We were delighted to sponsor seven sessions and a plenary at the Annual Conference in London, 2024. Details of the sponsored sessions below, including summaries – thanks to session organisers for sharing pictures from their sessions.
Urban visual justice: public images and the making of public spaces, Sabina Andron, University of Melbourne; Lutfun Lata, University of Melbourne
Images play a significant role in how many of us encounter, navigate, experience and process urban spaces; and a role in how urban spaces are developed and managed. Street posters and traffic signage, community murals, protest signs, municipal branding, graffiti tags, heritage plaques, shop signs and shopfronts, public art, and public notices – they are just some of the elements of the visual landscape of the city. This diverse mix of formal and informal visual communication is often competing in nature and creates urban character and identity that can contribute to developing visual justice in the city. This split session (paper session + world café) invites contributions from researchers, artists, architects, and policy makers, to survey, understand, debate, and create an agenda for visual justice in global cities. We aim to identify which areas of urban governance make direct use of images in public space, to improve research and policy around public images and urban visual culture. How can we deal with images in cities in more responsible and creative ways, in line with values of inclusivity, intersectionality, sustainability, and creativity? The importance of written and visual communication in the formation of urban publics has been highlighted by cultural historians (Henkin 1998, Ward 2001), geographers studying linguistic landscapes (Landry and Bourhis 1997, Shohami et al 2010), and a growing body of literature coming from street art and graffiti studies (Young 2014, 2016, Avramidis 2017, Iveson 2010, MacDowall 2019, Andron 2023). However, there has been little research on urban semiotics and visual cultures in the context of visual and spatial justice – and that is the gap our session will address. Possible themes for interventions (presentation + discussion) include: • Theoretical and methodological responses to the framework of urban visual justice • Taxonomies and classifications of public signage and images • Political uses of public images, in policy, governance, and resistance • Intersections between urban semiotics and spatial justice As well as more specific examples and their intersections: • Post-covid revitalisation through urban signs, objects, and surfaces • Graffiti management, mural and street art programmes • Urban design, neighbourhood character and visual amenity • Heritage of public images: signage, typography, plaques and memorials • City activation and advertising: brands, banners, commercial signage and shop fronts Who is allowed to be visible and under what conditions? Which principles guide the management of urban images (order, freedom of expression, diversity, artistic skill, cleanliness, political voice)? And which civic values are supported in the process?
Session Summary:
The double session on Urban Visual Justice brought together six scholars from four continents to critically examine how public images in cities relate to local contexts. We heard about the management of urban surfaces in the Netherlands, the ethics of representation of unhoused individuals in Italy, and the entanglements of religion and power in Delhi’s Hindu murals. We explored years of inscriptions on a building in a gentrifying neighbourhood of London by going back in time with Google Streetview, we questioned the agenda of a mural beautification project in an informal settlement in Indonesia, and we were shown a photographic collection of vernacular hand painted signage from New Mexico.
The session discussion focused on the importance of engaging with the visual in geographical, urban, and sociological research. Participants responded keenly to the creation of a framework focused on the critical study of images in urban spaces, beyond typological constraints (eg the study of public art, commercial displays, or graffiti). Perhaps the greatest success of the session was to discover a common language of urban visual research outside these typologies and use it to reflect on spatial and social justice in a variety of urban contexts.
We also used the space of the sessions to launch the Urban Surfaces Research Network booklets, and distributed a few printed copies of the publications to participants and audience members. These can be found online and they are open access.
Finally, session participants were invited at an evening event at London’s largest mural agency, Global Street Art, where we discussed “Painting urban narratives” and got a tour of the agency’s offices. Local bloggers and artists joined for this, with each participant answering these two prompts in two minutes:
- One key finding from your research and/ or practice on urban walls that could inform future policy/decision-making, supported by quantitative and/or qualitative findings.
- What challenge would you most like to solve through your practice/ research, and what would ideal next steps look like?
The event has been recorded and will be available to view online.
Thank you to the SCGRG for sponsoring our session!
Sport Mobilities: new directions and connections at the intersection of sport and mobilities research, Simon Cook (Birmingham City University), Peter Adey (Royal Holloway University of London), Diti Bhattacharya (Griffith University), Jonas Larsen (Roskilde University)
Sport and mobility are inherently entwined. Sport is predicated on movement, and in turn, sport moves us physically, socially, and emotionally. Yet, while geographers have been more engaged with the movement cultures involved in sports (Andrews 2017; Latham and Layton 2020), engagements between sports studies and mobilities studies are rarer. Newman and Falcous first noted this ‘conspicuous absence’ in 2012 and reflected on the shared promise of the two fields, appealing for ‘sports studies writers to consider the scope of mobilities approaches and, in turn, for mobilities researchers to consider the oft-overlooked, unique and contingent world of sport as a rich site of enquiry’. While some progress has been made since, sport is still largely an undercurrent and ‘curious neglect’ (Larsen 2022) in mobilities research and vice-versa. Rarely does such work hold actual dialogue between mobilities and sport studies, thus the promise identified by Newman and Falcous is still to be richly fulfilled. This session aims to intervene by bringing together work, ideas, and perspectives at the intersection of mobility studies and sport studies to further dialogue and collaboration between these fields. We, therefore, broadly invite papers that offer empirical, conceptual, methodological, reflective, review or agenda-setting contributions around ‘sport mobilities’ and consider the applications, promises, challenges, and possible directions for sport and mobility connections.
Session Summary:
The “Sport Mobilities” sessions at the RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2024 made strides in advancing the dialogue between sport and mobilities research, which, despite natural overlaps, have historically seen limited engagement with each other. The sessions brought together a range of presentations that explored how sport, as an inherently mobile activity, intersects with various forms of social, physical, and spatial mobilities.
A key theme that emerged across the presentations was the role of sport in shaping, and being shaped by, the spaces and environments in which it is practiced. Several papers explored how sports mobilities are not just about movement but also about the creation and transformation of spaces, whether urban, rural, or natural. Sports were shown to offer unique ways of engaging with environments, altering both the perception and the use of these spaces. The interactions between sport and place—whether in the form of everyday activities like running or large-scale events like stadium constructions—reveal the potential for sports to enable mobility while also highlighting challenges related to access and exclusion.
Another area the sessions explored was the role of sport in social mobilities. Various presentations highlighted how sports serve as both a vehicle for social connection and a site of inequality. Sports often bring people together from diverse backgrounds, fostering community and social capital, but they can also reinforce or exacerbate existing inequalities. This was evident in discussions around access to sports infrastructure, the commodification of sports spaces, and the ways in which different groups experience sport differently based on factors such as class, gender, and race.
Additionally, sport mobility was examined in relation to the movement of people, especially in contexts of migration and displacement. Presentations looked at how sport intersects with migratory mobilities, revealing both opportunities and precarities for athletes moving across borders. This focus on the intersections of sport and migration underscored how mobility in sport is not always voluntary or empowering, but can be fraught with challenges, including immobility, exclusion, and vulnerability.
Technological, environmental, and political dimensions of sport mobilities were also explored. In particular, the increasing impact of global events and the infrastructure that supports them highlighted how sporting mega-events reshape cities and regions in ways that can facilitate both mobility and immobility. Discussions explored how these events promise global recognition and mobility but often fail to deliver equitable benefits for local populations. This emphasized the need to critically assess the broader socio-political impacts of sport-related mobilities, particularly in relation to environmental concerns and urban development.
The Sport Mobilities sessions provided a rich platform for examining the complex relationships between sport and mobility. They demonstrated that sport is not only a physical activity but also a social, spatial, and political force that both shapes and is shaped by broader patterns of movement. By bringing sport into conversation with mobilities studies, the sessions underscored the need for continued exploration of these intersections to fully understand the potential and challenges of sport as a mobile practice in a globally connected world.
In Place of Maps, James Riding (Newcastle University); Annelys de Vet (University of Antwerp)
A map and its production is controlled and distributed through strict norms and visual discourses that shape our world. There is a direct link between the map and realities on the ground through drawing borders and maps are objects that should be questioned and contextualised. Maps limit aesthetic and affective experiences of place and we inhabit certain geographical narratives in the maps we use. For this reason, the reading of the map in this collaborative session is not a technical reading, but a political one. The traditional appearance of maps represents and reproduces singular and hegemonic world views. In order for maps to represent a multitude of factors, they need to come into being through the work of a multitude of map-makers. It is in plurality that we can encounter the many different ways of relating to space and stimulate and centre multiple local understandings of place. Too often territorial images fail to render that which is present on the ground. This collaborative session with arts practitioners seeks arts-based, community, indigenous, decolonial, subjective, participatory, map-based contributions that place local inhabitants at the centre of the map to record this spatial knowledge in careful, visually striking, and vital ways. We seek to challenge the dominant mode of map production as others have before, and provide a space at the 2024 RGS-IBG Annual International Conference for alternative ways of doing geography. The process of making a map can activate and articulate locally anchored knowledge and experiences in order to make space for existing realities that are rendered invisible by the hegemonic gaze that maps traditionally create. We seek critical reflections on map-making, maps, and participatory and personal visual stories to reveal landscapes that lie behind fabrications: political, territorial, cartographic. Maps can be an excellent graphic tool for non-linear storytelling. Their visualisation, their design, could not only be concerned with final results, but also the conditions of making: how can maps be produced and imagined, and by who? Questions of methodology, transparency and the positionality of the map-maker are posed in this collaborative session and we want to celebrate map-making methods that foster shared authorship and collective belonging to a place. We will work to include alternative presentation formats and online participation in the conference for those unable to attend in-person. We hope to collate the maps and essays into a journal special issue or edited collection following the conference. We are exploring sponsorship by RGS research groups for this map colaboratory.
Geography and Storytelling : mapping with words through fact and fiction, Nadia von Benzon, Lancaster University
‘I’ve always wanted to believe that shifting one’s perception of a thing literally transforms the thing itself.’ Maddie Mortimer, on Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, 2022, Picador. The historic and the contemporary power of storytelling is widely accepted: Humans were telling stories before they were writing; stories fix our place within our family and our communities; stories teach us about the world beyond our own experience. Thus, stories hold power that can be used to inform and strengthen, to catalyse, to manipulate and undermine (Cameron, 2012). ‘I have to appear before a judge to fight for my children. Did this happen to anyone else? What was the outcome?’ A woman on social media is desperate for stories. “I never swim in the sea. Haven’t you seen Jaws?” My friend, on the life-long impact of a story. Contemporary society ensures individuals are bombarded with stories across broad media types and platforms. The internet provides us with limitless access to stories, as well as to free and accessible spaces in which to share our own stories in whatever format we choose. Yet the use of stories and storytelling, particularly in fictitious and more creative forms, remains somewhat sidelined in geography. This session seeks to explore the contemporary place and the use of stories within geographical thought, research and teaching. Conventional academic papers and creative contributions are welcomed. Contributions might reflect, or go beyond: – The use of stories as communication tools – Stories as cultural representation – Storytelling as a way of talking about alternative futures – The use of fiction in research, writing or teaching – Creative writing as a tool for doing geography – Narrative mapping and narrative cartography as method – Other approaches to storytelling as method Cameron, E. (2012). New geographies of story and storytelling. Progress in Human geography, 36(5), 573-592.
Displaced people, displaced objects: Mapping material heritage, indigenous groups and ancestral lands, Dr. Noam Leshem (Main convener), Dr. Yafa El Masri (corresponding convener), Dr. Molly T. Oringer (Co-convener). Affiliated with Durham University
This session aims to shed light on the material archives of displacement and their potential role in a meaningful and multi-layered process of return. Return here does not solely mean the return of objects to its rightful owners as a narrow matter of possession rather, this session seeks to understand and foreground the agency and cultural sovereignty of displaced communities— who are often denied physical access to ancestral land and material culture—through these objects. Contributions will consider not only how objects might be returned to the communities; rather, we aim to address the ability of objects to facilitate a more profound and just process of repatriation and restitution in and of themselves. Through this, we seek to construct an analytical and methodological agenda that accounts for the potentials and pitfalls of material culture research in emplacing agency, resituating sovereignty and restructuring pathways of access to ancestral lands despite territorial and colonial exclusions. This session will begin with a paper panel that centres various indigenous and refugee experiences on material culture as a disruptive mechanism to settler colonial and imperial expansions. We invite papers that pose questions on repatriation, material culture and indigenous agencies. This will be followed by a roundtable that explores questions of material heritage and return through experiences that emerge from Occupation Debris, a project exploring the role of objects excavated from depopulated Palestinian villages in empowering Palestinian displaced communities to reassert agency and cultural sovereignty over ancestral land. The aims of this session are to illuminate the often-overshadowed trajectories of objects that link diasporas, experiences of exile, and strategies of material heritage resistance across the world.
Session Summary:
The session opened with a presentation by Yafa El Masri and Molly Theodora Oringer titled Occupation Debris: Return of Objects, Objects of Return, and Palestinian Sovereignty over Material Heritage. They discussed the Occupation Debris project, which explores howdis placed Palestinian communities reclaim agency over their material culture. Their research focuses on the potential for material archives to spark imaginings of return and sovereign claim-making. They reflected on a participatory workshops they conducted in London in May 2024 with Palestinians in the UK. During the workshop, participants engaged with personal objects that evoked connections to their ancestral lands, framing the objects as relational and tied to both the personal and political body. Through creative writing, community mapping
and dialogue, participants’ engagements with the objects highlighted the transformative potential of material culture in navigating intergenerational displacement. Yasmeen Foqahaa from the University of Manchester followed with a paper on Material Heritage and Cultural Policy Under Settler Colonialism. Yasmeen explored how the condition of material heritage in Palestine under a settler colonial regime has policed its cultural policy and material heritage management. Her paper raised critical questions about how material heritage can be mobilized to resist colonial narratives and support the reclamation of Palestinian agency and identity. She emphasized the role of participatory processes in policy development and the ethical challenges of safeguarding heritage in times of conflict.
Next, Eleri Connick, a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam, presented Dissenting Objects. Eleri discussed her Material Witness workshop series in Amman, where Palestinian participants in exile explored the concept of objects as material witnesses of their displacement. She described the methodology of “playful workshopping,” a process that enables participants to unlearn colonial narratives while reimagining their personal connections to objects from home. Eleri provided three critical insights: moving “unmoving memories,” constructing a legible cartography of exile, and creating space to piece together fragmented experiences under oppressive conditions. Lastly, Puji Hastuti, a researcher from BRIN, Indonesia, presented Repatriation of Dayak Pottery Artifacts: Strengthening Indigenous Agencies and Cross-Border Cooperation in North Borneo. Her research focused on the repatriation of Dayak pottery artifacts from European museums to indigenous communities in North Kalimantan, Indonesia. Puji emphasized the impact of these repatriation efforts on indigenous agency and trans-border community cohesion. By employing theories of materiality and social space, she argued that repatriation facilitates decolonization and strengthens cross border cultural dialogue between Indonesia and Malaysia, offering practical insights for future international cooperation on cultural heritage. The session underscored the power of material heritage in facilitating indigenous agency, sovereignty, and restitution processes. Through diverse geographical contexts, the presentations illustrated how objects carry significance far beyond their physical form, serving as vehicles for political resistance, cultural revitalization, and imaginative return.
Metabolic returns, metabolic georgaphies?, Jonathon Turnbull, University of Oxford; Adam Searle, University of Nottingham; George Cusworth, University of Oxford
Across the social sciences and humanities, the concept of metabolism is receiving renewed attention for its capacity to illustrate, map, and trace the complexities of material life in the Anthropocene. Geographers have long been at the forefront of metabolic thinking; from early work in urban political ecology on the ‘metabolic rift’ to recent work that contemplates the ‘metabo-politics’ of human and nonhuman digestion. In contemporary science and technology studies, scholars examine the body as a site of metabolic politics, exploring topics ranging from dietary inequalities and governance to antimicrobial resistance. Metabolic thinking has been extended to consider the relationship between farms and their surrounding ecologies, from material inputs to the circulation of commodities, opening up possibilities of new ethical responsibilities across networked topographies through broader spatial and temporal ranges. Metabolism has also re-emerged among the lexicon of physical geographers in relation to energy flows and the transformation of ecosystems; a way of measuring ecosystem function and health. The closely related concepts of cycles and circulation are equally important in earth systems sciences, where cycles of carbon, nitrogen, and various other nutrients are mapped and measured. Indeed, metabolism is often deployed as a means of encouraging planetary thought in emergent climatic regimes. Human impacts on these cycles are increasing and metabolic thought, inspired by political ecology, is well suited to help understand who gets access and control different metabolic processes. In relation to the conference theme, metabolism can be thought of as a diagrammatic framing for understanding material change and processes across scales, from the microbial to the planetary. Cows are fed seaweed as a dietary supplement to prevent the production of climate-change inducing methane. Cocaine makes its way from central London’s bars and clubs to southern England’s rivers where it affects the ability of eels to migrate. Painkillers used in veterinary medicine kill wild bird populations. And anthropogenic radionuclides (among other materials) move through ecosystems, affecting bodies and environments in unpredictable ways for unknowable temporalities. Metabolic thinking, we argue, is crucial in the Anthropocene if we are to comprehend the material transformations of human and nonhuman worlds in ways attentive to political economy and social justice. In this way, metabolic thinking prompts us to think about both the translation, circulation, and transformation of matter, as well as the way those flows are represented and acted on in political life. It thus offers an ethical prompt to think about care, responsibility, and causal connections to actors both remote and spatially immediate in nature. This panel takes stock of contemporary metabolic thinking across geography. It aims to map metabolism’s geographies, geography’s metabolisms, and the emergence of novel forms of metabo-politics (or metabolic politics). How are geographers uniquely placed to bring together existing strands of metabolic thinking to speak to key concerns of the modern world? If we are witnessing a “metabolic return”, how might foundational geographical concepts – such as scale, space, cartography, temporality, territory, or mobility – be rethought through the conceptual vernacular of metabolism?
Contemporary Forms of Disorientation, Dr Victoria J E Jones – Northumbria University and Dr Robin Finlay – Durham University/ Sunderland University
The purpose of this paper session is to open up the forms and conditions of disorientation that emerge in the contemporary contexts of neoliberal life and everyday geopolitics. Disorientation is a socio-spatial-temporal feeling. Conceptually, it involves the loss or detachment of orientating relations that enable a person to feel certain of their position in the world. Contemporary neoliberal life has opened new forms of disorientation. Recent catalytic events such as the Covid-19 pandemic, government austerity measures, the emergence of Black Lives Matter, the rise of populist politics, the proliferation of territorial conflicts, the escalation of global migration and displacement, the propagation of conspiracy theories, the decline of high street retailing, the pollution of water systems and the housing crisis have created the conditions that displace people, incite nativism and discrimination, disturb and destroy orientating infrastructures and expose the mutability of seemingly stable forms of political governance. Conversely, these disorientating events create the conditions for an individual or community to reorientate, create new relations, and construct positive change. Recent work in geography has moved disorientation as a condition beyond the spatial and wayfinding, to a disruption of orienting relationships (Bissell and Gorman-Murray 2019; Dorignon and Nethercote 2021; Kinkaid 2020; Schmidt di Friedberg_2018; Simonsen 2013; Turnball et al 2022; Wylie 2021). This work has mostly drawn on Sara Ahmed’s (2006) conceptualisation of disorientation via her ‘Queer Phenomenology’, and Ami Harbin’s (2016) ‘Disorientation and moral life ‘as a way of considering how disorientation shifts bodily and emotional perceptions of a situation. The session aims to expand current understandings within human geography of disorientations that are shaped by neoliberal and geo-political conditions. Papers in this session reveal that disorientations may be felt at an individual level or collectively. They may be experienced as singular feelings or plural imbricating disorientations. They may be felt in different intensities that feel pervasive or are acutely front and centre. Disorientation may be felt by or in bodies, communities, or socio-culturally. It may be felt by humans or non-humans. Materially or immaterially. Disorientation may be experienced positively, negatively, or even ambivalently. In this session we explore disorientation found in a variety of forms and conditions.
Session Summary:
The two sessions of Contemporary Forms of Disorientation had the ambition to surface multiple conceptualisations of disorientation within a range of contexts and conditions. The call out had specifically rallied for work which explored disorientation within neoliberal and/or geo-political conditions. As these imbricate, the presenting papers mostly explored both to a greater or lesser extent.
The first session explored how disorientation is felt at an individual level. The second session explored disorientation as a wider environmental condition experienced collectively. However many papers revealed that individual experiences of disorientation were part of collective disorientation or imbricated with others experiencing similar disorientations, and so the papers in both sessions demonstrated that disorientation is a messy and entangled condition.
Victoria J. E. Jones began the first session by outlining disorientation as a plural condition and a point of exposure for neoliberal instincts, through her ethnographic work in Queen Elizabeth II’s lying in state queue. Tomasz Sowada and Jason Luger explored ideas of individual and mass resistance through their disorientating experiences of the hyper-real time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through his fieldwork of small traders in China’s Shandong Province, Samuel Berlin discussed how the rapid movement towards a market economy has created a form of temporal disorientation for the traders whose fantasies of a (potentially unobtainable) good life is at odds with their present situation. Tammy Wong traced the disruptions to a person’s sense of home, through the individual and collective disorientations of expatriate children often moved between locations. The dispersal of young asylum seekers in the UK was highlighted by Robin Finlay as a process lived by those affected as multi-layered disorientations which affect their transition into adulthood.
Ben Platt opened the second session, by focusing on an aesthetic disorientation created by neoliberal property developers in the Royal Docks in East London, adopting the queer ecological approach Derek Jarman’s Dungeness garden. Louis D’Arcy Reed explored the city as a dynamic space which creates entangled, competing and communal disorientations. Through artist Marjolijn Dijkma’s ‘Surviving New Land’ (2010) a film of a sandbank changing through land reclamation in the Port of Rotterdam, Moyra Derby argued for the empathetic, responsive and imaginative aspects of disorientation. Sopheak Chann discussed the materialities of place through the experiences of displaced floating communities in Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake, who become disorientated by the state’s move to control the water way and make static their community’s usual mobile way of life.
The session was closed by discussant David Bissell who identified nine common themes across the papers: 1) disorientation as plural and multifaceted that take shape in, and through, spaces, bodies, and temporalities; 2) disorientations are triggered by multiple catalysts; 3) disorientations have different intensities, allowing for simultaneous experiences of orientation and disorientation; 4) the papers demonstrated a range of conceptual renderings of disorientation; 5) disorientations can be examined through a variety of research methods; 6) disorientations can be experienced on both the individual and collective level; 7) disorientation holds an ambiguous value, carrying negative and positive connotations; 8) disorientations are clearly tied to the contemporary moment, while also reflecting the lasting influence of the past; 9) in a given situation disorientation may be given primary or secondary significance.
The common threads between the papers but also their scope and difference in approach, reveal disorientation as a compelling theme worthy of further attention by social and cultural geographers. We look forward to seeing how the work from these sessions unfolds and thank the presenters for sharing their valuable insights.
Cultural Geographies Plenary
Restoring the question of culture: identity, essence and the unknowability of difference, Mitch Rose, Aberystwyth University
Throughout the 20th century the question of culture was a central pillar of social scientific thought. From Durkheim to Levi-Strauss, from Stuart Hall to Dennis Cosgrove, the question of culture and cultural difference was a touchstone for understanding the structures, norms and expectations that organised society. Yet, today the concept has disappeared from the academic landscape, including geography, where it is absorbed into other debates and terms, or discarded as an antiquated essentialist construct. Despite pressing political debates about culture wars, identity politics, cultural appropriation and nativism, there seems to be little interest in discussing, debating, much less theorising, the concept of culture as a credible explanatory tool.
The aim of this paper is two-fold: first it explores what has been lost by forsaking the question of culture (in geography and elsewhere) and second it endeavours to reframe the question of culture in terms that emancipate it from the problem of difference. Indeed, at its heart, this paper argues that while geographers commonly study difference as an obvious empirical fact of life, emerging and receding at various scales, the nature of difference itself is unknowable. Yet rather than seeing this as an obstacle to theorising culture, the paper uses it as an invitation to think culture differently; culture not as an explanation for difference but as an elucidation of the phenomenon of claiming difference. The lecture will focus on explaining this distinction and how it fundamentally changes the question of culture.
