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)

CFPs: 2nd International conference on Migration and Mobilities

Venue: University of Plymouth

Date: 12th-13th July 2018

Conference abstract

Discussions of migration and mobilities feature prominently in our everyday lives. The often competing discourses debated by politicians and the media regarding the movement of people, of products and services, of resources and pollution, of ideas and beliefs have greatly influenced the ways in which people consider and contest notions of distance, proximity, territory and belonging and the (in)equitability involved in this. Within the academy, the rapidly changing shape of the world in terms of governance, finance, resources, war, terrorism etc. has encouraged migration and mobilities experts to challenge the theories and concepts we employ to explore, interpret and evaluate movement at a range of spatial and temporal scales to respond to a myriad of societal changes.

The first International Migration and Mobilities conference at Loughborough University in July 2016 successfully created a space through which these patterns and processes of migration and mobilities could be interrogated by drawing together scholars from across both fields to cultivate and share new ideas. Through the second conference in this series we build upon these themes and seek to draw these fields even closer to explore more critically how the intersections between migration and mobilities might contribute towards new understandings of contemporary societal debates through an interdisciplinary lens.

This two-day conference will be broadly organised around the themes of:

  • Theoretical and conceptual understandings of / interconnections between migration and mobility studies;
  • Methodological approaches for researching migration and mobilities;
  • Scales of migration and mobilities and the impact upon borders and boundaries;
  • Experiencing migration and mobilities through embodied performances – of ‘being mobile’;
  • The politicization of migration and mobilities that (de)enable / (dis)empower;
  • The role of intersectionality in migration and mobility that might affect the ability to move equitably (e.g. age, gender, class, religion, sexuality, ethnicity race etc.);
  • The role of community and belonging in critiquing the categorisations associated with migration and mobilities (e.g. Diaspora, (home)lands, (dis)connections and the search for belonging);
  • The role of structural actors in shaping and managing migration and mobilities (e.g. governments, cities, institutions, industries, agencies etc.).

Submitting abstracts: Please can participants submit abstracts that are between 150-200 words long for the paper and poster sessions. We also welcome participants that wish to propose workshop sessions and these will require abstracts of 300-400 words that outline:

  • the type of workshop
  • the anticipated group size(s) – i.e. is there a minimum/maximum number of participants required?
  • the aims and objectives of the session
  • the activities that will be covered during the session
  • any special requirements, for example equipment, room layout etc.

Informal enquiries regarding workshop proposals can be directed to Dr Mark Holton (mark.holton@plymouth.ac.uk).

Please register your abstract at: www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/Migration_and_Mobilities_2018 before Friday 9th March 2018.

Further details of the conference, including venue, accommodation, transport etc. can be found at: https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/whats-on/2nd-international-conference-on-migration-and-mobilities

Our sponsored sessions for RGS-IBG 2018

We can finally announce the list of our sponsored sessions for the upcoming Royal Geographical Society conference in Cardiff 28th – 31st August 2018.

Please contact session organisers if you are interested in submitting a paper.

Postgraduate Snapshots in/of the landscape

Maddy Thompson, Newcastle University, m.c.thompson@newcastle.ac.uk

Jen Owen, Cardiff University, OwenJ4@cardiff.ac.uk

Social and cultural landscapes – the traces and imprints of people and groups on the land – have long been of interest to geographers. Social and cultural geographers are adept at analysing, reading, and interrogating ‘landscapes’ from a variety of perspectives; accounting for processes of creation and maintenance, as well as lived experiences and practices. Even after forty years geographers are finding new ways and methods to conceptualise and understand landscape, considering how issues of power and dissent, identity and belonging, inequality and social justice, and memory and representation play out in the landscape.

This session showcases the ways Postgraduate Social and Cultural Geographers are negotiating and critically engaging with the concept of ‘landscape’ within their research. Each presentation will be centred round a single ‘Snapshot’ (whether an image, artefact, quotation, soundbite, field diary entry, or mini-video clip) which will form a focal point. Presenters are encouraged to delve into the varying ways we can encounter, apprehend, inhabit, belong to, move through, and be haunted by landscapes.

Sandscapes: geographies of flux and flow

Julian Brigstocke, Cardiff University, brigstockej@cardiff.ac.uk

William Jamieson, Royal Holloway, University of London William.jamieson.2017@live.rhul.ac.uk

Sand is the stuff of power. It is a vital material in modern construction. It transgresses borders and thresholds. It connects the elemental to the global. It is at home in land, sea, and air. Yet within social and cultural geography, little attention has been paid to the material life of this imaginatively potent material. This session addresses calls for a multiplication of materiality within the discipline (Anderson and Wylie 2009; Whatmore 2006), by delving into the multiplicity of sandscapes that pervade our lives in the context of a global shortage of sand (Peduzzi 2014). Sand, a seemingly mundane material, is an active substrate of the spaces of modernity, and constitutes a vantage point from which to read and write landscapes that are urban, coastal, nomadic; wet and dry; dispersed and fragmented; eroded and reclaimed. What aspects of the production of space slip through our fingers? How do we develop new ways of reading and writing everyday spaces that are intimately entangled with an inherently itinerant material?

This session invites papers that engage with the materiality of sandscapes, examining how sand might reinvigorate debates around: new materialism; affective and more-than-human geographies; and new ways of reading and writing landscape.

Landscapes of “Detectorists”

Dr Innes M. Keighren, Royal Holloway, University of London innes.keighren@rhul.ac.uk

Dr Joanne Norcup, University of Glasgow, joanne.norcup@glasgow.ac.uk

The BAFTA-winning situation comedy-drama “Detectorists” has, across three series and a Christmas special (2014–17), garnered critical praise for its affectionate portrayal of metal detecting and amateur archaeology in rural England. In its attention to the embodied practice of detecting and to the social worlds of detectorists, the programme has been described by critics variously as “about hardly anything and almost everything” (Lloyd 2015) and “the most accurate portrait of men being men that you’ll find in current popular culture” (Fewery 2015). For one Twitter user (Sumsion 2014), the show is simply “a warm, beguiling, slow-burn meditation on male friendship and prosaic details of Englishness, plus some metal”. Explaining his motivation for creating “Detectorists”, Mackenzie Crook, writer and director of the programme, has said “I wanted to do an exploration of men and their obsessions, and I wanted to do a celebration of people and their hobbies, and a celebration of the English countryside” (Crook 2015).

While the comedy in “Detectorists” centres largely on the friendship of Andy Stone (Mackenzie Crook) and Lance Stater (Toby Jones) as they pursue their niche hobby in the diverse company of the Danebury Metal Detecting Club (DMDC), the dramatic foil is provided by the relationships Andy and Lance have with their significant others—Andy’s geography-graduate, school-teacher wife, Becky (Rachael Stirling) and Lance’s exploitative ex-wife, Maggie (Lucy Benjamin)—and their antagonists, ‘Simon and Garfunkel’ (Simon Farnaby and Paul Casar), members of the DMDC’s arch rivals, the Antiquisearchers/Dirt Sharks. Nuanced characterisation and relatable situations have endeared “Detectorists” to viewers in the United Kingdom and beyond. Fans of the programme praise its “humanity and the honest observations of the real world” (Meaden 2015).

Where “Detectorists” is distinct from most situation comedies is that much of the action takes place outdoors, in the fields and meadows where the programme’s protagonists pursue their hobby. Both aesthetically and thematically, landscape dominates “Detectorists”. Filmed on location in Framlingham, Suffolk—standing in for Essex, and the fictional town of Danebury— the visual palate of the programme enfolds a non-human supporting cast of insects, birds, plants, and trees, and variously echoes the landscape paintings of Thomas Gainsborough and George Shaw, and the cinematic vision of Peter Hall’s “Akenfield” (1974). Landscape is, also, the focus of the protagonists’ preoccupations; it is variously walked, surveyed, sensed, gazed upon, read, and dug. Landscape is where the programme’s characters seek solitude, find companionship, and navigate the sometimes dramatic intrusions from ‘the rude world’. Landscape reveals the past while concealing the prospect of future discovery.

The following is a list of topics/themes our session seeks to explore:

 Aesthetics and landscape;

 Amateur and vernacular knowledge-making and practise;

 Gender and friendship;

 Geographies of comedy-drama;

 Geographies of detecting;

 Hobby geographies;

 Landscape and Englishness;

 Landscape and heritage;

 Landscape and identity;

 Rural geographies;

 Sonic geographies;

 Technology and the sensing of landscape;

 Vertical geographies.

Historical-Cultural Geographies of Exhibition and Display

Dr James Robinson, Manchester Metropolitan University, james.robinson@mmu.ac.uk

Geographers have long expressed an interest in the practices and spaces of exhibition and display, from museum spaces and art installations (Geoghagen, 2010; Hawkins, 2008) to festivals, parades and a range of commemorative acts and landscapes (Cudney, 2014; Johnson, 1995; Marston, 2002). These engagements have taken place in conjunction with a diverse range of geographical themes: exploring the discipline’s colonial legacies (Driver, 2013), the construction of imperial landscapes (Driver and Gilbert, 1999), cultures of remembrance (Johnson, 2003), and socio-cultural representations of nature (Naylor, 2002), to name some examples. Moreover, these accounts have often reflected upon the role of display and exhibition in the construction and contestation of a myriad of identities – of nationality (Kong and Yeoh, 1997), gender (Whitehead, 2008), sexuality (Johnston, 2008) and the non-human (Anderson, 1995). This session seeks to provide a forum for ongoing discussions about the historical-cultural geographies of exhibition and display. Contributions to the session may be historical or contemporary in nature. Themes for consideration include (but are by no means limited to):

 Material landscapes and cultures of display and exhibition

 Performative and enacted spaces of display

 Sensuous geographies of display and exhibition

 Parades and ritualised cultures of display

 Cultural and contested politics of exhibition

Uncomfortable Geographies

Jen Owen, Cardiff University, OwenJ4@cardiff.ac.uk

Amy Walker, Cardiff University, WalkerA13@cardiff.ac.uk

Anthony Ince, Cardiff University, InceA@cardiff.ac.uk

As geographers have sought to consider everyday resonances of emotions, affects, and sensations, many have considered the notion of ‘comfort’, engaging with materialities (Price et al. 2018), public spaces (Boyer 2012), mobilities (Bissell 2008) and hospitality (Craggs 2015). However, in Cruel Optimism, Berlant (2011) reminds us that comforting things may have a darker side: aspirations to the ‘good life’ and middle-class dreams of suburban comfort consistently fail. We therefore view comfort and our desire for it in a tense relationship with its antitheses: discomfort and the uncomfortable.

To be uncomfortable is to feel discomfort, unease or awkwardness, or be fearful of the unknown. If Hinton (2010) suggests that comfort is an achievement/aspiration then discomfort can be perceived, within discourses of neoliberal austerity, as a personal failing. Yet discomfort can be generative or productive, driving social change, such as through geopolitical negotiation, political struggle, and living in diverse communities. This session wishes to explore what pushes us outside of our comfort zone. We invite deep empirical and theoretical engagements with dissonance, contradictions and the ambiguous that go beyond discomfort as just ‘another emotion’ (Pile 2010).

Topics could include but are not limited to:

 Identity – being (un)comfortable in own skin

 Being comfortably off – downplaying success/ wealth

 Taboo – acknowledging the forbidden

 Tragedy – dealing with distressing events

 Violence – combating hostility

 Political correctness – confronting discrimination

 Morals/ values – re-evaluating ‘sinful’ behaviour

 Ethics – engaging participants with discomfort

Everyday Landscapes of Memory

Amy Walker, Cardiff University, awalker13@cardiff.ac.uk

Kieran O’Mahony, Cardiff University, omanhonyk@cardiff.ac.uk

Kate Boyer, Cardiff University, boyerk@cardiff.ac.uk

Since Pierre Nora’s assertion that narratives of memory are fixed in place, or lieux de mémoire, geographers have increasingly engaged with the temporal-spatialities of memory and heritage (Nora 1989). Of particular interest to this session are the unofficial and everyday spatial practices that exist alongside formalised sites of heritage and commemoration. Many geographers have explored the ways in which such spaces and their practices are imbued with memories comprising of affective (Jones 2011), material (DeSilvey 2012), emotional (Horton and Kraftl 2012), spectral (Edensor 2005) and embodied capacities, forming ‘ecologies’ of memory across our everyday lives (Hoskins 2016). These memories may entangle the human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate matter, and occur at differing temporal scales.

This session aims to not only engage with the different ways in which memory can be understood, but also on the consequences of (doing/enacting) memory in the everyday. Being open to the ways they are invoked in contemporary contexts helps us consider the potential for these every day, illusive and multi-faceted memories to become politicised and intersect with broader collective narratives.

This session would welcome papers, or non-traditionally formatted presentations, on topics such as (but not exclusive to):

 Everyday practices of memory

 Family memory and remembrance

 Non-Human/Material/Animal Memories

 Affective Landscapes and memory

 Everyday heritage practices

 Commemoration and public/private memory

 Embodied and performed memory

 Contemporary political issues related to nostalgia- e.g. Brexit vote, nationalism, rewilding

movements

Geohumanities, literary cultures, and new landscapes of cartography

Jon Anderson, Cardiff University, andersonj@cf.ac.uk

Kirsti Bohata, Swansea University, K.Bohata@swansea.ac.uk

Kieron Smith, Cardiff University, smithk30@cardiff.ac.uk

Jeffrey Morgan, Cardiff University, morganj51@cardiff.ac.uk

Geographers have been central to re-presenting and re-creating the relations between landscapes and people from its inception as a public and academic discipline. The recent turn within cartography from the representational to the processual (see Kitchin, Gleeson, and Dodge, 2013) has not only created new ways of understanding what maps can be(come), but also coincided with the proliferation of social scientific, humanities, and digitised disciplines exploring the cartographic as a way to articulate the human condition.

This session explores these arena with particular attention to the relations between literature, culture, and place. It explores the ways an array of literary cultures story the landscapes around us. It asks how stories create new worlds, and how they relate to the ’real’ worlds in which we live? How do pictures (e.g. in the graphic novel), words (e.g. through oral narrative and novels), and illustrative augmentation (be it digitised or otherwise) combine to contribute new representations to the cartographic repertoire? Inviting papers that range from conventional distant mapping in literary geographies, to locative literature, ambient literature, artistic illiterature, and distant mapping, the session seeks to creatively explore what mapping can usefully be understood to be as a consequence of technological change, interdisciplinary convergence, and the processual turn. In short, it asks: what maps now exist to best aid our navigation of the real and imaginary landscapes we live in?

New Geographies of Automation?

Sam Kinsley, University of Exeter, s.kinsley@exeter.ac.uk

This session invites papers that respond to the variously promoted or forewarned explosion of automation and the apparent transformations of culture, economy, labour and workplace we are told will ensue. Papers are sought from any and all branches of geography to investigate what contemporary geographies of automation may or should look like, how we are/could/should be doing them and to perhaps question the grandiose rhetoric of alarmism/boosterism of current debates.

Automation has been the recent focus of hyperbolic commentary in print and online. We are warned by some of the ‘rise of the robots’ (Ford 2015) sweeping away whole sectors of employment or by others exhorted to strive towards ‘fully automated luxury communism’ (Srnicek & Williams 2015). Beyond the hyperbole it is possible to trace longer lineages of geographies of automation. Studies of the industrialisation of agriculture (Goodman & Watts 1997); Fordist/post-Fordist systems of production (Harvey 1989); shifts to globalisation (Dicken 1986) and (some) post-industrial societies (Clement & Myles 1994) stand testament to the range of work that has addressed the theme of automation in geography. Indeed, in the last decade geographers have begun to draw out specific geographical contributions to debates surrounding ‘digital’ automation. From a closer attention to labour and workplaces (Bissell & Del Casino 2017) to the interrogation of automation in governance and surveillance across a range of scales (Amoore 2013, Kitchin & Dodge 2011) – the processes and experiences of automation have (again) become a significant concern for geographical research.

The invitation of this session is for papers that consider contemporary discussions, movements and propositions of automation from a geographical perspective (in the broadest sense).

Examples of topics might include (but are certainly not limited to):

 AI, machine learning and cognitive work

 Automation and bias

 Autonomy, agency and law-making

 Automated governance

 Boosterism and tales of automation

 Economies of automation

 Material cultures of robots

 Mobilities and materialities of ‘driver-less’ vehicles

 Robotics and the everyday

 Techno-bodily relations

 Working with robots

Sonic Spaces: music landscapes, soundscapes and identity

Eveleigh Buck-Matthews, Coventry University, Eveleigh.buck@gmail.com

Kris Vavasour, Ara New Zealand Broadcasting School, Kris.Vavasour@ara.ac.nz

Dr Heather Jeffrey, Middlesex University Dubai, Heather.l.jeffrey@gmail.com

Sonic spaces feature in a broad spectrum of research, and proposals are welcome from any areas of geography, cultural/media studies, and other social sciences that engage with musical spaces and places. This forum will discuss geographies of music and how these have developed, interconnecting with cultural practices, values and wider society, in keeping with the conference theme of landscapes. The social, legal, political, environmental, and economic geographies of music and sonic spaces offer many angles through which to explore the changing landscapes/soundscapes of the world.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

 Music festivals and gigs

 Music subcultures and scenes

 Music as resistance or protest

 The night time or gig economy

 Leisure spaces and music consumption

 Drugs, drink and music scenes

 City-based or regional sounds

 Music and politics and/or legislation

 Changing mediascapes of music

 Music Pilgrimage

Accounts and reflections on research and fieldwork, alongside embodied experiences, are encouraged. We invite empirical and theoretical papers around these themes and others related to musical landscapes, including alternative forms of presentation.

Over-Researched Places

Cat Button, Newcastle University, cat.button@ncl.ac.uk

Gerald Taylor Aiken, University of Luxembourg, gerald.aiken@uni.lu

Certain places are magnets for researchers and sometimes we bump into other researchers or share interview times with them. The ‘Ghosts of Researchers Past’ linger at the case study sites we visit and traces are present in the work we produce. There has been recent interest in the problems of large numbers of researchers in places as diverse as Hackney (Neal et al, 2016), the Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp in Lebanon (Sukarieh & Tannock, 2013), and Transition Towns (Taylor Aiken, 2018). This body of literature focuses primarily on reasons that particular places are popular with researchers or on research fatigue of respondents. There is a need for reflexive interrogation of the issue of this researcher saturation and its consequences. The research itself, and theory building more widely, can be weaker where it is over-reliant on examples which may prove to be outliers or the applicability of generalisations over-claimed. Over-research also produces a sample bias: familiar cases are easier to communicate to other researchers; possibly easier to publish; or conversely, researchers wring dry popular cases. This also raises questions on the nature of research itself: is it possible to over-research anything, or is seeming over-research just poor research? We could even ask if the research encounter is singular?

This session aims to explore the consequences of theory being developed from research on places that are saturated with other researchers from multiple disciplines. Papers are invited to bring case studies of urban or rural landscapes anywhere in the world to address such issues as: Theoretical links and implications; Methods and Positionality; Research (and researcher) fatigue; Researching researchers; Encounters. Papers that use a reflexive approach or consider the conceptual complications of researching in researcher-saturated landscapes are particularly welcomed.

The cultural politics of lingering

Esther Hitchen, Durham University, e.j.u.hitchen@durham.ac.uk

Angeliki Balayannis, University of Melbourne, abalayannis@student.unimelb.edu.au

Lingering is a commonly used, but taken-for-granted term within cultural geography. It is largely invoked as a descriptor or metaphor for crafting other thematically related concepts – in particular, haunting (Edensor, 2008; 2012), absent-presence (Wylie, 2009), dwelling (Ingold, 2011), residues (Krupar, 2012), traces (Hetherington, 2004), fragments (DeSilvey, 2007), and discards (Crewe, 2011; Stanes & Gibson, 2017). This session, however, aims to consider how lingering can be conceptualised in itself and be used to bring diverse literatures into conversation.

This session raises questions about what lingering is and does: What are the temporalities of lingering – how does it endure, persist, or stretch space-times? What are its spatialities, such as within particular landscapes, sites, and institutions? How can we think about lingering politically, for example, as a mode of action, as a disruption, as a refusal to disappear? And in what ways is lingering used within different methodological approaches, including ethnographic work, participatory methods, and artistic practice?

This session welcomes papers on a range of themes, including, but not limited to:

 The affective life of lingering

 Lingering as affirmative and/or negative

 Materialities of lingering

 Racialized, gendered, and/or queer politics of lingering

 Lingering across different scales

 More-than-human forms of lingering

Utility After Abandonment? The New Ruin as Cultural Asset and Public Space

Hayden Lorimer, University of Glasgow, Hayden.Lorimer@glasgow.ac.uk

Ruth Olden, University of Glasgow, Ruth.Olden@glasgow.ac.uk

Ed Hollis, University of Edinburgh, E.Hollis@ed.ac.uk

Luke Bennett, Sheffield Hallam University, L.E.Bennett@shu.ac.uk

Across the arts and humanities, and associated cultural spheres of literature, cinema, architecture, heritage, urban exploration and curated art, interest has intensified in ruinenlust, ruins and ruination (Edensor 2005; Lavery and Gough 2015; Bennett 2017). Ruminating on the ruin is a sensibility reflective of classical, romantic and picturesque tropes.

Learning how to live with ruins is a twenty-first century challenge requiring cultural articulations that are forward-thinking and experimental, acknowledging new models of intervention, ownership and access, and welcoming contrasting – even conflicting – forms of aesthetic and emotional attachment (Hollis 2010; Lorimer and Murray 2015; DeSilvey 2017).

Nationally and internationally, there are a multitude of valued heritage landscapes, in a ruinous, vulnerable, degraded state, requiring differing form of creative intervention for the purposes of rehabilitation, re-occupation and reinvention, so as to safeguard cultural legacies for the future. For this session we seek not only statements of intent, but also critical reports on activities already occurring in cities under austerity and non-urban landscapes, in the global north and global south.

Papers will be sought which variously address three connected questions:

 How do you activate modern ruins safely?

 How do you activate modern ruins creatively?

 How do you activate modern ruins collaboratively?

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:

  1. 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).

  2. 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 13th December at 6pm. We will inform applicants of the outcome by 22nd 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.

 

 

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 Undergraduate Dissertation Prize 2017: Deadline for nominations Friday 7th July

The SCGRG offers an annual prize of £100 for the best Undergraduate Dissertation in Social and Cultural Geography. We also announce a runner-up prize. Both prize-winners also receive a year’s personal subscription to the journal Social & Cultural Geography published by Taylor & Francis. Please see the mission statement for our definition of what is considered social and cultural geography.

Nominated dissertations should be: an outstanding theoretical and/or empirical piece of work; usually over 10,000 words in length; submitted for formal assessment in the preceding academic year to a UK Higher Education Institution for a BA/BSc level degree programme in geography; 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 prizes.

Nominations are requested from the Head of Department or Dissertation Convenor by the Friday 7th July. All dissertations should be submitted as a single pdf file of less than 5MB in size with a post-September email and contact address for the student.

Submissions and further queries about the SCGRG Undergraduate Dissertation Prize should be emailed to the Dissertation Convenor, Richard Scriven r.scriven@umail.ucc.ie Department of Geography, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland. 

Click here to see the list of previous winners of the award.