Uppsala lecture in Human Geography: Matthew Gandy.

Professor Matthew Gandy, Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge, will give a lecture as part of the Uppsala lecture in Human Geography in English.

Attentive observation: walking, listening, staying put

In this lecture Professor Matthew Gandy suggests that a renewed emphasis on “attentive observation,” as both a form of radical empiricism and a source of imaginative insight, might contribute towards building a more nuanced conception of fieldwork that is better attuned to the multisensory and multispecies textures of material geographies. In this, he focuses on interactions with nature, landscape, and nonhuman others in an urban context. But the argument has wider connotations for concerns with embodied methodologies, critical phenomenology, and slower forms of research.

Conducting research in Germany, France, the US, Nigeria and the UK, Matthew Gandy has for more than two decades been at the forefront of both theorizing and historically uncovering the place of more-than-human nature, particularly in relation to cities and processes of urbanization. In eleven monographs or edited volumes, numerous academic articles, and two documentary movies his work has concerned the political ecology of water networks across the world, urban wilderness and unintentional landscapes, waste, epidemics, film, and methodology, as well as the cultural and natural history of the moth.

A mingle will follow at the Faculty Club (H429) at Ekonomikum immediately after the lecture. For the mingle, please register here.

There is no registration in advance necessary to attend the lecture.

The Uppsala Lecture in Human Geography

The goal of the Uppsala Lecture in Human Geography is to have an annual departmental “marquee” event which will provide an intellectual focal point for the Department of Human Geography while also reaching out to other departments in the building, other parts of the university, other geography departments in the region, as well as the broader public. Prominent lecturers are invited to display both the cutting-edge nature of geographical research and its intellectual and social relevance. This year will mark the fifth Uppsala Lecture in Human Geography. The inaugural lecture was held by Professor Laura Pulido (Dept. of geography, University of Oregon) followed by Professor Linda McDowell (School of Geography and Environment, University of Oxford), Professor Mike Crang (Department of Geography, University of Durham), and Professor Mei-Po Kwan (Department of Geography and Resource Management, Chinese University of Hong Kong.