what people were working on. I'm focusing for the most part on a combination of title, supervisor, and reference lists to get a sense of the focus / what people were reading. That's largely because it's covering 20+ years of dissertations so there's no way I'm going to read them all. However, as I went through (largely photographing things to look more at later) there's a definite trend from 'new cultural geography' projects that look at the representation of x in y in the mid-90s to much more that could be thought of as NRT-based in the early 2000s onwards (questions of the body, technology, affect, etc). In the former there's lots of citations of Cosgrove, Daniels, etc. and in the latter, lots of Thrift, Massumi, Deleuze, etc. But I need to look in more detail.
In lots of ways, I'm thinking there's a whole journal article on trends in cultural geography by looking at these reference lists (i.e. doing some time of massive frequency count by year of each of the 100s and 100s of source cited and looking at patterns / trends in that) but I'm trying to not get sidetracked from actually writing the book... Perhaps next year...
I'm hoping to get back to Bristol at some point in the next month or so once I've looked through the info on PhD graduates so that I can start to look at the theses in the Arts and Social Science library there, who the supervisor was, again what was being read, etc..
This is all probably going to translate to no more than a few hundred words in the book / a box or two, but for some reason it's turning into a very interesting rabbit hole to burrow down into...
I'm not quite sure where this will go at present. I partly got the idea from some things I've read about the 'Berkeley School' - where 5 or 6 generations of that work has traced onwards from Sauer based on his PhD students, their students etc., though that's on a much large scale and longer time frame. I'm doing a bit of that here though it isn't quite so straightforward in terms of who to include or discount in that.
That said, as part of this I have been looking a bit into both who was at Geography at Bristol alongside Thrift around the time NRT emerged, the PhD students and other postgrads he worked with at that time (and, hopefully, who they in turn supervised for PhDs), and so on. Effectively, I'm trying to gain a sense of the range of work being done that relates to NRT both at Bristol and beyond as people moved on, what was being thought about in that place at that time, and so on. I was lucky enough to bump into Mark Jackson who provided me with a copy of a book the School published to mark the University's centenary year (which, I'd forgotten, includes an image that I appear in - it was 2009 / the year I finished at Bristol and I now remember a whole-School photo being taken...). That includes a full list of all higher degrees awarded and staff present in the School so will be really useful.
Mostly, though,, I spent an afternoon in the Wills Memorial library going through all the dissertations produced for the MSc Society and Space degree. That degree was set up by Thrift (and others) and has become known for producing a lot of academics. Mark also provided me with a list of all graduates from that a while ago and I've been going through it to identify as far as possible who went on to academic jobs and what they're doing. However, the dissertations give much more of an insight into what people were working on. I'm focusing for the most part on a combination of title, supervisor, and reference lists to get a sense of the focus / what people were reading. That's largely because it's covering 20+ years of dissertations so there's no way I'm going to read them all. However, as I went through (largely photographing things to look more at later) there's a definite trend from 'new cultural geography' projects that look at the representation of x in y in the mid-90s to much more that could be thought of as NRT-based in the early 2000s onwards (questions of the body, technology, affect, etc). In the former there's lots of citations of Cosgrove, Daniels, etc. and in the latter, lots of Thrift, Massumi, Deleuze, etc. But I need to look in more detail.
In lots of ways, I'm thinking there's a whole journal article on trends in cultural geography by looking at these reference lists (i.e. doing some time of massive frequency count by year of each of the 100s and 100s of source cited and looking at patterns / trends in that) but I'm trying to not get sidetracked from actually writing the book... Perhaps next year...
I'm hoping to get back to Bristol at some point in the next month or so once I've looked through the info on PhD graduates so that I can start to look at the theses in the Arts and Social Science library there, who the supervisor was, again what was being read, etc..
This is all probably going to translate to no more than a few hundred words in the book / a box or two, but for some reason it's turning into a very interesting rabbit hole to burrow down into...
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