Fieldworks will explore the manifold ways in which performance shapes and is shaped by landscape and environment. We seek contributions that will set to work in and across a field in which diverse scholarly, artistic and activist practices and perspectives inform and challenge one another.

Landscape and environment are currently of compelling cultural significance, as fields of scholarly research, sites of artistic endeavour and arenas of public concern. Behind the singular terms hide a plurality of places: urban and suburban, rural and industrial, spectacular and overlooked, everyday and enchanting, remembered and contested, protected and degraded, embodied, enacted, looked at, moved through, worked on and lived in. As both imaginative representations and material realities, they are the loci where complex ideas, feelings and experiences – physical, sensual, emotional and cognitive – are dealt with: relating to beauty and health, belonging and identity, access to resources, relations with nature, the past and the future, making sense of the world and people's place in it.

Performance is increasingly regarded not only as a creative practice and mode of representation but also as a vital means of embodied engagement and enquiry. It offers modes of understanding how landscape and environment are encountered, imagined, evoked or transformed through human and non-human activity.

To reflect the diversity of possible approaches to these themes, the editors invite contributions in a variety of print-based formats and writing modes, including essays of up to 5,000 words, shorter pieces in the form of positional papers or reflections on practice, and contributions in the form of artist’s pages.

We particularly welcome contributions that address the manifold dimensions of ‘fieldworks’, material and metaphorical, scholarly and artistic, in a variety of (cultural, social, disciplinary, aesthetic) contexts.

Contributions may consider any of the following topics (although these are not prescriptive):

1. fields of study, fields of practice: e.g. the use of performance as analytical trope or embodied enquiry in a variety of academic and artistic disciplines concerned with landscape and environment, including geography, anthropology, archaeology, performance studies, media studies, cultural and environmental policy, music and visual arts, and others

2. working between fields: e.g. convergences of research practices, artistic and scholarly collaborations or methodological exchanges which address performance, landscape and environment; various traditions and techniques of fieldwork research and teaching, focused on the natural and cultural world, including field walking and sketching, photography, interviewing and the use and making of maps.

3. working across fields: e.g. the adoption of practices / understandings / approaches from other disciplines, for example the influence of theorizations of mobility, cartography and dwelling on performance scholarship and art practice; the influence of ‘performance’ on recent theoretical formulations in geography.

4. working beyond fields: e.g. moving beyond disciplinary boundaries in addressing topics of mutual concern, such as effects of globalization, environmental change, creating sustainable research agendas.

Fieldworks responds to and seeks to expand on themes arising from the ‘Living Landscapes’ - Arts and Humanities Research Council ‘Landscape and Environment’ Programme Conference 2009, which was held at Aberystwyth University (Wales, UK) from 18 to 21 June 2009. (http://www.landscape.ac.uk/2009conference.html)

Deadlines for the issue 15:4 are as follows:

Proposals (up to 300 words): November 25th 2009

Draft manuscripts: March 1st 2010

Finalised material: May 24th 2010

Publication Date: December 2010

ALL proposals (up to 300 words), submissions and general enquiries should be sent to:

Sandra Laurer

Administrator – Performance Research

Centre for Performance Research (CPR)

Aberystwyth SY23 3AJ

Wales, UK

Email: http://performance-research@aber.ac.uk

Web:  www.performance-research.net

Issue-related enquiries can also be directed to the issue editors:

Mike Pearson (mip@aber.ac.uk)

Department of Theatre, Film and Television, Aberystwyth University

Heike Roms (hhp@aber.ac.uk)

Department of Theatre, Film and Television, Aberystwyth University

Stephen Daniels (landscape@nottingham.ac.uk)

Department of Geography, Nottingham University; 

Programme Director Arts and Humanities Research Council ‘Landscape and Environment’ Research Programme

For complete guidelines for submissions, including details on artists’ pages, please see:

http://www.performance-research.net/index.php?pid=12