TY - JOUR
T1 - Dreamlands: Stories of Enchantment and Excess in a Search for Lost Sensations
AU - Dickens, Luke
AU - Edensor, Tim
N1 - Funding Information:
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research informing this article was supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust small grant, award number: SG170671.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2021.
PY - 2022/1
Y1 - 2022/1
N2 - This paper reflects on the search for a lost, obscure piece of experimental architecture that appeared on the west coast of Scotland in the late 1960s. Encouraged by cultural geography’s efforts to recuperate storytelling as a valid mode of inquiry and to adopt a more enchanted, affirmative disposition to our endeavors, we develop a geographical story intended to draw out how enchanted experiences gained through curiosity and an openness to contingencies can serve as a vital force for sustaining geographical ways of being, doing and knowing with the world. This account focuses on our encounters with various research sites that we identify as ‘dreamlands’ to express the idiosyncratic, unregulated, unexpected sensations of wonder and delight that such places evoked, the excessive materialities they revealed and the imaginative processes they elicited. We argue that such dreamlands are not as superfluous as might be assumed by their uncanny absence from the polished end-products of scholarship, and instead, allude to the latent forces of enchantment to which geographers might become better attuned when conducting and crafting their research.
AB - This paper reflects on the search for a lost, obscure piece of experimental architecture that appeared on the west coast of Scotland in the late 1960s. Encouraged by cultural geography’s efforts to recuperate storytelling as a valid mode of inquiry and to adopt a more enchanted, affirmative disposition to our endeavors, we develop a geographical story intended to draw out how enchanted experiences gained through curiosity and an openness to contingencies can serve as a vital force for sustaining geographical ways of being, doing and knowing with the world. This account focuses on our encounters with various research sites that we identify as ‘dreamlands’ to express the idiosyncratic, unregulated, unexpected sensations of wonder and delight that such places evoked, the excessive materialities they revealed and the imaginative processes they elicited. We argue that such dreamlands are not as superfluous as might be assumed by their uncanny absence from the polished end-products of scholarship, and instead, allude to the latent forces of enchantment to which geographers might become better attuned when conducting and crafting their research.
KW - Enchantment
KW - Excess
KW - Materiality
KW - Memory
KW - Senses
KW - Story
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85117944565&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/14744740211053613
DO - 10.1177/14744740211053613
M3 - Article
SN - 1474-4740
VL - 29
SP - 23
EP - 43
JO - cultural geographies
JF - cultural geographies
IS - 1
ER -