Panel title: Engaging space, Performing place: 'making place' through expressive practice (P222)

In this panel we would like to explore how people engage with space in performative and other expressive practices. We want to focus on how, in these practices, reflexive (sensory) experience is used to ‘make’ meaningful places, which can be imagined or real, public or private.

We take as our starting point the notion that expressive/performative practices are embedded in and contingent upon socio-cultural context, and that they are brought into being through, and are dependent on, the engagement of individuals/groups with their physical and social environment; in short, that they are em-placed and em-bodied expressions of ‘being-in-the-world’ (Csordas, 1999).

We would like to invite proposals for papers that reflect, theoretically and/or empirically, on current notions of space and place in a variety of disciplines - such as geographer Doreen Massey’s (2005) perception of space as a ‘spatio-temporal event’ or anthropologists’ Tim Ingold's (2008) notion of place as a 'meshwork of paths' ‘occurring’ through the movement of people and other organisms through space, or Paul Stoller’s work on embodiment and sensuous scholarship -, and that relate this reflection on space and place to the practice of expressive performance, stressing the relationship between bodies and minds and the materiality and sensoriality of place.

Convenors: Maria Krom, PhD Researcher, CRIA-Center for the Research in Anthropology, Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Anthony McCann, Lecturer in Contemporary Folk Culture, University of Ulster