To celebrate our 50th year, the SCGRG is staging a series of events and publications to reflect on the past, present and future of the subdisciplines, beginning with the SCGRG 50th Celebration event in Nottingham on November 6, 2024.

This page will share details of the various activities organised and undertaken to mark the occasion.

Revisiting New Words, New Worlds (November, 2024)

To mark the occasion of the 50th celebration event, Chris Philo and Vickie Zhang engaged in an interview reflecting on New Words, New Worlds: Reconceptualising Social and Cultural Geography, a compilation self-published by the study group in 1991. The volume, originally compiled by Chris, brought together the papers, discussant’s comments and circulated documents from the New Words, New Worlds conference held in Edinburgh, in September 1991.

Responding to the explosion of interest in the ‘cultural’, and an ‘Initiative’ mobilised in the wake of the renaming of the study group from the Social Geography Study Group to the Social and Cultural Geography Study Group, New Words, New Worlds brought together what is, from today’s vantage point, a truly remarkable set of social and cultural geographers. These thinkers, and the germinating ideas archived in this volume, have gone to have a major influence across human geography, in Britain and beyond.

Recognising that the compilation is extremely difficult to find and long out of print, we have taken the occasion to make the volume available for the first time in digital format. To accompany the original text, Chris and Vickie engaged in a new dialogue around the compilation to orient the present reader to the context, significance, and legacies of the ‘new words’ and their surrounding moment. In circularity with the original New Words, the study group have decided to self-publish the new correspondence once more.

If you are interested in ordering a hard copy of the Revisiting correspondence, please contact Vickie Zhang <vickie.zhang@bristol.ac.uk>.

Philo, C. & Zhang, V. (2024). Revisiting ‘New Words, New Worlds’: A Correspondence. Social and Cultural Geography Research Group: Bristol.

Philo, C. (1991), New Words, New Worlds: Reconceptualising Social and Cultural Geography, Social and Cultural Geography Study Group: Lampeter.