Mapping Vernacular Terrains Conference 2024

Mapping Vernacular Terrains is a call for reflection on the scope, diversity, interconnectedness, and at the same time, diasporic nature of vernacular studies in 2024. It is an opportunity to consider cartographies as research tools that produce conceptual mappings to navigate the complex 'terrains of the contentious and often ambiguous notion of what might be defined as the 'vernacular. 'Mapping' is an operative term, which may be interpreted as identifying. locating, representing, discursively conveying, re-constructing. and delineating the built and landscaped environments pertaining to the concept of the vernacular. While maps are considered static representations of an environment, mapping is a recognised process for investigation of time and space in cultural geography but is atypically utilised as a method in vernacular studies.

Viewing the vernacular through a cartographic agency, it is proposed as a strategy to decipher the relational and global nature of the vernacular. This process of extension of the scope of the research beyond a particular community, geographical boundary, and built typology, but to position the vernacular in its broader contexts such as historical migration patterns to the migration of ideas; using visual and discursive forms of recording: documenting and theorising vernacular traditions will highlight the extents and capacity of influence of which is this field. Therefore, 'terrains' may be considered geographical, philosophical, topographical, cultural, spiritual, and highly conceptual in exploration of the spread of ideas, ways of building, being in the world and inhabiting an intellectual concept which since the 1980s has been referred to as the vernaculor. We seek positioning of vernacular terrains within rich, evolving, contemporary contexts to understand the continued resonance, persistence, continuity of the vernacular for the twenty-first century.

Vernacular Terrains' may include:
• Intellectual histories: How are the merits of scholarship on the vernacular understood in Oceania and beyond? Has the emphasis of vernacular studies expanded beyond historical and cultural underpinnings?
• Boundaries: How has the notion of 'boundaries typically culturally determined and understood impacted vernacular studies? How might boundaries be explored to delimit but also to open-up interdisciplinary 'fields' of enquiry?
• Currents/Counter-currents: What are the trends that endure in vernacular studies from the insight around environmental design to the sense of community built from socio-cultural traditions? How do inhabitants and advocates of the vernacular occupy spaces of subversion? How does the vernacular provide agency for resistance; and endurance of dominant power structures and colonial landscapes?
• Cartographies/Mappings: To what extent are ideas ranging from the philosophical to the historical able to be represented and understood through the thematics of cartography-verbal/oral, performative, religious/spiritual, military, cosmological, scientific/accurate; imaginative/mythical?
• Ethnographies: How do fields such as architectural anthropology methodologies embrace other ways of understanding vernacular environments? What are the advantages of the interview and community engagement in revealing the intellectual depths of the vernacular?

Conference Co-conveners: Dr Julie Nichols [UniSA] + Professor Samer Akkach [UniAdel]