Social and Cultural Geography Research Group

New frontiers of geographical knowledge and practice? Exploring creative methods and encounter Liz Bondi (Edinburgh), Hester Parr (Glasgow), Olivia Stevenson (Glasgow), Alette Willis (Edinburgh)

1 session slot sponsored by the SCGRG for the RGS-IBG conference, London, Wednesday 28 to Friday 30 August 2013 (with an opening event on Tuesday 27 August 2013)

The aim of this session is to explore and show-case how creative and arts based encounters, acts, ways of knowing and exchanging knowledge are being currently utilised within the discipline of human geography.  The session allows for papers or performances that engage with a range of empirical materials, but with an accent on reflecting upon how geographers are creatively expanding ways of organising and engaging the research encounter and disseminating the knowledges that are accumulated within them. Artistic and theatrical and mediatised techniques, methods and tactics are increasingly common in a discipline which is newly energised to critically deliver its ‘impact’ performatively.

We want to ask: What is at stake here? What and how are these new techniques being utilised as ‘research methods’? How are traditional methodological concerns with inter-subjectivity and empathy being re-cast as a result? In regards to research dissemination and knowledge exchange – how is this creativity constituted and encountered with what intentions and outcomes? How are understandings of ‘research’ and ‘impact’ being challenged?

The session aims to learn from the differing experiences of those using diverse forms of arts based research methods and arts in public and ‘user’ engagement activities.

The call for papers is thus guided by the following question and themes, but not restricted by them:

• What are creative and arts based research methods and why should they be used in human geography?
• How can geographical knowledge be performance based and performative and with what effects/affects?
• What genres are being used in geographical research and with what effects/affects?
• What happens to ‘safe inter-subjective relations’ in creative and arts based research encounter and dissemination?
• How does writing geographical research as scripts make a difference?
• What is the role of the visual in creative research methods and dissemination

Creative and interactive methods of presentation are very welcome.

Further thematic guides:

• Geography and the creative arts
• Storying research for social purpose
• Creative methods and the impact agenda
• Representing everyday live through arts based approaches
• Experimental practices
• Audiencing and production
• Performance
• Transformative spaces of learning
• Creative practice as a pedagogical tool

Please email abstracts of 250 words max to Hester.parr@glasgow.ac.uk by 4^th February, 2013.

Over the next week, we will be posting the calls for papers and other news on the SCGRG sponsored sessions for the 2012 RGS/IBG conference.  Thank you to everyone who submitted session ideas to us. We are delighted to be sponsoring a range of innovative slots for the summer.

Immunitary Geographies

Organisers: Gail Davies, Jamie Lorimer and Steve Hinchliffe

We invite papers and other provocations exploring immunitary geographies, how biological and social practices, community and immunity, territory and borders, self and non-self are de- and/or re-territorialised through understandings and performances of immunity.

Immunity is receiving increasing attention in social and political theory, biology and geography as well as outside academia. In one sense this suggests a need to interrogate shared metaphors. The correlations between biological framings of immunological responses and the ordering of social lives are well known (Waldby, Haraway, Martin, Napier, Esposito). Martial registers used in fighting disease and defending borders, for example, as well as seemingly more neutral senses of immune system and communicative process, tend to operate through culturally and politically sedimented notions of self and non-self (Napier, 2012). These high-level metaphors can function as premature closures on understanding the complex and embodied practices of immunity across a range of sites (Fischer, 2012). In another sense, there is also a possibility to make use of shared re-investments in the notion of immunity to reconfigure geographies of self and difference. Indeed, alternative ways of thinking about and practising immunology may challenge notions of identity, system and spatial register, and it is here that an immunitary geography could usefully contribute.

Immunitary thinking is active in a range of settings, (we sketch them below), but it is also important to note these scientific paradigms, empirical practices and social theoretical accounts do not always align. By bringing them together in this session we aim to interrogate their geographies and promote not so much a tracing of high-level metaphor, but rather a sense of opportunity for a re-vitalised geography of life.

• Research into immunologically complex phenomena, such as viruses, transplantation, tumour development, pregnancy and regenerative medicine, point to the wider range of immune repertoires and trouble any hard and fast division between self and other. The result may point to more affirmative forms of life politics.

•‘Probiotic’ conceptions of immunity are emerging from citizen science experiments, applying new ideas about health and hygiene to develop practices for tolerating, cultivating and even introducing parasites and symbionts. Likewise, dissatisfaction with anti-biotic modes of urbanism introduces complexity through practices such as shared space planning.

•Security practices, which rely on tropes of resilience, and Lockean preparedness, de- and re-territorialise spaces of home and nation. Here, spatial extension, anticipatory governance and risk management may involve a new kind of warfare, as immunities and exceptions arise from state and nonstate partnerships in emergencies, wars, and disaster management.

•Engagement with hypertrophic security and autoimmunity through the work of Derrida, Esposito and others highlights the paradoxical nature of self-protection.

•Work in geography and elsewhere on hospitality, on hosting and on the requirement to rethink classical political notions of friend and enemy (Dikec et al) starts to unsettle notions of immune response.

We seek to bring together with different ways of understanding immunitary geographies. Our aim is to encourage ongoing and inventive exchange across the different practices, sites, scientific and social theoretical perspectives currently at play in such immunitary geographies, preventing closures around a further series of high-level metaphors.
Some foci include, but are not limited to:

Immunology and security, resilience and risk; Biosecurity and insecurity; Emergencies, accidents, preparedness and immunity; Community and immunity; Political economies of inoculation, vaccine manufacture and administration Immunology; Immunology and the political ecologies of the human microbiome; Discourses and practices of immunology in urban planning; Dirt and mess in children’s geographies; Immunitary bio-economies and bio-resources; The nature of immunosuppression and the geographies of tissue matching; Aesthetic and architectural interventions into immunity; Spatial thinking and immunitary geography; Political immunity and power, and exception; Affirmative biopolitics and thanatopolitics; Studying and tracing immunity; Life as interval, inflexion and the memory of immunity.

Please send an abstract of 250 words to Gail Davies (g.f.davies@exeter.ac.uk), Jamie Lorimer (jamie.lorimer@ouce.ox.ac.uk) and Steve Hinchliffe (Stephen.Hinchliffe@exeter.ac.uk) by Wed 6th Feb 2013.

RGS-IBG Social and Cultural Geography Research Group AGM

Tuesday 2nd July 2012, RGS Edinburgh, Room TRH-COM

Agenda for the meeting

1. Apologies for absence
2. Chair’s report
3. Treasurer’s Report
4. Changes in Committee Membership:
   • Election of New Chair
   • Election of New Secretary
   • Confirm Election of Acting Treasurer to Treasurer
   • Other committee members, including election of new dissertation co-ordinator, proposed re-election of postgraduate representatives, any further roles (membership secretary, communications secretary) and ordinary members
5. Undergraduate Dissertation Prize
6. Proposed research group activities
7. Allocating Group funds to support non-committee proposed research activities
8. Proposal from Robert Rojek (sage)
9. AOB
10. Key dates from RGS:
    • a) Research Group Grants – deadlines Oct 31st
    • b) Annual Report due 31st January 2013
    • c) Next RGS-IBG annual conference Wednesday 28 to Friday 30 August 2013. The conference Chair will be Jonathan Rigg (Durham) and the theme ‘New Geographical Frontiers’.
    • Key dates for the research group are: i) October 2012 Call for Papers ii) End of February 2013 deadline for Research Group sessions
11. Date of next meeting sometime 28-30 August 2013

Dear All,

The next Social and Cultural Geography Research Group AGM will be at 7.30pm on Tuesday 3rd of July.  The meeting will be in a venue during the RGS annual conference. Details of the venue will be published in the programme and posted here when available.

We are hoping to make lots of new appointments to the committee at this meeting, so please do come along to find out more about the opportunities  in the group and offer your support for those interested in these roles.  There is more information on these new opportunities in a previous post.

with best wishes

Gail Davies, Chair

The provisional programme for the RGS annual conference 2012 in Edinburgh has now been posted online.  Keep a look out for the following SCGRG sponsored sessions:

Tuesday 3rd July 2012

• Ludic Geographies (1)
• Ludic Geographies (2)
• Policing geographies: securities, insecurities and mobilities (1)
• Policing geographies: securities, insecurities and mobilities (2)
• Creating Geographical Legacies: The Red Road Legacy Project (1)
• Creating Geographical Legacies: The Red Road Legacy Project (2)
• More-than-human geographies: from coexistence to conflict and killing (1)
• More-than-human geographies: from coexistence to conflict and killing (2)

Wednesday 4th July 2012

• Chair’s plenary session: Geographies of Insecurity (3) – (In)secure peoples
• Chair’s plenary session: Geographies of Insecurity (4) – (In)secure spaces
• Social and Cultural Geographies in a Time of Crisis
• Home Unmaking (1)
• Home Unmaking (2)
• Writing and doing human geography research in Greece during a turbulent decade

Thursday 5th July 2012

• Licensing spaces, things and people (1)
• Licensing spaces, things and people (2)
• Social and Cultural Geographies of Impact (1): Impact Statements / Critical Pathways to Impact
• Social and Cultural Geographies of Impact (2): Answers on a Postcard?

The SCGRG AGM will be on Tuesday 3rd July at 7.30pm. All are welcome to attend.

We are delighted to confirm the line up for two innovative sessions the SCGRG is running on ‘Social and Cultural Geographies of Impact’ at the RGS annual conference Edinburgh 3-5th July 2012.

Sarah Mills, Chris Bear, Amanda Rogers, Rebecca Sandover and Mia Hunt have put together two fantastic sessions which aim to unpack and expand understandings and conceptualizations of impact, generating discussion and debate. These will both run on the Thursday afternoon during the conference.

The first session will host very short, critical ‘impact statements’ (short papers or think pieces) from a range of academic and non-academic participants at AC2012.   We now have a final line up of contributors.  We are delighted to welcome the following people who will be helping us navigate the landscape of ‘impactful’ geographies in higher education and research institutions.

• Rachel Pain  Impact: a masterful blow or walking hand in hand?
• Anna Carlsson-Hyslop What is the impact of histories and geographies of science?
• Katriona Carmichael Outcomes: A view from Scottish Government
• Catherine Souch/Rita Gardner  Impact and the RGS
• Jonathan Mendel How bad research might achieve strong REF impact
• Richard Phillips A Place for Curiosity in the Age of Impact?
• James Kneale Accidental Impact
• Jennifer Turner Impact for postgraduates: in search of the Holy Grail?
• Lakhbir Jassal Deadly Impact: The Construction of Expertise and Responsibility
• Ruth Wolstenholme Brokering knowledge for a broad audience
• Penny Woolnough Policing Research and the Geographies of Missing People
• Hannah Macpherson The Work of Disabled Artists and its Potential ‘Impact’
• Jenny Pickerill Impacting who, when, and for whose gain?
• Deirdre Conlon Reflections on the politics of ‘retaking impact proposals’
• Lucy Veale The AHRC Landscape and Environment ProgrammeDirector’s Impact Fellowship
• Ian Cook, et al. Making is connecting: followthethings.com’s shopping bags

The second session will develop discussion from these statements, exploring the ‘impact of impact’ through a series of postcard prompt questions.  Small group discussions will tackle such questions as: What is ‘impact’?  How do we evidence ‘impact’?  How do those outside the academy understand ‘impact’?  What are the stakes of ‘impact’ for postgraduates? Please bring along your questions concerns and comments.