Un/Packing Psychogeography
As the former Psychogeography Editor of Panorama, 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).
