Tim Edensor

Nick Dunn

This book examines the concept of darkness through a range of cultures, histories, practices and experiences. It engages with darkness beyond its binary positioning against light to advance a critical understanding of the ways in which darkness can be experienced, practised and conceptualised. Humans have fundamental relationships with light and dark that shape their regular social patterns and rhythms, enabling them to make sense of the world. This book ‘throws light’ on the neglect of these social patterns to emphasize how the diverse values, meanings and influences of darkness have been rarely considered. It also examines the history of our relationship with the dark and highlights how normative attitudes towards it have emerged, while also emphasising its cultural complexity by considering a contemporary range of alternative experiences and practices. Challenging notions of darkness as negative, as the antithesis of illumination and enlightenment, this book explores the rich potential of darkness to stimulate our senses and deepen our understandings of different spaces, cultural experiences and creative engagements. Offering a rich exploration of an emergent field of study across the social sciences and humanities, this book will be useful for academics and students of cultural and media studies, design, geography, history, sociology and theatre who seek to investigate the creative, cultural and social dimensions of darkness.

Cultures, Histories, Practices

Rethinking Darkness

This book focuses on a single artefact, the Barochan Cross, a ninth century stone sculpture in Renfrewshire, Scotland. Exploring the changing stories, meanings, locations, uses and feelings of the sculpture, Tim Edensor adopts a broad temporal frame across twelve centuries that moves away from a periodisation that solely considers its original meanings and uses. Narrating the shifting ways in which the Barochan Cross has been moved, utilised, cared for, interpreted, encountered, sensed, copied and appropriated allows for a sophisticated yet highly accessible discussion about its changing relationships with the physical and conceptual landscapes in which it has been situated. This book thus expands the ways in which landscape might be conceptualised, revealing how artefacts can inform future critical thinking about heritage and bringing an important contribution to theories about material culture and landscape.

An Object Biography

Landscape, Materiality and Heritage

Kaya Barry

Maria Borovnik

This book delves into the everyday spaces, diverse mobilities and affective potency of weather. It presents cutting-edge research into the multiplicity of weather phenomena and analyses the lived experiences of humans in conjunction with contemporary issues, notably climate change. The book considers how everyday experiences of weather in the mundane lives of people are linked to broader changes in weather patterns and climate change. Heat, dust, ice, snow, precipitation, sunlight, clouds, tides and fog are states of weather that impact on the ways in which humans become intertwined with landscapes. Our experiences with weather are diverse and ever-changing, and engaging with weather entangles humans with mobilities, materials and landscapes. This book thus explores affective and sensory resonances, drawing upon a variety of theoretical, empirical and creative material to investigate how weather is perceived in different social and cultural contexts. Key themes focus on the mobilities generated by weather, the affective and sensual potency of weather, and the diverse cultural forms and practices that exemplify how weather is historically, geographically and artistically represented. Offering a social and cultural understanding of weather events, this book contributes to a growing literature on weather across various disciplines, including human geography and cultural geography, and will thus appeal to students and scholars of geography, sociology, humanities, cultural studies and the arts.

Spaces, Mobilities and Affects

Weather

The Millennium Dome, Braveheart and Rolls Royce cars. How do cultural icons reproduce and transform a sense of national identity? How does national identity vary across time and space, how is it contested, and what has been the impact of globalization upon national identity and culture?This book examines how national identity is represented, performed, spatialized and materialized through popular culture and in everyday life. National identity is revealed to be inherent in the things we often take for granted - from landscapes and eating habits, to tourism, cinema and music. Our specific experience of car ownership and motoring can enhance a sense of belonging, whilst Hollywood blockbusters and national exhibitions provide contexts for the ongoing, and often contested, process of national identity formation. These and a wealth of other cultural forms and practices are explored, with examples drawn from Scotland, the UK as a whole, India and Mauritius. This book addresses the considerable neglect of popular cultures in recent studies of nationalism and contributes to debates on the relationship between ‘high' and ‘low' culture.

National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life

Norma Rantisi

Steve Millington

Deborah Leslie

Creativity has become part of the language of regeneration experts, urban planners and government policy makers attempting to revive the economic and cultural life of cities in the 21st century. Concepts such as the creative class, the creative industries and bohemian cultural clusters have come to dominate thinking about how creativity can contribute to urban renewal. Spaces of Vernacular Creativity offers a critical perspective on the instrumental use of arts and creative practices for the purposes of urban regeneration or civic boosterism. Several important contributions are brought into one volume to examine the geography of locally embedded forms of arts and creative practice. There has been an explosion of interest in both academic and policy circles in the notion of creativity, and its role in economic development and urban regeneration. This book argues for a rethinking of what constitutes creativity, foregrounding non-economic values and practices, and the often marginal and everyday spaces in which creativity takes shape. Drawing on a range of geographic contexts including the U.S., Europe, Canada and Australia, the book explores a diverse array of creative practices ranging from art, music, and design to community gardening and anticapitalist resistance. The book examines working class, ethnic and non-elite forms of creativity, and a variety of creative spaces, including rural areas, suburbs and abandoned areas of the city. The authors argue for a broader and more inclusive conception of what constitutes creative practice, advocating for an approach that foregrounds economies of generosity, conviviality and activism. The book also explores the complexities and nuances that connect the local and the global and finally, the book provides a space for valuing alternative, marginal and displaced knowledges. Spaces of Vernacular Creativity provides an important contribution to the debates on the creative class and on the role of value of creative knowledge and skills. The book aims to contribute to contemporary academic debates regarding the development of post-industrial economies and the cognitive cultural economy. It will appeal to a wide range of disciplines including, geography, applied art, planning, cultural studies, sociology and urban studies, plus specialised programmes on creativity and cultural industries at Undergraduate and Postgraduate levels.

Rethinking the Cultural Economy

Spaces of Vernacular Creativity

Ares Kalandides

Uma Kothari

The handbook presents a compendium of the diverse and growing approaches to place from leading authors as well as less widely known scholars, providing a comprehensive yet cutting-edge overview of theories, concepts and creative engagements with place that resonate with contemporary concerns and debates. The volume moves away from purely western-based conceptions and discussions about place to include perspectives from across the world. It includes an introductory chapter, which outlines key definitions, draws out influential historical and contemporary approaches to the theorisation of place and sketches out the structure of the book, explaining the logic of the seven clearly themed sections. Each section begins with a short introductory essay that provides identifying key ideas and contextualises the essays that follow. The original and distinctive contributions from both new and leading authorities from across the discipline provide a wide, rich and comprehensive collection that chimes with current critical thinking in geography. The book captures the dynamism and multiplicity of current geographical thinking about place by including both state-of-the-art, in-depth, critical overviews of theoretical approaches to place and new explorations and cases that chart a framework for future research. It charts the multiple ways in which place might be conceived, situated and practised. This unique, comprehensive and rich collection will be an essential resource for undergraduate and graduate teaching, for experienced academics across a wide range of disciplines and for policymakers and place-marketers. It will provide an invaluable and up-to-date guide to current thinking across the range of disciplines, such as Geography, Sociology and Politics, and interdisciplinary fields such as Urban Studies, Environmental Studies and Planning.

The Routledge Handbook of Place

Weather: Spaces, Mobilities and Affects

The Millennium Dome, Braveheart and Rolls Royce cars. How do cultural icons reproduce and transform a sense of national identity? How does national identity vary across time and space, how is it contested, and what has been the impact of globalization upon national identity and culture? This book examines how national identity is represented, performed, spatialized and materialized through popular culture and in everyday life. National identity is revealed to be inherent in the things we often take for granted ñ from landscapes and eating habits, to tourism, cinema and music. Our specific experience of car ownership and motoring can enhance a sense of belonging, whilst Hollywood blockbusters and national exhibitions provide contexts for the ongoing, and often contested, process of national identity formation. These and a wealth of other cultural forms and practices are explored, with examples drawn from Scotland, the UK as a whole, India and Mauritius. This book addresses the considerable neglect of popular cultures in recent studies of nationalism and contributes to debates on the relationship between 'high' and 'low' culture.

In Rhythmanalysis, Henri Lefebvre put forward his ideas on the relationship between time and space, particularly how rhythms characterize space. Here, leading geographers advance and expand on Lefebvre's theories, examining how they intersect with current theoretical and political concerns within the social sciences. In terms of geography, rhythmanalysis highlights tensions between repetition and innovation, between the need for consistency and the need for disruption. These tensions reveal the ways in which social time is managed to ensure a measure of stability through the instantiation of temporal norms, whilst at the same time showing how this is often challenged. In looking at the rhythms of geographies, and drawing upon a wide range of geographical contexts, this book explores the ordering of different rhythms according to four main themes: rhythms of nature, rhythms of everyday life, rhythms of mobility, and the official and routine rhythms which superimpose themselves on the multiple rhythms of the body.

Nature, Place, Mobilities and Bodies

Geographies of Rhythm

Mark Jayne

Since the late eighteenth century, academic engagement with political, economic, social, cultural and spatial changes in our cities has been dominated by theoretical frameworks crafted with reference to just a small number of cities. This book offers an important antidote to the continuing focus of urban studies on cities in ‘the Global North’. Urban Theory Beyond the West contains twenty chapters from leading scholars, raising important theoretical issues about cities throughout the world. Past and current conceptual developments are reviewed and organized into four parts: ‘De-centring the City’ offers critical perspectives on re-imagining urban theoretical debates through consideration of the diversity and heterogeneity of city life; ‘Order/Disorder’ focuses on the political, physical and everyday ways in which cities are regulated and used in ways that confound this ordering; ‘Mobilities’ explores the movements of people, ideas and policy in cities and between them and ‘Imaginaries’ investigates how urbanity is differently perceived and experienced. There are three kinds of chapters published in this volume: theories generated about urbanity ‘beyond the West’; critiques, reworking or refining of ‘Western’ urban theory based upon conceptual reflection about cities from around the world and hybrid approaches that develop both of these perspectives. Urban Theory Beyond the West offers a critical and accessible review of theoretical developments, providing an original and groundbreaking contribution to urban theory. It is essential reading for students and practitioners interested in urban studies, development studies and geography.

A World of Cities

Urban Theory Beyond the West

In undertaking a systematic analysis of urban materiality, this book investigates one kind of material in Melbourne: stone. The work draws on a range of pertinent, current theories that consider materiality, assemblages, networks, phenomenology, resource and extraction geographies, memorialisation, maintenance and repair, place identity, skill, sensation and affect, haunting and the vitalism of the non-human. In appealing to the general reader, academics and students, this book provides a highly readable account, replete with evocative examples and fascinating historical and contemporary stories about stone in Melbourne.

Stories of Urban Materiality

Stone

Light pervades the world, and when it is not light, darkness emerges and is combated by electric illumination. Despite this globally shared human experience in which spaces appear radically different depending on time, season, and weather, social science investigation on the subject is meager. From Light to Dark fills this gap, focusing on our interaction with daylight, illumination, and darkness. Tim Edensor begins by examining the effects of daylight on our perception of landscape, drawing on artworks, particular landscapes, and architectural practice. He then considers the ways in which illumination is often contested and can be used to express power, looking at how capitalist, class, ethnic, military, and state power use lighting to reinforce their authority over space. Edensor also considers light artists such as Olafur Eliasson and festivals of illumination before turning a critical eye to the supposedly dangerous, sinister associations of darkness. In examining the modern city as a space of fantasy through electric illumination, he studies how we are seeking--and should seek--new forms of darkness in reaction to the perpetual glow of urban lighting. Highly original and absorbingly written, From Light to Dark analyzes a vast array of artistic interventions, diverse spaces, and lighting technologies to explore these most basic human experiences.

Tim Edensor

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