This call is relative to a special session on Ambiances and Atmospheres, to be held within the Royal Geographical Association - Institute of the British Geographers 2013 International Conference.

Argument

Recent work on affect in Anglophone human geography has opened up new material frontiers by theorizing affective atmospheres (Anderson 2009; Bissell 2010; McCormack 2008). In such work we see an adjustment of thinking towards and around the relations between bodies and their environment by considering the ways in which bodies are situated within diffuse, distributed, sensible, and potentially turbulent volumes. Such an emphasis on the atmospheric, taken in both its meteorological and felt/affective sense, is in many ways tied to an expanded conception of materiality that draws attention to “the vibrant, constitutive, aleatory, and even immaterial indices” of materiality and materialization (Coole and Frost 2010: 14; Bennett 2010).

However, Anglophone human geographers have not been alone in thinking through these sorts of tensions or in exploring these frontier zones of indeterminacy. Emerging largely independently from this work, Francophone scholars have developed an established body of work considering ‘ambiances’ as the milieu of social life (Augoyard 1995; Masson 2009; Tixier 2001; Thibaud 2003). Having emerged in the fields of Architecture and Urban Studies over the past 50 years, work here has sought to understand the relations of perception around the compositions of individuals, collectives, and their environment, and the co-production of a pervasive and immediate felt sense of space from this.

In these sessions we seek to bring together scholars interesting in both affective atmospheres and ambiances in thinking through the frontiers these conceptualisation both together and apart open up for geographic research. Papers can be conceptual, methodological, empirical, performative, or any combination of these.

We particularly encourage papers that: 

• think through the possible advances a conversation between these previously separate traditions of work can offer to geographic understandings of materiality/sociality
• reflect on the conjunctions and disjunctions between these traditions of work
• consider the methodological tensions in apprehending and presenting affective atmospheres and/or ambiances in various forms of text, media, installation, or performance-based research
• engage specific atmosphere and/or ambiances, and the milieus from which they emerge
• Consider the politics of controlling, designing, and (re)shaping atmospheres and/or ambiances
• Outline ways in which modes of atmospheric and/or ambiance-based critique can be developed

Instructions for Authors

• Paul Simpson (p.simpson@keele.ac.uk),
• Peter Adey (Peter.Adey@rhul.ac.uk)
• Damien Masson (damien.masson@gmail.com)