Image 'Urban Bird' is reproduced with the permission from the artist © Polina de Mauny
Winged Geographies is a two-day academic workshop which addresses the question of our evolving spatial relationships with bird life. The presence of birds and their song has long shaped human experience and conceptualisation of the skies, the countryside as well as urban and domestic environments.
Birds have been collected, traded and re-contextualised across territories. Their migrations have inspired new kinds of human connections, both psychic and physical. How have birds been part of human efforts to make sense of terrestrial and avian spaces and places? Such a question implicates all kinds of actors: gardeners, scholars, pilots, naturalists, children, writers and philosophers. Aristophanes’ play The Birds saw two frustrated Athenians join with the birds to build a utopian city in the clouds, a new republic where ‘Wisdom, Grace and Love pervade the scene’. Steven Feld’s work with the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea showed that the avian voices heard in the forest defined an entire cultural and spiritual realm. Today, birds increasingly draw attention as indicators of environmental crisis. In the Anthropocene, are the much-loved imaginative and metaphorical readings of bird life still culturally productive or dangerously retrograde?
Day One
22/04
13:00
Introduction and Welcome
13:15
The Moth and the Nightingale
14:15
Rupert de la Bère and the Cranwellian Cranes
Melanie Jackson, Department of Arts & Humanities, Bishop Grosseteste University, UK
The Cuckoo’s Leah: Birds, Naming, Belonging and Place in Early Medieval England
Michael J Warren, Independent Researcher, UK
15:10
Break
15:30
Overhead and Underfoot: The Everyday Proximities of Urban Pigeons
Shawn Bodden, Department of Geography, University of Edinburgh, UK
Making Buildings Hospitable with Swifts
Ariane d’Hoop, Université Saint-Louis, Belgium
Wings in the City: Living with Urban Birds in Greater Paris
Alizé Berthier, Department of Geography, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France
16:45
Break
17:00
'On the Wing': Experience and Perception in Falconry Practice
Sara Asu Schroer, University of Olso, Norway
Poetic Birds and Lyric Flights in the Age of the Anthropocene
Clara Dawson, Department of English & American Studies, University of Manchester, UK
Birds as Intermediaries: a Reading of Aristophanes’, ‘The Birds’
Jeremy Mynott, University of Cambridge, UK
Angels have Bird Wings
Roger Wotton, Division of Biosciences, University College London, UK
Day Two
23/04
11:00
Displaying Displacement: Exhibiting Extinct Birds and Their Ecosystems in Natural History Museums
12:00
Legless Birds and Toneless Chirps: Avian Creatures in Hong Kong's Urban Imaginations
Fiona Law, Comparative Literature, University of Hong Kong
Migration at the Limit: Mobile Birds Exploring the Edges of Life
Andrew Whitehouse, Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, UK
Savage Magpies: Conceptualising the ‘New World’ through the Beak of a Toucan
Alex Lawrence, Faculty of Medieval & Modern Languages, University of Oxford, UK
13:15
Lunch Break
14:30
Birds in the Shared Spaces of British Farms from 1960
Paul Merchant, National Life Stories, British Library, UK
The Changing Geographies of Human-Starling relations in the Shared Spaces of the Anthropocene
Andy Morris, Department of Geography, Open University, UK
A Close-up View of Birds: Bird Reserve Management and the Shaping of Human/Avian Relations, circa 1940-75
Sean Nixon, Department of Sociology, University of Essex, UK
15:45
Break
16:00
The Exploitation and Veneration of Birds: Past, Present and Future
Rebecca Jewell, Artist and Printmaker, UK
Centuries of Crafted Bird Lines Face Logo Times
Susan Clayton, Université Paris Diderot, Université Paris VII, France
Falling Birds
Helena Hunter, Independent Researcher, UK
For the Birds? Rehabilitating Animals, Rehabilitating Animality at Chicken Sanctuaries
Heather Rosenfeld, University of Wisconsin, USA
Poetry
Matt Howard, poet and conservationist, UK
18:00
Reflection on the workshop
Philip Howell, University of Cambridge
The Key Speakers
Key Speakers
RACHEL
MUNDY
Assistant Professor of Music in the Arts, Culture, & Media program at Rugters University in Newark, USA
Rachel Mundy specializes in twentieth-century sonic culture with interests at the juncture of music, the history of science, and animal studies. Her research shows how music has been used to navigate changing boundaries between race, species, and culture in the twentieth century.
DOLLY
JØRGENSEN
Professor of History at the University of Stavanger, Norway.
Dolly is most interested in how human technologies shape the world around us and how we come to understand what is "natural" and what is not, what is acceptable environmental behavior and what is not. Her research spans from medieval to contemporary environmental issues. Her primary areas of interest are human-animal relations, the urban environment, and environmental policymaking.
Tom
Bailey
Theatre Maker, UK
Due to the current restriction, we sadly need to cancel this event. The plan is run the performance in September/October 2021.
Tom is a theatre maker based in Bristol. He creates work through award-winning theatre company, MECHANIMAL.
The company’s work presently focuses on exploring narratives of biology and climate change.
At Winged Geographies Tom will be presenting Zugunruhe, a show exploring the incredible migration journey of a marsh warbler. The performance received a Herald Angel award for excellence at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2018.
