unsettling landscape dr john wylie associate prof of cultural geography university of exeter...

Unsettling Landscape

Dr John WylieAssociate Prof of Cultural GeographyUniversity of Exeterj.w.wylie@exeter.ac.uk

1. Concepts of landscape, locality, and environmental change

2. Unsettling landscape: vulnerability and un-homeliness

1. Concepts of landscape, locality, and environmental change

‘A focus on the familiar landscapes of everyday life offers an opportunity to examine how climate change could be researched as a relational phenomenon, understood on a local level’ (Brace & Geoghagen, 2011, p.284)  ‘It is part of our argument that landscape – in all its multifarious definitions and theorizations – grounds an understanding of climate and the ways it might change in a fundamental way’ (ibid, pp.288-289).

2. Unsettling landscape: vulnerability and un-homeliness

‘Thinking through the human in terms of a constitutive vulnerability to forces beyond its control’N. Clark (2010) ‘Volatile Worlds, Vulnerable Bodies’, TCS, p.47

Landscape names ‘the thought of presence as withdrawn from itself: estranged and unsettled presence, from which all the gods have departed and the humans are always still to come’J-N Nancy (2005) ‘Uncanny Landscape’ p.62

From ‘The Grounds’ by Phillip Gross (The Water Table, 2009) Indefinable grounds: don’t try to set foot,not even if some craft could steady in these mud-thick shallows (almost ground) by groundalmost as loose as water. Don’t count on your fine distinctions then.