Author: SCGRG

Professional Officer: Conference and Research Groups – Maternity Cover

Salary: £24,000 to £26,000

Temporary, full time, Professional Officer (maternity cover) to organise the Society’s annual international conference, to support the Society’s 28 research groups, and to work with the Head of Research and Higher Education to disseminate information on the Society and geography to the geographical academic/research community.

This appointment would be suitable for someone who has an interest in contemporary academic geography and for organising events, with very strong communication skills. It provides an excellent opportunity to work alongside the academic community. The person appointed to the post is likely to have at least two years of work experience or a Masters (or further) degree and work experience.

Cover is expected to last until at least 31 July 2012 or until the existing post holder returns. The starting date is 3 January 2012.

Closing date for applications: Noon on 11 November 2011. More information available at http://www.rgs.org/AboutUs/Jobs.htm

Many of you will have heard about the school Geography National Curriculum consultation.  Many of you will also have seen calls for professional geographers and others to get involved in these discussions and provide responses.  We thought Ian Cook’s posting to the critical geography forum was so good, we’ve got his permission to post it here.  This consultation is not just for school teachers, not just for the UK, and as Ian says will have real consequences.  Please do get involved.

“For those about to get their university students to address the ‘what is geography?’ question as new academic years start (in many places), please consider using the UK National Curriculum consultation on Geography as a pedagogical resource.

There are some fascinating documents that will enable the edges and nuances in this debate to be drawn out, students can bring to the discussion their own experiences of Geography at school, this is a ‘real’ debate about the identity of the discipline which will have ‘real’ consequences, and students and staff can help to shape these debates online as part of the consultation.

This debate is not just for UK-based geographers. Anyone can take part. One of the key protagonists – whom the UK Government’s Department of Education invited to compile a curriculum document – is Alex Standish, Assistant Professor of Geography at Western Connecticut State University.

The consultation finishes on *30 October*, so there’s a month to go.

The Geographical Association (the subject Association for Geography School teachers in the UK) have assembled a comprehensive range of documents, papers and opportunities for feedback on its web pages:

• The consultation
• Background to the consultation
• Resources for discussion
• Feedback on the GA’s ‘Curriculum Proposal & Rationale’ document
• Comment on the consultation (at the foot of the linked page)

 To add to this, a few years ago I was involved with Tracey Skelton, Duncan Fuller and Helen Griffiths in ‘Young People’s Geographies’ – a project funded through the RGS/GA ‘Action Plan for Geography’ – which aimed to enliven school geographies and to make them more widely/deeply relevant by encouraging students and their teachers to co-create their Geography curriculum. Project resources which might be used in a ‘What is Geography’ debate include:

• The Young People’s Geographies website
• Evaluations of the project in Years 1 and 2
• Vox pop videos from student participants, answering questions including ‘Have you learned anything about Geography?’

From a distance, these discussions may **seem** to range between two ‘extremes’: Standish’s conservative, fact-based rote learning and the YPG’s radical, contingent, co-learning pedagogy. This is a crude simplification of a complex debate, but could be a great place to start off the discussion…

There has been some discussion of the consultation in Twitter, and you can find it via the hashtags: #geographyteacher #geographyriot #Standish &/or #NewGeog

If anyone has used these resources before or can recommend any others, please reply to this post. Finally, whether you do this with your students or not, please read the core documents and contribute to the online discussions on the GA’s website by the end of next month.

Thanks and best wishes

Ian Cook (Exeter)”

 The RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2012 will take place at the University of Edinburgh from Tuesday 3 to Thursday 5 July 2012.

The theme for the 2012 conference is Security of geography/geography of security. The chair of conference is Professor Chris Philo (University of Glasgow).

The conference theme ‘Security of geography/geography of security’ provides an opportunity to explore the many intersections between geography and security: meaning both the security of geography and the geography of security. The idea is to work between an ‘inward-looking’ concern for the well-being of geographical research, learning, teaching and communication, and an outward-looking’ concern for how worldly geographies are deeply implicated in achieving or compromising the security of environments, peoples and communities. Attention should be given to ways of securing the subject of geography in the face of educational restructuring at schools and financial restructuring of university teaching and research, as well as set against growing governmental (and even popular) demands to show impact, relevance and applicability. Success in this respect may then depend on demonstrating what a geographical perspective – spanning the sciences through to the humanities – can offer attempts at understanding and countering multiple sources of insecurity (environmental, climatic, economic, national, digital, personal). A critical sensibility is needed, however, to ensure that the will to create security, whether for an academic subject or in real-world situations, does not descend into simplistic drawing and policing of boundaries around whatever is to be secured. The invitation to all geographers, physical and human, is to ask challenging questions about matters of geography and security which advance intellectual and practical agendas, addressing issues of major scientific and social significance, while also cultivating the institutional supports upon which our own ability to contribute as a subject necessarily depend

The call for Sessions and Papers by the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group will be announced shortly, and posted on-line and on twitter.  We look forward to your ideas and potential contributions.

The 2011 prize winning dissertations are now available on the social and cultural geography website on the dissertation page.  We are delighted that both prize winners have given us permission to post their prize winning submissions on the website.  We are sure they will be of considerable interest to the group, and hope you will join us in congratulating them on their achievements.

The minutes from the 2011 annual general meeting are also now available on the meetings and reports page.  If you have any further comments or questions about any of the items discussed at the AGM, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Gail Davies (Chair)

We are delighted to announce the award winners for the 2011 Undergraduate Dissertation Prize.

Jessica Potts, University of Durham, is the winner for her dissertation entitled “We are not here, we are not there”: Young Refugees’ and Asylum Seeker’s Negotiations of Identity and Belonging’. The committee praised the study for its high level of theoretical engagement, its excellent empirical analysis and its methodological innovation. The committee felt it made a significant and original contribution to academic debates on identity and belonging in social and cultural geography.

Mary McLaren, University of Exeter, was highly commended for her dissertation entitled ‘Constructing distant geographies of care: the example of Fairtrade in Horsham’. The Committee thought it was an impressive and sophisticated study, written in an eloquent and clear style, engaging with challenging issues and debates. It deftly weaved existing literature with original research findings. The findings were based on high quality, in-depth multi-method qualitative research. The Committee felt that the research was both engaging and innovative and nicely developed ideas within the existing cultural geography literature on fair trade.

The SCGRG recieved around 16 high quality nominations for this prize from depaments across the country.  We would like to thank everyone for sharing their work with us.  We saw many examples of very high quality  research that indicates the relevance of social and cultural geography to the study of contemporary issues and concerns.  We were pleased to see the range of work across different universities and would like to congratulate everyone who was nominated by their departments for this excellent achievement.

Gail Davies (Chair) & Emma Roe (Dissertation Convenor)

Thanks to everyone who contributed to vibrant intellectual discussions at the RGS-IBG annual conference this year, and to all those who came along to the rather more organisational conversations at the AGM of the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group.

We are delighted to welcome four new committee members.  Rebecca Sandover and Mia Hunt are our new post-graduate representatives.  Sarah Mills is taking over as membership secretary, and Hannah Macpherson is joining the committee.  We are delighted to have them on board.

Many of you already have already been keeping in touch with the activities of the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group via Facebook.  We are delighted to announce that we now have a new twitter account @SCGRG_RGS.  These resources are run collaboratively by the committee, and we welcome your input.  We are very happy for all members, and others, to make use of these social media to post news or ask us to retweet items and events that will be of interest to the rest of the group.

Gail Davies (Chair)