Professor David Bissell, Bristol Next Generation Visiting Professor
Peel Lecture Theatre (followed by a drinks reception in Hepple), School of Geographical Sciences
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Abstract
We seem to be living in a new age of hallucination where some people’s perception of reality is becoming destabilised. From the digital fabrications generated by artificial intelligence to the twisting of truth by political gaslighting, hallucinations have become both a cause and symptom of deception in our post-truth era. The remedy to such hoodwinkery, or so we are told, is an increased demand to cultivate vigilance. And yet the idea of such a vigilant subject is itself, a kind of hallucination. In this lecture, I want to explore the contention that perception is actually much more hallucinatory than we often imagine as geographers. I’ll do this by introducing sunstroke as an intriguing kind of hallucinatory perception that pushes the boundaries of how we as geographers theorise worldly encounters. Pairing archival accounts of responses to sun exposure in early colonial Australia with more recent literary accounts of sunstroke, I trace some of the political and ethical consequences of this variability of perception and highlight dimensions of bodily difference. Drawing on both phenomenological and post-phenomenological geographical thought, I develop the argument that all perception is, to a degree, hallucinatory, and I explain how and why this matters for geographical theory.
About the Speaker
David is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Melbourne. He is a cultural geographer interested in theorising bodily vulnerability through geographical theories of affect and alterity. He is currently working on a book project on the concept of being ‘out of it’—of which the ideas in this lecture form a part—and has recently written an essay on brain fog as a form of bodily dispossession for Dialogues in Human Geography. Outside this project, David has been part of project teams exploring mobile lives and technological futures in relation to working from home, digital on-demand mobile work, and automated workplaces. He is author of Transit Life: How Commuting Is Transforming Our Cities (MIT Press, 2018), co-editor of Negative Geographies: Exploring the Politics of Limits (U Nebraska Press, 2021) and is managing editor of Social & Cultural Geography. David will be visiting the University of Bristol as a Bristol ‘Next Generation’ Visiting Professor for six weeks in May and June.
About the Bassett Lecture
The Bassett Lecture is held annually in honour of Dr Keith Bassett, a critical geographer and long-time Senior Lecturer at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol. Though formally retired, Dr Bassett continues to write, teach, and contribute to the intellectual life of the School and University. The lecture series recognises Dr Bassett's work and contributions in the fields of social and geographical theory, critical geographies of political economy, urbanism, social movements and social justice, political ecology, and critical socio-legal studies.
Yuyue Sun: yuyue.sun.2022@bristol.ac.uk
