A Place More Void takes its name from a scene in William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, wherein an elderly soothsayer has a final chance to warn Caesar about the Ides of March. Worried that he won’t be able to deliver his message because of the crowded alleyways, the soothsayer devises a plan to find and intercept Caesar in “a place more void.” It is precisely such an elusive place that this volume makes space for by theorizing and empirically exploring the many yet widely neglected ways in which the void permeates geographical thinking.

This collection presents geography’s most in-depth and sustained engagements with the void to date, demonstrating the extent to which related themes such as gaps, cracks, lacks, and emptiness perforate geography’s fundamental concepts, practices, and passions. Arranged in four parts around the themes of Holes, Absences, Edges, and Voids, the contributions demonstrate the fecundity of the void for thinking across a wide range of phenomena: from archives to alien abductions, caves to cryptids, and vortexes to vanishing points.

A Place More Void gathers established and emerging scholars who engage a wide range of geographical issues and who express themselves not only through archival, literary, and socio-scientific investigations, but also through social and spatial theory, political manifesto, poetry, and performance art.


 

“In the current period of climatic and political uncertainty A Place More Void explores the generative capacities of the unknown through the lens of different conceptualizations of the void. I came away from the reading invigorated by the productive mobilizations of the concept and fully convinced of its potential to assist in understanding and moving forward in the current conjuncture.”-Susan M. Ruddick, professor of geography at the University of Toronto “As a spatial concept the void-or a space that reflects a gap in place or time-is a curious yet compelling question to investigate in geographical research. A Place More Void is conceptually unique and definitely provides a step forward as a contribution in the discipline of geography.”-Nadia Bartolini, associate research fellow of geography at the University of Exeter

Paul Kingsbury is a professor of geography and associate dean of the Faculty of Environment at Simon Fraser University. He is the coeditor of Psychoanalytic Geographies and Soundscapes of Wellbeing in Popular Music. Anna J. Secor is a professor of geography at Durham University. She is the coeditor of The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography.