Dr Callum Sutherland
- Lecturer in Human Geography (School of Geographical & Earth Sciences)
telephone:
ext 5447
email:
Callum.Sutherland@glasgow.ac.uk
Room 302, Main Building, East Quad, University of Glasgow, G12 8QQ
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1040-460XResearch interests
My overarching interest is in geographies of postcapitalist desire, which is animated – in large part – by the work of the late cultural theorist (and more) Mark Fisher as well as engagement with broader geographies of postcapitalism and desire. I am interested in how the spaces that link and traverse the places of resistance and prefiguration of alternatives to capitalism can be co-ordinated into an alter-system (or systems) to capitalism via cultural experimentation and activism.
Methodologically, I have explored these interests through psychogeography, music-making, and videography to generate ‘weird’ representations of Glasgow: cultural experiments that bring into ongoing dialogue both personal and political readings of the city (see: https://concretebodach.scot/). I have couched these – often, but not exclusively – ‘solo’ explorations and productions in broader discussion with artists, psychogeographers, and fellow academics within and beyond Glasgow who are interested in the weirdness and weirding of urban life. By exploring and generating the weird – an affect of simultaneous attraction and repulsion – I offer ways of imagining how people might be attracted to alternative and dissenting ways of being in the world that they might first reckon beyond the pale.
Through this work I have develop my previous research on religion and postsecularity. I have wrestled with my own Christian non/religiosity in the midst of the more subjective aspects of psychogeography. In reflecting on my own discomfort with the label of ‘Christian’ when walking in Glasgow I’ve simultaneously reflected on how Glasgow’s fractious religious spaces and histories facilitate this discomfort through their entanglement in, for instance, the transatlantic slave trade and certain expressions of the protestant work ethic. My encounters with new - or at least changing - ways to be non/religious in Glasgow through psychogeography allow me to ask questions about how personal subjective dynamics might open-up to new kinds of collective subjectivity by reorienting – in a postsecular vein – their approach to (and weaving together of) rationality and a/ir-rationality. I’m interested particularly in how these new non/religiosities might contribute fresh ideas and ways of being to an enlarged politics of repair and solidarity across difference in the present conjuncture of increasing and large-scale political, environmental, and economic oppression.
In summary, my research interests include:
- Geographies of postcapitalist desire.
- Psychogeography
- Creative - particularly musical - methods.
- Geographies of the weird.
- Geographies of religion and postsecularity.
Grants
Urban Geographies of Acid Communism
Urban Studies Foundation, Postdoctoral Research Fellowship
£160,000
2020-2024
Additional information
Chair of Scottish Centre for Geopoetics 2022-2024
