Geographical Aesthetics: Imagining Space, Staging Encounters

‘Geographical Aesthetics’ is ambitious. It seeks to marshal twelve papers on disparate subjects and with contrasting methodological and analytical approaches, advocate a new aesthetics by articulating key provisional theoretical principles, possible projects and trajectories, while re-describing geography as an always at least partially aesthetic discipline. Where its editors Harriet Hawkins and Elizabeth Straughan’s task is trickiest is where they feel out continuities across longstanding controversies – “ethereal and precious” aesthetics as tending to the apolitical (it is hard to fit, say, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Erika Fischer-Lichte and Hans-Thies Lehmann into this description), polarities of sublime and picturesque, aspirations for relational and synthesized practices of togetherness that tend towards “a sense of comfort” – and then seek to resolve or accommodate them with the collected papers and their general design.