Dr George Burdon

I am an early career researcher currently working as a Lecturer in Cultural Geography in the School of Science at UNSW Canberra.

My work focuses on the affective dimensions of music and sound (including in new forms of digital sonic media) and develops concepts to understand the spatial dimensions of attention and subjectivity.

I currently have three overlapping research interests:

1. Developing geographic concepts of attention at a time often characterised by ideas of attentive stress and overload. Many of these discussions lack a sense of the relation between attention and the cultural spaces in which it emerges, so my interest here is in understanding the spatial dynamics of attention in ways that complicate broad-brush narratives about a crisis of attention. 

Burdon, G. (2025) Displaced attention: Bergson, attentive habits and Tony Conrad's drone music. Area, 57, e70022. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/area.70022 

2. Understanding the impact of noise and sound on wellbeing. I am currently working on a project on hospital noise, involving understanding both how noise is experienced in healthcare settings and experimenting with the design of audio soundscapes for sensory rooms as spaces of respite and recuperation. This builds on previous work conceptualising the influence of ambient sound on subjectivity and perception.

Burdon, G. (2023) Immunological atmospheres: Ambient music and the design of self-experience. Cultural Geographies, 30(4), 555-568. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740231167604

3. Exploring the way encounters with sound art express new ways of thinking and perceiving our worlds. This longstanding interest was the focus of my PhD thesis, completed at UNSW in 2022, which paired analyses of sonic artworks with concepts from the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze, Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson and more to understand sound art in terms of affective space-times.

Burdon, G. (2025), Sound Art Geographies: Listening at the Limits of Audibility. Geography Compass, 19: e70022. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.70022

See my full list of publications below. I welcome applications from potential PhD students wishing to study topics related to the above.