Editors: Dr. Paul Gilchrist, University of Brighton, UK | Professor Peter Hansen, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA | Dr. Jonathan Westaway, University of Central Lancashire, UK.
The AHRC funded Other Everests Research Network calls for contributions as chapters to a collected volume of essays to reassess the historical and cultural significance of Mount Everest in the modern world. Everest has become a well-known site for mountaineers in search of the ‘third pole’, high-altitude adventure, or individual dreams and desires. The centenary of the British expeditions in the 1920s is an opportune moment to reassess the social, political, economic, and environmental dynamics at work in this longer history. We seek contributions that explore the “Other Everests” within, outside, or alongside the iconic images and received histories of Everest.
Collections and commemorations have played a critical role in fashioning narratives and visual imagery of Everest. Among many potential themes, we hope to explore the opportunities and potential afforded by these archives to bring formerly hidden histories into view. We seek scholarly essays, personal reflections, and creative interventions that give prominence to new perspectives, hidden histories, and marginalized voices that acknowledge and broaden our understanding of the peoples, geographies and forces that have made Mt Everest.
We seek contributions that explore the “Other Everests” within, outside, or alongside the iconic images and received histories of Everest.
Several partners in the Other Everests research network—the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers and Kendal Mountain Festival—have been prominent venues for the dissemination of films, narratives, and images of Everest. The aim of the Other Everests network is to bring together international scholars, archivists, curators, artists and practitioners with learned societies and the mountaineering community to reassess the legacy of Everest expeditions and to re-evaluate the symbolic, political, and cultural status of Everest in the contemporary world. By offering fresh perspectives on historical and cultural practices that shaped “Everest” over the last century, the contributors to this volume aim to envision new kinds of “other Everests” in the future.
Submission of Abstracts
Please send abstract proposals of no more than 300 words to Paul Gilchrist (P.M.Gilchrist@Brighton.ac.uk), Peter H. Hansen (phansen@wpi.edu) and Jonathan Westaway , (JWestaway@uclan.ac.uk) by 14 November 2022.
Contributors will be invited to develop their works by the summer 2023.
More information about the Other Everests Network
Other Everests: Commemoration, Memory and Meaning and the British Everest Expedition Centenaries, 2021-2024. AHRC Networking Grant AH/W004917/1 | URL: www.othereverests.com | Twitter: @OtherEverests.
