Landscape Conference Screens The Exiles

How physical places affect people’s emotions – whether by inspiring fear, love or even anger – will be the subject of a University of Derby conference called Affective Landscapes.

This Friday and Saturday (May 25-26), 150 academics, researchers and others will be at the University’s Kedleston Road site, in Derby, to discuss the many different ways writers, film-makers, photographers and artists have conveyed the sensations, memories, dreams and emotions evoked by landscapes they’ve lived in or visited.

Among the speakers at the prestigious conference will be Kathleen Stewart, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas, USA, who will speak on Worlding; or the attempt to study human culture in a globalised era, rather than the traditional cultural studies approach looking at individual peoples, regions or nations in isolation.

The two-day event will also include a related screening at Derby’s QUAD centre of director Kent Mackenzie’s little seen film The Exiles (1968); a documentary covering 24 hours in the life of a group of relocated Native Americans living in and around Bunker Hill, Los Angeles, in the late 1950s.

The Affective Landscapes conference is being hosted by the University’s Identity, Conflict and Representation Research Centre in collaboration with the University of Portsmouth’s Centre for Studies in Literature. It follows the success of Derby’s 2009 symposium on Land and Identity.

Neil Campbell, Professor of American Studies and Faculty Research Manager at the University of Derby, said: “This conference will bring together scholars working in cultural studies, literary studies, creative writing, film and media studies, photography, fine art and many others; interested in examining the different ways in which human beings respond and relate to, as well as debate and interact with, landscape.

“Ideas we will be looking at include national identity, suburbia, wastelands, rural versus urban areas, and landscapes which evoke trauma and memory.”

For more information about the Affective Landscapes conference see website www.derby.ac.uk/events/affective-landscapes