Un/Packing Psychogeography – a checklist

As the Psychogeography Editor of Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature, I would like to provide the following (fluid, playful, provocative) criteria for those considering submission for one of our call-outs.

Leaving Behind

• Capitols (London; Paris anyway…)
• Solipsistic intellectualism.
• The pontifications of the lone, white male.
• Obfuscation and needless jargon.
• A performance of erudition over a sincere, embodied engagement and strong sense of voice.
• ‘Wikipedia-lit’ and Rough Guide
• Self-importance (it’s only going for a walk).
• Maps (‘Done with the compass, done with the chart’, Emily Dickinson).
• Smart devices.
• Footnotes, end-notes, a bibliography (‘death-by-quotes’).

Taking with Us

• A compassionate, curious gaze.
• A visceral, authentic response.
• The Flâneuse.
• A multi-dimensional form of exploration, one that is both diachronic and immediate, vertical as well as horizontal, outward as well as inward.
• Self-excavation – a form of travel through one’s own history.
• Body writing – maps of the skin.
• Voices of the marginalized: the psychogeographies of indigenous peoples, BAME, LGBTQ+, Traveller culture, asylum seekers and refugees, working class, etc.
• An awareness and acknowledgement of the challenges of the Climate Crisis, and the seismic destabilisation of the Anthropocene (‘The Earth has moved,’ Prof. Bruno Latour).
• Humility: a disavowal of omniscience.
• An ethical foregrounding. A responsible form of writing, sensitive to cultural appropriation. An exoticisation of the self, perhaps, but not the ‘other’.
• Humour.
• Soulfulness: a Psyche-geography, rather than a Psycho-geography.
• Mindfulness (mind in one’s feet; mind in the pen).

Contact Kevan if you are interested in submitting: psychogeographyeditor[at]panoramajournal[dot]org