Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Kate Sammler, 

; ,

Description:

Depth keeps showing up as a geographical imagination, orientation and dimension.

Geographical concerns with depth have recently been ‘grounded’ in interests in under land, sea or ice, on or off Earth, as deep ‘outer’ space, the algorithmic deep learning of machines, or the deep time integral to the geological imaginaries of the Anthropocene. Indeed, an orientation towards depth as subsurface unites diverse areas of geographical scholarship; from political concerns with volumetric governance, security and control, to the inevitable spatialities of extraction and the frontiers of ‘deep’ colonialism, the role of elemental depths in ‘wake work’ and the cartographies of struggle, as well as the holes, voids, ‘gaps, cracks and lacks’ currently ‘hollowing-out' social and cultural geographies (e.g. recent sessions at AAG, RGS, 4S, special Issues of Geopolitics, Geoforum, Dekeyser and Jellis, 2020; Kingsbury and Secor, 2021).

Entangled with geography’s subsurface studies is wider geographical work on the ‘topological twist’ (Allen ,2011; Martin and Secor, 2013) whose various conceptual forms summon geographical imaginations of insides and outsides, above and below, surface and depth (Cockayne et al. 2020; Barba Lata and Minca, 2016). Further, to ‘think deep’ might combine a spatial orientation with certain ways of knowing and forms of attention. Tracing depth through geography and social science is to find conflicting epistemological forces (Anderman et al. 2020), it is to evoke metaphors of excavation; of ‘grounded’ knowledge, or even more recently to be ‘immersed’ in volumes, or to enact certain kinds of ‘deep’ reading. Yet this can sit in tension with elemental ungroundings, phenomenological indistinctions and depth’s withdrawals; depth it seems is also shaped by the value of unknown and not known, and constitutive forces of speculation and the imagination. What too of depth in geography drawn towards ontological ‘flatness’?

We have gathered together scholars and practitioners from across and beyond geography who want to join a wide-ranging discussion about depth, and in particular to explore the idea of ‘creating depth’, whatever this might mean to them. Perhaps they are working on geographies of the subsurface; perhaps their creative practice is one of summoning the depths on the surface (or otherwise) or by way of exploring the challenges of subsurface representations? Maybe they are exploring the creation of digital depths, perhaps their interests are those of conceptual creation, of insides and outsides, surfaces and their others? Perhaps they are concerned with what it might mean to be orientated towards the deeps, or to look up at the surface from below? How deep is deep? What might ‘thinking deep’ offer to contemporary geographical thought and imaginations, what might it mean to ‘create’ depth, as a space, as an empirical object, a mode of practice or thought, a metaphor for a form of scholarship ?

Please note we have four sessions in this group, a mixture of in-person and virtual.
Organisers: Harriet Hawkins, Katherine Sammler, Kim Peters, Lily House-Peters and Rachael Squire.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda