Rethinking the cultural landscape
Culture serves as a lens through which people interpret the experiences and interactions that occur in their everyday life. Advances in technology are changing every aspect of our lives, leading to contemporary issues. This includes the opportunities and pitfalls of globalisation as well as new human technological relations that create new challenges from different cultures and communities.
Exploring cultural practices helps us understand human activities. Cultural geography explores the relationship between humans and the elements of our environment by examining the way meaning is constructed according to differences in space, time and place. It emphasises the relationships not only between people and their physical environment but also their material, social and cultural landscapes.
Associated schools, institutes & centres
Impact
Working at the intersection of science and art, cultural and human geography research at UNSW Canberra addresses a range of transformative social and cultural processes. We explore the challenges posed to traditional social science through reconfigurations and changes to human life including:
- innovations in material and biological science
- the proliferation of technological interfaces
- the emergence of digital cultures
- artistic, social, and technological communities associated with new forms of cultural and political creativity.
Our research capability and expertise in Cultural Geography include:
- Published research across a range of high impact journals in geography and social science disciplines, including:
- Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.
- Cultural Geographies.
- Environment and Planning.
- Body & Society.
- Performance Research and Theory.
- Culture & Society.
- Curation of special issues on emerging issues in social science, including post-humanist research methods, the unconscious, speculative thinking, and the geographies of fashion and style.
- Organisation of high-profile sessions and panel discussions at international conferences, including the annual meetings of the Institute of Australian Geographers, the American Association of Geographers, the Institute of British Geographers and the Deleuze & Guattari Studies Conference.
Competitive advantage
We have research capabilities, unique expertise and a strong tradition of conceptual innovation across many areas of human geography. This includes insights from non-representational theory, affect theory, post-humanism and new materialism—as well as from a wide variety of continental philosophers and political theorists.
We are a leader in global research in the science of cultural geography. Our strength comes from:
- Leading the field in cutting-edge conceptual debates in contemporary social science research.
- Driving innovation in qualitative research methodologies.
- Developing interdisciplinary research agendas across the sciences, arts and humanities.
- Ongoing and new research collaborations with leading Australian and international scholars and departments.
Our researchers
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The Cultural Geography group has established a vibrant research culture in the School of Science hosting a weekly reading group (Non-representational Theory and Geography) and bi-monthly research workshops (Space, Performance, Art, and Technology). We have an internationally diverse team of PhD students working on a variety of research projects and we are active supporters of the UNSW ALLY Network for LGBTIQ+ people.
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The Cultural Geography group has developed collaborative networks with several Australian and international partners, including:
- Play Activation Network (Canberra)
- Design and Living Systems Lab (London)
- SymbioticA (Perth)
- Challenging Racism Project (Sydney).
The group also has ongoing and developing interdisciplinary research projects in collaboration with academics from the:
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Dewsbury, J-D. (2019). 'Refrains of Lost Time: Collapse, Refrain, Abstract'. In T. Jellis, J. Gerlach & J-D. Dewsbury (eds.) Why Guattari? A Liberation of Cartographies, Ecologies and Politics (pp. 88-98). London: Routledge.
Dewsbury J-D. (2019). 'Foreword: Civic Space and Desire: after Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari', in C. Drozynski and D. Beljaars (eds.) Civic Spaces and Desire (pp. Xvii-xxi). London: Routledge.
Lapworth, A. (2020). ‘Gilbert Simondon and the Technical Mentalities and Transindividual Affects of Art-Science', Body & Society, 26, pp. 107-134. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X19882750
Lapworth, A. (2019). ‘Sensing’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 44, pp. 657-660. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12327
Roberts, T. (2019). 'In Pursuit of Necessary Joys: Deleuze, Spinoza, and the Ethics of Becoming Active', GeoHumanities, 5, pp. 124 – 138. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2373566x.2019.1575762
Roberts, T. (2019). ‘Resituating post-phenomenological geographies: Deleuze, relations and the limits of objects,’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 44, pp. 542-554. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12280
Sharpe, S. (2020). ‘Untoward laughter and the micropolitical: social action, politics and the will after the sovereign subject’, Cultural Geographies, 27, pp. 55-69. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1474474019866205
Sharpe, S. (2018). 'Pluralising affect: Encountering Ben Anderson's Encountering Affect', Dialogues in Human Geography, 8, pp. 225 – 228. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2043820617748270
Williams, N. (2019). 'Reframing politics in art: from representational subjects to aesthetic subjectification', In T. Jellis, J. Gerlach & J-D. Dewsbury (eds.), Why Guattari? A Liberation of Cartographies, Ecologies and Politics (pp. 202-213). London: Routledge.
Williams, N. (2019). 'Listening', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 44, pp. 647-649. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12324
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Our current research projects include:
- Non-representational theory and Edouard Glissant
- The production of smart subjectivity in Colombo, Sri Lanka
- The Emotional Geographies of Fear and Harassment on Public Transport in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
- Cinema, Subjectivity, and Deleuze
- Cruel Optimism in Iran
- Development of a Climate Resiliency and Adaptation Framework for the Protection and Management of Coastal Heritage Places along the Southern Victorian and Northern Tasmanian Coastlines.
- Acoustic mapping, conservation, and contemplation: Documenting acoustic histories within ephemeral urban cultural landscapes
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- Christian Sirois
- Lan Yi
- Deepak Tiwari
- Tara Elisabeth Jeyasingh
- Kevitiyagala Liyana Arachchila Liyanage
- Sabrina Shanto
- Nazanin Hosseinpoursharafshadeh
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As a Cultural Geography student, you will benefit from:
- National and international field trips available to undergraduate students
- Research-led teaching and thinking through innovative conceptual ideas about cutting-edge empirical examples in art, technology, and science
- Experimental methodologies with strong local community and public engagement.
The following courses are available to students interested in Cultural Geography:
Undergraduate:
ZPEM2213 - Art & Science of Doing Geography
ZPEM4205 - Human Geography Honours Special Topic
ZPEM4002 - Science Honours Research 2
ZPEM4004 - Science Honours Research 4
Postgraduate:
ZPEM8208 - Human Factors and the Technological Interface
ZPEM8310 - Understanding Socio-Technical Systems: Ideas, Spaces, and Cultures
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The following projects are currently active:
- Negotiating trust in AI-enabled navigation technologies (UNSW Faculty Seed Grant)
- Psychological and physiological impacts of neighbourhoods (UNSW Faculty Seed Grant)
The following research proposals are in the planning stage:
- Fostering Ecological Care Through Public Arts: Creative Experiments with Lake Burley Griffin.
- (Re-)Imagining Trust in Artificial Intelligence through Institutional Encounters (with colleagues at UNSW, Macquarie, Tokyo)
- Re-thinking human-technology relations in the age of Industry 4.0.