26-29th, March 2015
Newcastle University, UK

This international cross-disciplinary conference will bring together scholarly communities for knowledge exchange and debate. It aims to consider the discourses that swirl around concepts of wilderness, wildness, wildscape, re-wilding, wilding and the wild.

The conference, organised by the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University, will seek to explore the place of these notions in the contemporary imagination, whilst giving an account of their continuing agency for academics, professionals and all those engaged in landscape issues. We look forward to welcoming participants from around the world including academics, journalists, artists, writers, creative practitioners, activists and landscape practitioners across disciplines such as conservation management, environmental philosophy, countryside planning, landscape architecture, cultural geography, literature, fine arts, and other subject areas in the arts, humanities and sciencesKeynote Speakers (confirmed to date)

Professor Bill Adams holds the Moran Chair in Conservation and Development at Cambridge University. His research focuses on the choices and conflicts between development and conservation. His writing on the subject includes: ‘Against Extinction, the Story of Conservation’ (2004).

Dr Steve Carver of the University of Leeds has worked extensively on the development of wild land mapping and evaluation methodologies and has tested and applied these across a variety of locations and spatial scales including Scotland, England, Britain, Europe, and the USA. See

Jay Griffiths is the award-winning writer and author of ’Wild: An Elemental Journey’ (2008) and ‘Kith: the Riddle of the Childscape’ (2013). She was born in Manchester and studied English Literature at Oxford University.

Dr Anna Jorgensen of Sheffield University – Managing Editor Landscape Research and Co-Editor of ‘Urban Wildscapes,’ one of the first edited collections of writings about urban ‘wilderness’ landscape.

Paul Kingsnorth is a poet and novelist. He is a former deputy-editor of The Ecologist and a co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. His writings include ‘Kidland’ (2011) and ‘Uncivilization’ (2009).

Call for Papers

There is an open call for papers for conference sessions. Abstract submissions for presentations or posters are welcome from people working in research, policy and practice.

Abstracts (in Word format) should be no longer than 350 words (excluding references). You may also send one A4 page of images or tables (as a pdf file). Final papers will be 5,000 words. All approved abstracts and papers will be pre-published in the conference proceedings.

The planned themes are:

• The Urban Wild
• Rewilding vs the Cultural Landscape
• Future Imaginaries of Landscape
• Wilderness as a State of Mind
• Reclaimed and Restored landscapes
• The End of Environmentalism?

The submission of abstracts for selection and approval
should be sent to wilderness@ncl.ac.uk by 1st June, 2014

Please identify with which of the themes you feel your paper is most appropriately allied. All enquiries, comments and suggestions should be to the conference organisers by email: wildernessconf@ncl.ac.uk