AARC / ECLIPSE conference to be held on 28 June at Pendennis Castle

‘Land’s End:Pendennis Castle Imagination, Culture, and Society at Coastal Edges’ will examine the interactions between culture, heritage, oceans, and wellbeing in liminal places where land meets sea, developing the themes of the inaugural AARC collection of essays Coastal Works, ed. Allen, Groom, and Smith (OUP, 2016). The aim is to consolidate current research and extend the AARC team into Europe in order to facilitate a collaborative ERC bid. It will consider various distinctive forms of coastal heritage and how a dialogue might be fruitfully begun between them. In particular, the location of the conference on the Cornish coast might bring to mind tensions between region and nation, periphery and centre. How, for example, have similar such spatial dynamics played out elsewhere? What alternative spatial dynamics of the coast might there be? What of histories of expedition and exchange, of precarity and isolation? What of geographies of island utopias and experimental living, of vision and wonder, dissent and rebellion? What of trans-local routes and relationships connecting one periphery to another? How else might ‘Land’s End’ be conceptualised and what role might the arts, and research in the humanities, play in understanding and negotiating this?

As various members of AARC have shown in recent years, careful attention to the cultural geographies of the coast can reveal intricate and distinctive spatialisations of historical themes and issues. Reading the coast in this way requires innovative new approaches that might draw on archipelagic criticism, blue cultural studies, human geography, and ecology, among other areas. But what might such work contribute to our wider sense of coastal heritage and conservation? Rachel Carson once described the ecology of the coast as a ‘place of compromise and conflict and eternal change’; she might as easily have been describing the forms of social and historical negotiation that have made the coast such a vital and energetic space in which to think through cultural meanings. ‘Land’s End’ will mix short conference papers, roundtable discussion and an evening event of public talks, poetry readings and artwork. We are pleased to be able to advertise that we have Professor Nicholas Allen from the University of Georgia delivering the keynote address.

The conference will take place at Pendennis Castle, Falmouth, England.

A preliminary conference schedule is below. For more information and registration details, please visit the conference website.

 

‘Land’s End’

AARC/ECLIPSE One-Day Conference and

ERC Planning Meeting,

28th & 29th June 2016

 

Tuesday 28th June, Pendennis Castle, the Arundel Room:

 

0930 – Introduction. Prof. Nick Groom

 

0945 – Keynote: Prof. Nicholas Allen

 

1045 – Round Table 1

 

1145 – break

 

1215 – Round table 2

 

1315 – lunch

 

1430 – Round table 3

 

1530 – break

 

1600 – Round table 4

 

1700 – finish

 

Evening:

 

1900 – Conference dinner, Falmouth

 

2030 – The Poly, Falmouth: Public talk, Prof. Nicholas Allen; readings by Alan Riach, Isabel Galleymore, Ben Smith and Jos Smith, plus short artist’s talk.

 

Wednesday 29th June, Falmouth University (Wood Lane Campus) Rosehill Boardroom:

 

ESRC meeting

 

930-1000 – Nick Groom & Jos Smith to introduce funding call‘Cultural Heritage of European Coastal and Maritime Regions’ (CULT-COOP-07-2017: expected deadline February 2017).

 

1000-1130 – Discussion consolidating Tuesday, establishing strengths/weaknesses of group, identifying new partners, establishing agenda

 

1145-1300 – Plan a way forward looking ahead to the deadline.