Royal Holloway, University of London
Graduate Student, Geography
PhD Candidate
Thesis Title: Preternaturalisms: Landscape, Place, Spirit.
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Phil Crang
Tim Cresswell |
About
PhD candidate in cultural geography.
My research takes place at the intersections of geography, philosophy and cultural studies and seeks to understand the relationship between place and the processes of enchantment that exist within a wider context of landscape mysticism. Traditionally, the preternatural refers to those entities or events that are believed to exist outside the realms of normality; spirits, magick, sprites etc. This project aims at locating instances of the fortean within the natural, exploring the idea that such anomalies are in fact a way of accessing the landscape, of engaging with place. Landscape mysticism offers particular methods of countering the banality of one’s surroundings, inflecting the spaces that have been formed around occupation, labour and politics through an implicitly magical ecology.
The study will be broken down into three strands; each one providing an occasioning of the preternatural: Hauntings, Magicks and Leylines. The strands will be dealt with using specific sites and explore the people and practices that utilise these locations, who purport their enchantment. Furthermore, the case studies will be shown to be interrelated through a network of hauntology ; the Being or essence of a place that appears reiterated, repeated or resurrected. In essence, this is an exploration of the performativity of the absence conjured through hauntings, of the (im)materialities of enchanted sites.
Please see:
http://jamesthurgill.wordpress.com/
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