If remembering and feeling, designing and decision-making are situated as well as embodied processes, then cognition can have material and ecological components. Our mental lives may be partly constituted by places – landscapes, built environments, neighbourhoods – and by artifacts. This workshop examines relations between memory, place, and material culture. Our topics include maps and spatial cognition, tools and devices in wayfinding and memory, mental health and the city, difficult places and historically burdened heritage, and spatial disruptions of memory. Speakers draw on evidence from archaeology, architecture, art, neuroscience, performance, philosophy, and sociology, opening up new questions about the nature of bodily and affective orientation as people navigate places and the past together.

Program

May 16, 2023

14.30-14.40 Welcome, John Sutton (Macquarie University, Institut d’études avancées de Paris)

• 14.40-15.30 Erik Rietveld (Philosophy, Amsterdam - RAAAF [Rietveld Art- Architecture-Affordances]), Landscapes of transformation
• 15.30-16.00 Valeria Giardino (Philosophy, Institut Jean Nicod), We are geometric beings: how we use space to think

16.00-16.20 Tea

• 16.20-17.10 Sarah Gensburger (Sociology, CNRS/ Sciences Po), The memorialization of terrorism in Paris public space, 1974-2023
• 17.10-18.00 Mark Edmonds (Archaeology, York), Building and belonging: architecture and memory in Neolithic Orkney

18.00-20.00 Drinks

May 17, 2023

• 10.00-10.50 Andy Clark (Philosophy & Informatics, Sussex), Predictive processing and the materially entangled mind
• 10.50-11.40 Paula Reavey (Psychology, London South Bank), Spatial markings and memory: mental health and institutional space

11.40-12.10 Coffee

• 12.10-13.00 Madeleine Accarain (Wagon Landscaping, Paris), The coldness of the stone and the lightness of the bird: a memorial garden for the victims of November 13, 2015

13.00-14.10 Lunch

• 14.10-15.00 Roberto Casati (Philosophy, Institut Jean Nicod), The cognitive life of maps

15.00-15.20 Tea

• 15.20-16.10 Evelyn Tribble (English, Connecticut), Affective atmospheres: place and memory on the early modern stage
• 16.10-17.00 Mike Wheeler (Philosophy, Stirling), The invisible and the visible: building, dwelling, and authenticity

17.00-17.30 Roundtable discussion with Alain Berthoz, Valeria Giardino, John Sutton

Information

Free entrance upon registration here

Institut d’études avancées de Paris 17 quai d’Anjou 75004 Paris

Access: Metro Sully-Morland (line 7) or Metro Saint-Paul (line 1)

Organizer

Workshop organized by John Sutton, Emeritus Professor at Macquarie University, Australia, and 2022-2023 Paris Institute for Advanced Study Research Fellow, with the support of the Paris IAS.

John Sutton is Emeritus Professor in Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. His research on memory and skill seeks to bring humanities, social sciences, and cognitive sciences together, and to integrate conceptual, ethnographic, and experimental methods. After early work addressed early modern science and philosophy, his main topics have been autobiographical and collaborative memory, embodied memory and expert movement, distributed cognition, and cognitive history.

A collection of essays he co-edited with Kath Bicknell, Collaborative Embodied Performance: ecologies of skill, was published in Bloomsbury’s ‘Performance and Science’ series in 2022. Sutton is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, and has held visiting fellowships at UCLA, Edinburgh, UCSD, London, and Durham. After Paris, he will take up a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at the University of Stirling in Scotland for 2023-24.

In September 2022, he joined the Paris IAS as part of the French Institutes for Advanced Study fellowship program - FIAS - co-funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 945408. His fellowship also benefits from the support of the RFIEA+ LABEX (Grant ANR-11-LABX-0027-01).