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Our 2018-19 committee

Our annual AGM took place at the Annual Conference of the Royal Geographic Society at Cardiff University on Wednesday 29th August during the lunch plenary. We say thank you so much to our outgoing members who have done a fantastic job and service for our research group, while we welcome our new committee members for the upcoming year! Our next AGM will take place once again during the Annual Conference at the RGS in London between the 27th and 30th August 2019.

We will publish the minutes from this year’s AGM in due course. For now, you can find our committee organisation for 2018-19 below:

Committee members 2020-2021

Name	Email	Committee position	Term dates
Tara Woodyer	tara.woodyer@port.ac.uk	Chair	2019-2022
Will Andrews	wandrews@uclan.ac.uk	Secretary	2020-2023
Mel Nowicki	mnowicki@brookes.ac.uk	Treasurer	2018-2021
James Robinson	james.robinson@mmu.ac.uk	Membership Secretary	2018-2021
Saskia Warren	saskia.warren@manchester.ac.uk	Dissertation Officer	2020-2021
Osian Elias	o.h.elias@swansea.ac.uk	Conference Officer	2020-2021
Mark Holton	mark.holton@plymouth.ac.uk	Education Officer	Treasurer 2015-2018 Ordinary Committee Member 2018-2019 2019-2021
Charlotte Veal	Charlotte.Veal@newcastle.ac.uk	Early Career and Mentoring Officer	2020-2023
Jen Owen	owenj4@cardiff.ac.uk	Social Media Officer	2018-2021
Milena Morozova	ms.morozova@gmail.com	Postgraduate Representative	2019-2020; 2020-2021
Suzanne Hocknell	suzanne.hocknell@newcastle.ac.uk	Ordinary Committee Member	2015-2018; 2018-2021
Maddy Thompson	maddy.thompson@ncl.ac.uk	Ordinary Committee Member	2018-2021
Jason Luger	jason.luger@northumbria.ac.uk	Ordinary Committee Member	2020-2021
Ben Anderson	ben.anderson@durham.ac.uk	Ordinary Committee Member	2019-2022
Helen Wilson	helen.f.wilson@durham.ac.uk	Ordinary Committee Member	2018-2021
Sinéad O'Connor	sio13@aber.ac.uk	Ordinary Committee Member	2018-2021
Jamie Halliwell	j.halliwell.mmu@gmail.com	Website Officer	2016-2018; 2018-2021

RGS-IBG 2018: AGM and committee vacancies

The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) will take place in Cardiff in August 2018

The 2018 AGM of the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group (SCGRG) will take place at the RGS-IBG Annual Conference in Cardiff on Wednesday 29th August at 13:10 (Beverton Lecture Theatre, Main Building, Cardiff University). All are welcome to attend.

We have nine vacancies for Committee positions as current post-holders complete their terms of office:

Secretary
This post is a three-year term (in the first instance) and the role involves coordination of the group’s administration. Each January the secretary prepares the annual report with the chair and the treasurer; the secretary also prepares agenda and notices for the AGM in August/September and takes minutes of this (and any other) meeting(s). The secretary may attend the RGS-IBG Research Groups Committee at the RGS, normally in October and March. The secretary will usually be involved in SCGRG’s wider committee activities, i.e. part of the judging panel for our undergraduate dissertation prize.

Treasurer
This post is a three-year term (in the first instance) and the role involves managing the research group’s finances and related administration. Each January, the treasurer prepares an annual financial report and an interim report for the AGM in August/September. The treasurer may attend the RGS-IBG Research Groups Committee at the RGS, normally in October and March. The treasurer would usually be involved in SCGRG’s wider committee activities, i.e. part of the judging panel for our undergraduate dissertation prize.

Membership secretary
This post is a three-year term (in the first instance) and the role involves recording the SCGRG membership and welcoming new members. The membership secretary will liaise with the RHED officer of the RGS-IBG to update records on RGS-IBG affiliates who are group members, and keep the group’s records of non-affiliated members. The membership secretary would usually be involved in SCGRG’s wider committee activities i.e. part of the judging panel for our undergraduate dissertation prize.

Ordinary Committee Members (x 4)
This post is a three-year term (in the first instance). While without specific responsibilities, ordinary committee members would usually be involved in the SCGRG’s wider committee activities i.e. part of the judging panel for our undergraduate dissertation prize. Ordinary committee members may also be asked to provide support for named roles.

Postgraduate Representatives (x 2)
This post is a one-year term (in the first instance) and the role involves liaising with the RGS-IBG Postgraduate Forum, engaging with postgraduate issues through our SCGRG postgraduate blog and working with our other postgraduate representative(s) on related events and activities. The PG representative would usually be involved in SCGRG’s wider committee activities i.e. part of the judging panel for our undergraduate dissertation prize.

Nominations for successors (who must be a Fellow or Postgraduate Fellow of the RGS-IBG) are now open. Nominations must be in writing to the Chair (Prof. Harriet Hawkins – Harriet.Hawkins@rhul.ac.uk) and Secretary (Rhys Dafydd Jones – rhj@aber.ac.uk) with the name of two nominators (these need not be Fellows of the RGS-IBG or existing committee members). The deadline for nominations is Friday 24th August 2018. The elections will be conducted at the AGM itself.

Further opportunities to be elected to a named role or as an ordinary committee member may become available during the AGM itself. We’ll also be discussing different ways that our wider membership can get involved with SCGRG.

If you have any questions about any of the above posts or about SCGRG more broadly, please e-mail Harriet and Rhys.

Best wishes,

Rhys (SCGRG Secretary, on behalf of the SCGRG committee)

Reflections from the Postgraduate Midterm Conference 2018 by Hibba Mazhary

University of London’s Royal Holloway Campus, Egham

Hibba Mazhary was awarded a bursary from our research group to attend this year’s Royal Geographical Society Mid-term conference at the University of London’s Royal Holloway campus back in April 2018. As part of her award, we asked her to provide us with a blog post, recounting her experiences and thoughts of the postgraduate conference event.

Ideas and Provocations

By Hibba Mazhary

It was a sunny week in mid-April, during the first (and what we naïvely thought was the last) real heatwave of 2018, when a group of postgraduates and some senior academics gathered in Royal Holloway’s leafy Egham campus for the 2018 RGS-IBG Mid-Term Conference.

We had the pleasure of listening to a variety of keynote speakers with diverse geographical approaches. After the initial welcome and registration, we were addressed by Professor Katherine Brickell from Royal Holloway’s geography department. Her talk wove together two fieldwork projects, linked funnily enough by the common topic of ‘bricks’. She acknowledged the link between her chosen research topic and her last name, as fated, or at the very least, serendipitous. Professor Brickell traced the mundane engagements of people with bricks in Cambodia and Ireland, and how the politics of grievability and vulnerability became inscribed on bodies through the medium of bricks. In Cambodia, she described the phenomenon of ‘Blood Bricks’, where the booming building development market created an insatiable demand for bricks in the country. Modern-day slavery is prevalent in Cambodian brick kilns and multi-generational families are trapped in debt bondage. In this case, bricks represented exploitation. Bricks were embodied, quite literally, by the limbs and bodies of workers, as workers often suffer serious injuries in the kilns. In contrast, bricks represented something quite different in the Irish case. Residents of a modular housing development for the homeless in Dublin were concerned that the buildings were not traditional ‘bricks and mortar’. They feared that their homes would be conspicuously unlike normal housing and would further marginalise the homeless. The emotional resonance that residents had with bricks in this case, and what bricks symbolised in the Cambodian context, showed that building materials are affective infrastructures.

The next keynote speaker presented his thoughts from quite a different angle, as a journalist rather than as an academic. Jamie Bartlett, who works for a leading think-tank, spoke to us about his experience with fringe communities, otherwise known as ‘radical movements’. His work involved in-depth ethnographic research, following radical groups such as the Transhumanist Party and Tommy Robinson attempting to set up Pegida UK. Although he made a point of not identifying himself as an academic, but rather as a journalist, much of what he mentioned resonated with us as an academic audience: the ethical struggles of participant observation, the difficulties of writing critically about people with whom you have built rapport, and research participants being unhappy with your write-up all felt like familiar issues. The most fascinating and disconcerting part of his address was the observation that what is deemed ‘radical’ by society can change quite drastically over decades. To demonstrate this, he gave the example of Neo-Luddite Ted Kaczynski’s ‘Unabomber Manifesto’; whilst Ted’s violent methods still seem extreme today, the fears about technology expressed in this manifesto resonate much more strongly in today’s world than when it was written in the 1990s.

The third keynote speech by David Gilbert, again from Royal Holloway’s geography department, deconstructed the idea of the suburban and problematised the idea of the suburban being subordinate to the urban. The suburban was traditionally theorised as a place of mundanity and lack of creativity. He referenced the new critical studies, which are more celebratory about the suburbs, and which recognise that they are not ethnically and racially homogenous. We were therefore encouraged to think about the suburbs in a more critical and nuanced manner.

There was also a range of very useful workshops where we, as postgraduates, tried to absorb as much information as we could. The first workshop I attended was on publishing, given by the co-editor of Area, the journal of the Royal Geographical Society. She imparted some very valuable advice such as the significance of titles, abstracts and keywords, which are often overlooked, in shaping the discoverability of your article in search engines. She also gave us a valuable insight into the peer review process, demystifying the stages before, after and during the dreaded “Reviewer 1” and “Reviewer 2”.

The second workshop on access was similarly valuable. The workshop conveners encouraged us to think of access beyond just the idea of the gatekeeper. Usually, access is confined only to the methodology section and never mentioned again, but in fact a deeper approach is needed to acknowledge its emotional labour and challenges. Access is something to consider at all stages of the research process. In order to illustrate these points, one of the workshop conveners spoke about her access to an arms fair. There were a range of negotiations to secure access including multiple emails months in advance. There was also the matter of performing ‘insider’ status once in the arms fair by using jargon in order to maintain access.

Overall, the conference presented an assortment of ideas and provocations for all attendees to mull over. It provided a supportive atmosphere that was a good forum for first-time postgraduate presenters such as myself. The range of topics was immense and there was an action-packed schedule with multiple parallel sessions, meaning that we were spoilt for choice about which sessions to attend. This regular conference continues to deliver a valuable and constructive site for postgraduates to gather.

Dissertation Prize 2018: Nominations now open!

The RGS/IBG Social and Cultural Geography Research Group is pleased to offer an annual prize of £100 for the best undergraduate dissertation. In addition, we will announce a runner-up prize. Both prize-winners will receive a year’s subscription to the Journal of Social and Cultural Geography published by Taylor & Francis. Please see the mission statement on the SCGRG website for our definition of social and cultural geography.

Nominated dissertations should be an outstanding theoretical and/or empirical piece of work; usually be 10,000 words or more in length; be submitted for formal assessment in the current academic year to a UK Higher Education Institution for a BA/BSc level Geography degree programme; include a full set of references and images (as relevant); be written in English. We are looking to reward both excellent scholarship and innovation in the study of social and cultural geography. Please note that a department may not submit more than one entry and nominated dissertations should not be submitted for consideration for any other RGS-IBG prizes.

Submission procedure

Nominations are requested from the Head of Department or Dissertation Convener. All dissertations should be submitted as a single pdf. Please include a post-September e-mail and contact address for the student. Submissions should be emailed to sofie.narbed@rhul.ac.uk with ‘SCGRG Dissertation prize submission’ as the subject header. The winners will be announced in September.

For further queries about the SCGRG Undergraduate Dissertation Prize please contact the dissertation convenor Sofie Narbed at sofie.narbed@rhul.ac.uk, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London. Further information, including previous winning entries, can also be found on the dissertation prize sections of the SCGRG website.

Deadline: Friday 6th July.

RGS-IBG Pre-conference AC2018: Austerity politics and the changing landscapes of equality

Tuesday 28th August 2018
12.00 -17.15
Cardiff University

Austerity has been widely discussed as a key factor in Britain’s vote to leave the EU (Dorling, 2016). The ‘austerity agenda’ has exacerbated existing inequalities of housing, health, education and welfare and produced new sites of precarity and vulnerability. Research on austerity in the Global North has drawn attention to its disproportionate effects for a range of groups, such as people of colour, women and young people (Bassel and Emujulu, 2017; Horton, 2016; Hall, 2017). This pre-conference workshop, organised jointly by the RGS-IBG Population Geography and Social and Cultural Geography Research Groups, introduces geographical perspectives on austerity and inequality in the context of a changing global political landscape.

Are inequalities deepening or widening in the context of austerity politics?
How are these patterned and experienced geographically and across the lifecourse?
What are the challenges for devolved and regional landscapes of austerity?
In what ways do people live with or challenge austerity in their everyday lives?

This event brings together academic, activist and policy participants to discuss these questions and the trends, experiences and challenges of austerity and inequality in a changing political landscape.

Confirmed speakers include:
Alison Stenning (University of Newcastle)
Sarah Marie Hall (University of Manchester)
Rory Coulter, (UCL), Sait Bayrakdar (Kings College London) and Ann Berrington (University of Southampton)
Jon May (QMUL), Paul Cloke (University of Exeter), Andrew Williams (Cardiff University) and Liev Cherry (QMUL)
Rosie Walker (University of Brighton), author of ‘The Rent Trap’

Event Details:

Lunch from 12 noon, 12.45-17.15: talks and discussion
(immediately before the opening plenary of the RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2018)

Registration fees (including lunch): Waged: £30; unwaged and students: £10.

Places can booked as part of your registration for the annual conference here.
To add this workshop to an existing booking, or to attend the workshop without registering for the main conference, please contact the conference organisers at AC2018@rgs.org.

For any other questions, please contact the organising committee: Kate Botterill (k.botterill@napier.ac.uk), Sophie Cranston (S.Cranston@lboro.ac.uk), Leila Dawney (L.Dawney@brighton.ac.uk) and Rhys Daffyd Jones (rhj@aber.ac.uk)

Call for RGS 2018 sponsored sessions are now open!

The RGS-IBG Social and Cultural Geography Research Group (SCGRG) would like to invite expressions of interest for sponsored sessions for the RGS-IBG 2018 Annual Conference, which will take place in Cardiff from Tuesday 28 to Friday 31 August 2018.

The theme for the 2018 Annual Conference, chaired by Professor Paul Milbourne, is Geographical landscapes / changing landscapes of geography.

SCGRG is keen to sponsor sessions that directly relate to the conference theme but also those sessions that engage with broader issues of contemporary concern to social and cultural geographers.

You can find out more about the theme at: http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/ConferencesAndSeminars/Annual+International+Conference/Chairs+theme.htm

When designing your session proposals please take note of the following:

A session cannot occupy more than two timeslots on the conference programme unless this has been pre-arranged with the RGS team. Those seeking more than one timeslot should consider co-sponsorship (i.e. splitting sponsorship so as to have a sponsor for each time slot).
Each attendee can only make two substantive contributions to the conference programme (e.g. as paper presenter, panel member, discussant). A substantive contribution is defined as one where the individual concerned needs to be present in the session room, and so can include session organiser if attendance is necessary. For individuals proposing multiple co-authored papers, an alternative presenter must be clearly nominated at the time of submitting the session/paper.

You can find the RGS guidelines for session proposals at: http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/ConferencesAndSeminars/Annual+International+Conference/Call+for+sessions+papers+and+posters/Call+for+sessions+papers+and+posters.htm

SCGRG is able to sponsor 12 timeslots and you are welcome to propose joint sessions to be co-sponsored by another research group.

Please send expressions of interest including the below information by Wednesday 13^th December at 6pm. We will inform applicants of the outcome by 22^nd December.

(i) Title of session;

(ii) Name of Co-sponsoring groups, if applicable

(iii) Name and Contact Details for Session Convenors

(iv) Abstract, outlining scope of session – 200 words max.

(v) Number of session timeslots that are sought – please note: this year a session may not occupy more than 2 time slots unless this has been pre-agreed with the RGS.

(vi) Indication of session format

Proposals for, or questions about, SCGRG sponsored sessions should be sent to Laura Prazeres: Laura.Prazeres@st-andrews.ac.uk

RGS Geography Ambassador Training 22nd November 2017

Nottingham University are holding Geography Ambassadors training on Wednesday 22nd November

The Royal Geographic Society (with IBG) is running a half-day workshop for undergraduates, postgraduates and graduate geographers who are interested in becoming ‘Geography Ambassadors’.

The event takes place on Wednesday 22nd November, 1pm – 6pm at the University of Nottingham. Registration is free and the deadline for registration is 15th November at 12 noon. The RGS will reimburse your travel and resource costs to attend this event.

For more information, see the tweet below from the University of Nottingham.

We are holding a training event for new @RGS_IBGschools ambassadors. Deadline is 15th Nov at 12pm. All current students welcome to apply pic.twitter.com/LgcX8Lvhrl

— Nottingham Geography (@UoNGeography) October 6, 2017

The winners of the 2017 Dissertation Prize are…

We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2017 undergraduate dissertation prize:

Winner: Anna Knowles-Smith, University College London

Refugees and theatre: an exploration of the basis of self-representation

Runner Up: Thomas Paulsen, University of Exeter

In Search of Danish Atmospheres

If you would like to read our winner’s dissertations, click on the titles above.

The winner receives £100 for the best Undergraduate dissertation while the both the winner and runner-up receive a year’s personal subscription to the journal Social and Cultural Geography, courtesy of the publisher, Taylor & Francis.

Congratulations to both of our winners!

SCGRG Sponsored sessions at the RGS-IBG 2017

The Social and Cultural Geography Research Group are sponsoring twelve sessions at the forthcoming Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) annual conference that will be held from 29th August – 1st September.

You can find when the conference sessions take place by searching for them here.

If you would like to read the abstracts for each of the sessions below, click here.

The list of sponsored sessions are as follows:

‘Placing’ knowledges in Social and Cultural geography: Postgraduate Snapshots
Conveners
Phil Emmerson (University of Birmingham, UK)
Maddy Thompson (Newcastle University, UK)

Educational Landscapes: Nature, Place and Moral Geographies
Conveners
Jo Hickman Dunne (Loughborough University, UK)
Sarah Mills (Loughborough University, UK)

Geographies of the body and technology
Conveners
Lizzie Richardson (University of Durham, UK)
Cordelia Freeman (University of Nottingham, UK)

Dance and the geographies of (de)coloniality
Convener
Sofie Narbed (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)

Non-representational geographies: practices, pedagogies and writing
Convener
Andrew S. Maclaren (University of Aberdeen, UK)

(en)Countering change, (dis)Assembling placeness
Conveners
Marc Welsh (Aberystwyth University, UK)
Samantha Saville (Aberystwyth University, UK)

Muslim women’s geographies – decolonizing discourses, re-writing everyday lives
Conveners
Dr Christine Schenk (University of Oxford, UK)
Negar Elodie Behzadi (University of Oxford, UK)
Akanksha Awal (University of Oxford, UK)

Critical perspectives on transnational education and knowledge mobilities in the Global South
Conveners
Johanna Waters (University of Oxford, UK)
Maggi Leung (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)

For whom and what do we grieve, when and where: The geo-politics of diverse experiences of death, bereavement and remembrance: human and non-human
Conveners
Ruth Evans (University of Reading, UK)
Beth Greenhough (University of Oxford, UK)
Philip Howell (University of Cambridge, UK)
Avril Maddrell (University of Reading, UK)
Katie McClymont (University of the West of England, UK)

Valuing Heritage in the Postcolonial City
Conveners
Mark Boyle (National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Ireland)
Andrew McLelland (National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Ireland)

A geography of small things: geographies of architecture beyond the high rise
Conveners
Rachel Hunt (University of Durham, UK)
Julia Heslop (University of Durham, UK)

(Re)Engaging Geographies of Religions, Spiritualties, and Faith
Conveners
Stephanie Denning (University of Bristol, UK)
Richard Scriven (University College Cork, Ireland)

SCGRG call for sessions: RGS-IBG Annual Conference, London 2017

The RGS-IBG Social and Cultural Geography Research Group (SCGRG) would like to invite expressions of interest for sponsored sessions for the RGS-IBG 2017 Annual Conference, which will take place in London, between Tuesday 29th Aug – Friday 1st Sept 2017.

The theme for the 2017 Annual Conference, chaired by Professor Sarah Radcliffe, is Decolonizing geographical knowledges: opening geography out to the world.