AGM

The SCGRG AGM will be held on Thursday the 27th August at 13.10 in room 1.218 University Place, at The University of Manchester main campus on Oxford Road. All members are welcome to attend.

After three years in post, both Phil Hubbard (Chair) and Gail Davies (Secretary) will be stepping down at this AGM, as will a number of committee members. The RGS requires that nominations for named posts should be in writing and include the names of the proposer and seconder. Nominations for Chair and Secretary can be accepted up to the beginning of the AGM. Nominations for committee members do not need to be made in writing. Please get in touch with either myself or Phil if you would like to discuss any of these posts further.

We would encourage anyone who is considering applying to the SCGRG for money to support seminars/reading meetings or other events for 2009/2010 to prepare a short case prior for circulation to committee prior to the AGM. As a group we aim to support 3-4 events per year, so we will not generally offer support over £500 per application, and request that applications for over £250 to be submitted in time for discussion at the summer AGM. We are open to suggestions for funding of events that forward the broad aims of the SCGRG as defined in our mission statement which is online at: http://www.rgs.org/OurWork/Research+and+Higher+Education/ResearchGroups/Research+Groups+N+-+Z/Social+and+Cultural+Geography.htm . All things being equal we would look to support events that benefit the greatest number of people in the group and/or widen access for new researchers.

A full agenda will be circulated shortly. If you have items that you would like added to the agenda, please let either Gail or Phil know as soon as possible.

Engaging geography 6-7th July

Engaging geography
ii. creative public geographies


All public geographies are, of course, ‘creative’. This event will examine how, in recent years, an increasing number of geographers and artists, poets, filmmakers, and other creative professionals etc. have worked collaboratively, broadening the remit of research and its outputs beyond the traditional texts and spaces of university education. In addition, geographers, artists, filmmakers, etc. are often one in the same person, and artists, filmmakers, etc. seem more and more interested in drawing upon geographical themes and vocabularies in their work. This event will explore the collaborative potentials, working practices, forms and spaces of engagement, and publics generated through recent academic/creative work on, for example, climate change, GM foods, animal geographies, ethical/sustainable consumption and postcolonial curating through a variety of project work underpinned by academic/creative collaborations.

We would like to encourage the involvement of anyone involved in, and/or interested in, this kind of work. Please check back for further details and/or let us know about any work that can be added to the numerous, diverse examples of Creative public geographies we have been able to put together here.
Arrangements

Date: Monday 6th – Tuesday 7th July 2009.
Venue: University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus, Penryn, Cornwall TR10 9EZ (directions here)
Application form (including optional campus accomodation): download here.
Registration costs: £0 (for travel / accommodation bursaries, see the application form)
Places: limited.
Convenors: Kathryn Yusoff & Ian Cook (Geography, University of Exeter)
Schedule
Monday 6th July

9.00 – 9.30: Registration and refreshments.

9.30 – 9.45: Creative public geographies: introduction
(Kathryn Yusoff & Ian Cook).

9.45 – 11.00: Politics and aesthetics 1: talks/provocations
(other speakers to be confirmed: please check back for details)
- Hayden Lorimer (Geography, Glasgow University)

11.00 – 12.30: Politics and aesthetics 2: responses/discussion

12.30 – 1.30: Lunch

1.30 – 3.30: Studio 1: examples and stories.
(short prepared interventions about CPGs organised in advance via the application process)

3.3.0 – 4.00: Refreshments

4.00-5.30: Walk and talk.
(Participants talk to interesting strangers and report back on their conversations)

6.30- Dinner / continuing conversations.
Tuesday 7th July.

9.00-9.30: Refreshments

9.30-11.30: Making creative public geographies happen.
(Speakers representing funders and other supporters to be confirmed)

12.00-1.00: Studio 2: future creative public geographies?
(Shorter, hastily prepared interventions resulting from discussions at the event)

1.00 - Lunch and/or leaving…

DRAFT Annual Conference Programme Now Online

Note SCGRG has 10 different sessions spread across three days. Early Bird Registration by 5 June.

View programme here

SPECIAL GENERAL MEETING AT THE RGS - PLEASE VOTE!

As you may know, the Society is holding a Special General Meeting (SGM) on 18th May 2009 at the request of some Fellows. The Fellows calling for the SGM wish to see the Society carrying out its own expeditions and regularly raising the funds for, and leading, its own multidisciplinary field research programmes - single large projects. Council's current strategy is to support research and scientific expeditions by increased grant-giving to a much wider range of established researchers and topics, which it has been doing since 2005. You can refer to further information on the SGM at http://www.rgs.org/AboutUs/Governance/SGM/SGM.htm

Whatever your views - AND PLEASE VOTE AGAINST THE PROPOSITION IF YOU WISH TO SECURE THE FUTURE OF THE SCGRG AND THE IBG-RGS - I urge all Fellows and Postgraduate Fellows of the RGS-IBG to exercise your vote (please note that research group-only members are not eligible to vote). This is an important vote for the Society as it will affect how the Society delivers its Charter objective 'the advancement of geographical science'. Fellows should by now have received voting papers from Electoral Reform Services, so please return your ballot paper to reach ERS by first post on 18th May using the pre-paid envelope provided. Or if you wish to vote in person, go to the SGM at the Society at 3.00 p.m. on 18th May.

A steaming pile of manure (from The Spectator)

http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/the-week/3592006/part_2/the-spectators-notes.thtml

"Thirty years, almost to the day, after we greeted our first woman Prime Minister, we greet our first woman Poet Laureate.
Such subversion of the purpose of an old institution to suit the current office-holder is a feature of our culture. It seems to be happening at the Royal Geographical Society, which once sent Darwin to the Galapagos and Shackleton to the Antarctic. The RGS has not mounted its own expedition since 1998. A group of young rebels is forcing a special general meeting on 18 May and a ballot to try to make the society adhere to its original purpose, as expressed in its charter, and send proper expeditions once more. They argue that these enterprises produce a mass of scientific material, and engage directly, as geographers should, with actual places, people and nature. But the bosses of the RGS are people of committee meetings, not wide open spaces. The president, Sir Gordon Conway, is chief scientific adviser to the Department of International Development, and has a record as long as your arm in the world of quangos and busybody groups (he was on the committee which first launched the idea of Islamophobia in the 1990s). The director, Dr Rita Gardner, is also an adviser to the government, and is said to believe that the Fellows of the RGS should not be so named because this is offensive to women. During Dr Gardner’s time, the society has become more a trade union for academic geographers and less a body doing its own intellectual and practical work. It has set up a Space, Sexualities and Queer Working Group to promote interest in ‘geographies [that unnecessary plural is always a bad sign] on issues related to sexualities [ditto] and queer studies’. The RGS expedition advisory centre has been renamed ‘Geography Outdoors’. The bosses are trying to secure the vote, forbidding the rebels to circulate material putting their case to the Fellows, while printing their own argument against the motion on the back of the ballot paper. In normal times, one would calculate that these Blair/Brown-era operators would prevail, but, luckily, these are not normal times; and now Joanna Lumley, fresh from her triumph over the Gurkhas, has given her support to the rebels. So perhaps Sir Gordon and Dr Gardner can be thrown into the dustbin of histories."

Visuality/Materiality: Reviewing Theory, Method and Practice

Co-sponsored by SCGRG

At the Royal Institute for British Architects, London, 9th-11th July, 2009


Plenary Speakers: Professor Elizabeth Edwards, Professor Paul Frosh, Professor Jane Jacobs

Confirmed Speakers Include: Sean Cubitt (Melbourne); Mike Crang (Durham), Nirmal Puwar (Goldsmith’s); Marquard Smith (Westminster); Jacquie Burgess (University of East Anglia); Prof Mimi Sheller (Swarthmore), Ruth Panelli (UCL); Yoke-Sum Wong (Lancaster); Craig Campbell (Alberta); Mathias Broth (Linkoping University), Oskar Juhlin (Interactive Institute); Dean Sully (UCL); Anne-Marie Fortier (Lancaster); Anne cronin (Lancaster); Tim Dant (Lancaster); Teal Triggs (University of the Arts)


Visuality/Materiality attends to the relationship between the visual and the material as a way of approaching both the meaning of visual and its other aspects. The interrogation of image as sign, metaphor, and text has long dominated the realm of visual theory and analysis. But the material role of visual praxis in everyday landscapes of seeing has been an emergent area of visual research; visual design, urban visual practice, visual grammars and vocabularies of domestic spaces, including the formation and structuring of practices of living and political being, are critical to 21st century grammars of living. The relationship between Visuality/ Materiality here is about social meaning and practice; where identity, power, space, and geometries of seeing are approached here through a grounded approach to material technologies, design and visual research, everyday embodied seeing, labour, ethics and utility. This conference is aimed at providing a dialogic space where the nature and role of a contemporary visual theory and practice can be evaluated, in light of materiality, practice, the affective, performativity; and where the methodological encounter informs our intellectual critique. The organisers are keen to encourage contributions based on research experience and practice into specific aspects of visuality and visual critique including concern with:

· What is the relationship between materiality and the visuality?

· How do we develop new theoretical approaches to new visual practices?

· What can we learn from everyday visualities?

· How can we approach ethical practices through visual practices?

· How are theories of materiality, performance, embodiment employed in research on the visual?


REGISTRATION FORMS are at: http://www.geography.dur.ac.uk/conf/visualitymateriality

Geographies of Education

Click image for full sized flyer with details of conference registration