Professor Sarah de Leeuw (Northern Medical Program and the National Collaborating Centre for Indigenous Health, University of Northern British Columbia)
When
Join us in welcoming Dr. Sarah de Leeuw from Northern British Columbia University for the 5th annual JP Jones lecture in social and spatial theory. Sarah was a former postdoc at UA. Friday, November 14th from 3:30-5:00pm in ENR2, Room S-107.
Justified Left?: Poetry’s Potential for Relineating Geography and Beyond
Sarah de Leeuw
Abstract:
Geography is fundamentally a textual discipline. And most every geographer is also and always a writer. Dialoguing with long histories of geographers critically engaging writing methods and practices, and then thinking as a poet and alongside Indigenous scholars and the words of a Palestinian American poet, this paper extends existing arguments that geographic writings are material objects (worlds) and argues that, as grounds and ontologies unto themselves, geographic writings require formalistic unsettling and reconfiguration should we geographers want to address urgent and terrifying injustices around the world. Diverse critical geographers have long documented how multiple texts, including written works, maps, charts, cartographies, and GIS renderings encode and re/produce sociopolitical economic power, how grids and two-dimensional renderings of space make effort to render people and places containable, manageable, and consumable by circuits of hegemonic power. Geographers have spent less time, however, critiquing our writing designs and formats, formats that rigidly adhere to highly gridded and lined formulations, obeying stylized conventions of justification, tabs, pagination, spacing, kerning, font sizing, and lineation. Turning to poetry, and in conversation with growing practices in geopoetics and geohumanities, this paper argues for a revolution of the line, a rebellion against standardized lineation, a refusal of straightly aligned text. Part long poem, part critique of publishing formats, part generative refusal of standrazied settled-upon lines, this paper is a call for new forms and formattings of text, for difficult readings and for writings that unsettle and surprise, for a relineating of written worlds.
Key Words:
Lines; Poetics; Lineation; Unsettled Writing; Geopoetics; Form; Writing Geography
Contributions:
· Geographic writings form worlds that need unsettling.
· Poetry and poetic forms hold potential to unsettle taken for granted lines of geographic writing and, thus, geographic thought.