Welcome and Thank You
Welcome to the home of Guelph’s second annual, interdisciplinary graduate student Psychogeographies conference. Thanks to all who contributed their voices, thoughts, time and engagement, and helped to make this year’s conference both worthwhile and exciting.
*** NEW ***
You may have noticed our videographer (thanks Denise) at all of the special events: we finally have the keynote presentations and both roundtables (in all of their unedited splendour) on Youtube!
Journal of Psychogeography
Now is the time! Presenters have been invited to submit their conference papers for peer review and publication. If you are interested in joining our editorial board or serving as a peer-reviewer (or both!) please contact the editors. If you missed our conference but wish to participate, please send us your bio at the same time.
Conference Feedback Form
Please help us to make the next conference better, by letting us know what worked and what didn’t, what was fun and what wasn’t, and what could be improved, and how.
Psychogeographies of Possibility
This year’s conference, organized by a committee from disciplines spanning our campus, offered paper presentations from students representing 14 universities and 22 departments, two exciting keynote speakers, a round-table posing a “wicked problem” to elite faculty with broad research interests, a student roundtable discussing the benefits and barriers to interdisciplinarity, and many opportunities for dialogue. Thanks to our sponsors from the campus of the University of Guelph, this was a FREE event.
The 2nd annual Psychogeography Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference showcased graduate students who are interested in exploring the possibilities present in these “critical times”, by re-imagining how societies – and individuals – interact with(in) geographical spaces.
In his “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography”, Guy Debord describes the arbitrary wanderings, accidental discoveries, satirical counter-propaganda and cartographic renovations of psychogeography as “obviously only a mediocre beginning in comparison to the complete construction of architecture and urbanism that will someday be within the power of everyone” (1955: emphasis added). This latter prediction has always felt wildly optimistic. But we now live in a time when the urban setting is daily being transformed by international financial meltdown, the collapse of key industrial sectors, and growing global acceptance of the need to collectively address environmental issues. This nexus of crises creates new spaces of possibility in urban redesign, citizenship, stewardship, institutional and community renewal, and even social and industrial realignment.
Psychogeographers might seem well-placed to act as guides in these transformative times. The question is, can psychogeography offer more than a detached voyeur’s satirical juxtapositions, or quixotic insubordinations? By renewing Debord’s call for bold approaches, can we fashion theoretical and practical tools of re-construction that allow all citizens to become stewards of the future course of history?
