Land Diagrams: the new twinned studies

Abstract

As interdisciplinary geographers we find ourselves taking part in conversations, conferences and collaborations that are structured to focus on commonalities across ways of knowing. The unchecked rhetoric of interdisciplinarity often refers to underthought, benign activities that prioritize the congruent topics and lexis by which two or more disciplines are able to be mutually supplementary. If the complex environments of the modern world are one of the major stakes in interdisciplinary conversations, then alternative methods of organizing cross-disciplinary geographical enquiry are needed. Land Diagrams, the new online series of non-collaborative ‘twinned studies’, uses found diagrams as ‘machines of translation’ to provoke divergent specialist interpretations. The series refers to the intellectual and practical uses of visual methodologies, as well as to a history of philosophical work in ekphrastics and diagrammatology, using diagrams as migratory objects that reveal diverse understandings of the multiple systems of knowledge attached to the land.