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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)

Dear All,

We are looking forward to seeing many of you at the forthcoming RGS-IBG annual conference next week.

The Social and Cultural Geography Research Group is delighted to be sponsoring and co-sponsoring the following sessions at the RGS/IBG conference in London 31 Aug – 2 Sept 2011.

• (Re)Imagining Materialities
• Geographies of Humour and Humorous Geographies.  Session 1, session 2.
• Mobile Geographies of Art: Bodies, technologies and transnationality.  Session 1, session 2
• ‘Emerging from the dark’: explorations into the experiences of the night.  Session 1, session 2, session 3, session 4
• Emerging geographies of animal-technology co-productions
• Exhibitionary Geographies and the Post-Museum.  Session 1, session 2
• Geographical perspectives on the British Diaspora
• Geographies of Friendships.  Session 1, session 2, session 3, session 4
• “Getting lost on the way to Farmville”: Virtual, mobile and online spaces of interaction
• Meteorological Imaginations: Towards geographies of affective practices of weather, atmospherics and landscapes. Session 1, session 2, session 3
• Moving Geographies: Film and Video as Research Method. Session 1, session 2, session 3

The SCGRG Annual General Meeting will be held on Thursday 1st of September in the Lowther Room, from 1.10pm to 2.25pm.  The meeting agenda will be circulated at the start of the meeting.  It will include a brief report on the group’s activities this year, elections to the committee, dissertation prizes, submissions for event support  and planning for the Edinburgh 2012 meeting.  If you have any proposals for consideration for events support, please get in touch with Gail Davies (gail.davies@ucl.ac.uk), the chair, prior to the meeting. If you have any other items you would like to raise, please send me an email about these too.

Next year’s RGS-IBG annual conference will be held in Edinburgh.  It will be earlier and smaller, with less room for research group sponsored sessions in the main conference.  We thus particularly want to encourage your input into how we should select these sessions, and how we might supplement the conference presentations with a dedicated SCGRG pre or post conference event.

Wishing you an enjoyable and productive conference.

Gail Davies, Chair

 

The annual general meeting for the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group will be held during the forthcoming RGS/IBG annual conference in London.  We will be meeting in the Thursday lunch time slot (1.10-2.25pm) on the 1st of September in the Lowther room at the RGS. SCGRG members do not have to register for the conference to attend the SCGRG AGM only.

In the meantime, if you have any agenda items for discussion or report, please let myself or Russell Hitchings know.  We are always looking to members for innovative ways to support and enhance research in Social and Cultural Geography.  We will also be looking to appoint a new postgraduate representative for the group.  If you would like to discuss this role or the way we might support your research, please get in touch.

Gail Davies (Chair, SCGRG)

The following event may be of interest to members ….

 

EXCURSIONS – TELLING STORIES AND JOURNEYS

An Interdisciplinary Symposium

Thursday 8th and Friday 9th December 2011

School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow

‘Excursions: telling stories and journeys’ is a two-day interdisciplinary symposium dedicated to the critical appreciation of the arts, acts and politics of telling. The event is intended to re-situating storytelling in scholarly research, through the crafting of unusual journeys, material narratives and disruptive geographies.

Speakers include:

• DEREK McCORMACK on being lighter than air
• SARAH PINK on slow cities
• MILES OGBORN on tales and tails.
• ERIC LAURIER on video blogging
• HESTER PARR on the missing
• HAYDEN LORIMER on scaring crows
• DEE HEDDON on buddy walks
• CAITLIN DeSILVEY on mending broken things
• LYNN ABRAMS on northern isles
• CALEB JOHNSTON on family memory
• and KATHLEEN STEWART (keynote) on regionality, in a small town

Cost of registration: £20 for academic staff and waged and £10 for postgraduate students and unwaged

Deadline for registration: 1st October 2011

This event is organised by the Human Geography Research Group, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow.

If you would like to attend the symposium please register by e-mail with Leenah.Khan@glasgow.ac.uk

Any questions or queries about the event to: Hayden.Lorimer@glasgow.ac.uk or Hester.Parr@glasgow.ac.uk

Each year the Social and Cultural Geography Research Groups is given a small number of complementary passes to distribute to contributors to the conference who are either from a non-UK or non-geography background. We are delighted to be able to support the following ‘Research Group Guests‘ in their contribution to the conference this year.

• Miriam Burke is an independent artist, contributing to the session on ‘Art – Science and the Geographical Imagination’.  Miriam has been working collaboratively with the glaciologist Professor Peter Knight from Keele.  Her paper will draw out the value of art-science collaborations to the historical and contemporary study of physical.
• Jane Dyson is an independent anthropologist, contributing to the session on ‘Geographies of Friendships’.  Jane works ethnographically on friendship, focusing on girls’ work in the Indian Himalayas.  Her work was recently published in the American Ethnologist (July 2010).
• Ben Gallan, from the Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research (AUSCCER), University of Wollongong, Australia, is contributing to the session on ‘Emerging from the dark’: explorations into the experiences of the night.  Ben is PhD student working on temporality, cultural infrastructure and the right to the city.
• Ralph Hoyte is an independent artist, contributing to the session on ‘Art – Science and the Geographical Imagination’.  Ralph works as a performance poet, and will be presenting a paper on his recent project SATSYMPH. Satsymph is a collaboration with composer Marc yeates and coder Phill Phelps which will allow people to create their own “satellite symphony” through an iPhone app.
• Nicola Triscott is the director of London-based Art-Science organization Arts Catalyst.  She is contributing to the session on ‘Art – Science and the Geographical Imagination’.  Nicola will be talking about the work of the Arts Catalyst and taking part in a panel addressing the relationship between art and geopolitics in the book Arctic Geopolitics.

 

Dear All,

RGS-IBG members will by now have received their voting ballot papers for the RGS elections.

Members of the social and cultural geography research group committee would encourage all fellows read their voting papers carefully and vote accordingly to ensure the continued accessibility, diversity and funding of academic and educative work that the RGS currently supports.

With thanks,

Gail Davies & Jo Norcup