Landscape, Wilderness and the Wild at Newcastle University

From Newcastle University

26-28th March 2015, Newcastle University, UK

This international cross-disciplinary conference, organised by the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University, will bring together scholarly communities for knowledge exchange and debate.  It aims to consider the discourses that swirl around concepts of wilderness, wildness, wildscape, re-wilding, wilding and the wild.   It will seek to explore the place of these notions in the contemporary imagination, whilst giving an account of their continuing agency for academics, professionals and all those engaged in landscape issues.  We look forward to welcoming participants from around the world including academics, journalists, artists, writers, creative practitioners, activists and landscape practitioners across disciplines such as conservation management, environmental philosophy, countryside planning, landscape architecture, cultural geography, literature, fine arts, and other subject areas in the arts, humanities and sciences.  

Keynote Speakers:

Professor Bill Adams : Conservation, Authenticity and Wild Nature in an Age of Management

Professor Bill Adams holds the Moran Chair in Conservation and Development at Cambridge University. His research focuses on the choices and conflicts between development and conservation. His writing on the subject includes:‘Against Extinction, the Story of Conservation’ (2004).

Dr Steve Carver : Re(al)wilding: making space for true nature in the British countryside

Dr Steve Carver is Director of the Wildland Research Institute at the University of Leeds and has worked extensively on the development of wild land mapping and evaluation methodologies and has tested and applied these across a variety of locations and spatial scales including Scotland, England, Britain, Europe, and the USA.  

Jay Griffiths : The Wildness Within

Jay Griffiths is the award-winning writer and author of ’Wild: An Elemental Journey’ (2008) and ‘Kith: the Riddle of the Childscape’ (2013).  She was born in Manchester and studied English Literature at Oxford University.

Dr Anna Jorgensen : Arcadia? A landscape typology of urban wilderness

Dr Anna Jorgensen is Managing Editor Landscape Research and Co-Editor of ‘Urban Wildscapes,’ one of the first edited collections of writings about urban ‘wilderness’ landscape.  

Paul Kingsnorth : The Anthropocene Fallacy

Paul Kingsnorth is a poet and novelist.  He is a former deputy-editor of The Ecologist and a co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. His writings include 'The Wake' (2014), ‘Kidland’ (2011) and ‘Uncivilization’ (2009).

Full details available on the university website here where conference registration is now live.