Session #139

– Hybrid Session –

‘a touch of anthropomorphism, then, can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations.’ Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (2009), 99.

Any story can be told, has been told, in many ways.

Writing spatially is a practice, a way of making sense of and giving voice to the myriad ecologies that have been forgotten in the past, buried in multiple presents or voided as valid futures. We write ourselves and others into sites and as the pen scratches paper and letters are typed, deep and future time is put on pause, created and reconstructed. Creating writing is a tactic to make sense of human and nonhuman entanglement (Bennett, 2009). Creating writing together is a way we can make, purpose and reinvent infrastructures, whether the tangible, material stuff that sustains life or the different systems and structures that make society (Simone, 2004).

This roundtable of performed papers and a “live writing” session asks how we can write alone and together, in the present and past, as an act of care and recuperation. In a pilot project we structured several walks around the complex, light industrial area to the east of Sheffield bordered by the Don River, once one of the city’s most successful and wealthy steelworks, Brightside Steel. We speculated on whether expanded ideas of writing – including poetry, field notes, walking, taking photographs and film – could be used as methods and vehicles to record and understand entangled histories, infrastructures and human and non-human agents in the area. The resulting ‘writings as care’ were lived acts of curiosity, communication and criticality that frame a provisional, speculative recovery of the site and its ecologies.

We seek expressions of interest, in the form of 300-word abstracts towards papers of 2000-words, which engage with sites close and far, interior, and exterior, to explore ways of writing about their multiple inhabitations and temporalities towards repairing their hidden ecologies, confederations and infrastructures. The roundtable will have two parts: a reading and discussion of each paper, followed by a workshop where parts of these papers will be “live written”. In your submission, we encourage creative approaches to text and site across the spectrum of fictional and critical registers.