AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT IN THE UK

Our final landscape surgery meeting of the autumn term focused on a recently begun project led from within Royal Holloway’s Centre for the GeoHumanities, An Oral History of the Environmental Movement in the UK, 1970-2020. Funded by the AHRC and running for three years (2022-25), the project will deliver a national archive of oral history testimony from 100 environmental activists and campaigners active within the UK between 1970 and 2020, to be housed at the British Library’s collection of National Life Stories within the National Sound Archive. The project team is led by Toby Butler as Principal Investigator, and includes Barbara Brayshay, Chris Church, Felix Driver, Jeremy Iles and Oli Mould, with a further post-doctoral researcher currently being appointed to join next year. That team membership provides a confluence of personal experience in environmental campaigning and practice (in particular from Chris and Jeremy) and varied academic expertise (in oral history, in archives and public geographies, in publicly focused and participatory mappings, and in activism).

Climate March, London 2019. (Picture: Garry Knight /Unsplash)

The project is also collaborating with a number of partner organisations, including: National Life Stories / the British Library, to deliver the freely accessible sound archive of oral history testimony, catalogued, with fully searchable transcripts, and held in perpetuity; the Royal Geographical Society (with the IBG), to produce GCSE and A-level appropriate educational materials; and Friends of the Earth, to support the project’s networking and dissemination activities. The project’s advisory board reflects those partnerships as well as offering additional external expertise, comprising Professor Julian Agyeman (Tufts University, Co-founder of the Black Environment Network), Craig Bennett (CEO, Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts), Dr Julia Laite (cultural historian, Birkbeck / Raphael Samuel History Centre), Professor Jenny Pickerill (environmental geographer, University of Sheffield), Professor Joe Smith (RGS-IBG Director), Mary Stewart (Director of National Life Stories, National Sound Archive, the British Library), John Vidal (former environment editor for The Guardian) and Joanna Watson (Communications & Events Manager, Friends of the Earth). Furthermore, the project is currently developing its wider collaborative network with environmental organisations, with whom consultation and engagement will continue throughout.

Protesters at Harwell nuclear research site, Oxfordshire (picture: Chris Church)

In advance of our meeting, the project team kindly shared with us a project summary and the ‘case for support’ from their grant application. Unless one is a research council peer reviewer then most grant applications that we see are our own, so Landscape Surgery is a space where we can share proposals within the group and talk about their development. Here, the careful crafting of the text was apparent, conveying with remarkable clarity the project’s aims, practices and intended contributions. To be honest, this blog post might have been best used simply to reproduce that text! But this clarity was more than a product of stylistic polishing; it also seemed to reflect the simple truth that this is a project that needs doing. In our meeting, the project team members talked through the origins of the project idea, how the team came together, the complex mechanics of the development of a great idea into a fully worked through AHRC application, and the project’s ambitions, both intellectual and cultural. Chris and Jeremy recounted how their initial planning began a decade ago; with the likes of Friends of the Earth UK and Greenpeace both founded in 1971, they recognised the cultural importance of documenting the lives of these environmentalists whilst their voices could still be heard. However, the ambition was more than simply documenting that past; by gaining testimony across the span of 1970-2020, and from the many different strands of the environmental movement of the last 50 years, it was to produce an enriched collective memory of the environmental movement in the UK. As Toby noted during the discussions, this will involve a variety of oral history dynamics, including the more typical engagement with the life stories of older people by younger generations, but also younger people recounting their more recent experiences to their elders. Both within the archival collection itself, and through wider public engagement activities, the project seeks to promote that intergenerational discussion.

Climate change protest, 2019 (photo: Callum Shaw/Unsplash)

The team also asked for input on key issues they are facing in the project’s early stages, particularly the ‘challenge of choosing’. Whilst creating an oral history archive of 100 testimonies is a huge endeavour, how to select just 100 voices is far from easy. Above all, the project aims to construct an innovative history of environmental activism over the last fifty years, situating the experience of activism within its biographical contexts and investigating links between family, region, class, ethnicity, gender and generation in the formation and careers of environmental campaigners. Its scope also reaches across multiple environmental concerns, including climate change and energy, transport and mobility transitions, wildlife and biodiversity, landscape, seascape, green and blue spaces, waste and recycling, and pollution. A key objective of the project is therefore to enable diverse and unsung voices to be heard. In part this means not only focusing on ‘the usual suspects’ or most famed; but it also means engaging critically with what is traditionally included within, and excluded from, the environmental movement, and exploring how that movement has been defined, and might have been defined differently, over the years. In sum, a polyvocal ethos is central to the work, with an emphasis both on collecting diverse voices and the careful curation of their shared presence within the archive.

Friends of the Earth activists campaigning near the International Whaling Commission meeting, Brighton, 1982 (photo: Friends of the Earth)

Other issues discussed ranged from the methodological – in particular, with respect to the interviewing and archiving practices – to the conceptual. The question of the relations between the UK environmental movement and place — at all scales from the sensing body to local sites, cities, regions, nations, transnational connections and planetary imaginations — was one to which the team and the proposal was strongly attuned. Narrative life story interviews, Oli argued, offer a means to weave those scales together, and a site-based element to some of the planned ‘witness seminars’ (which would focus on how people have worked on specific environmental issues) was also being considered. On the archival practice, it was clear that the expertise of the team and National Life Stories will be invaluable in navigating the complicated ethics of consent and transparency involved in collecting personal testimonies for open and enduring access. More broadly, the project allowed us to return to discussions from earlier in the term’s programme, on archiving, participatory politics, and activism. Archival activism will be a core concern for the project, as will the politics and ethics of ‘national’ archive projects. The project is designed both to engage with calls for a more democratic, inclusive and diverse view of national history; and, through producing a nationally resourced collection, offer a level of sustainable accessibility that it is hard for community-based independent initiatives to achieve.

As well as the oral history and witness seminar collection housed by the National Sound Archive, the project is looking to deliver an open access book representing that collection, educational materials, media coverage and commentaries, and academic articles. The Surgery group looks forward to hearing more about the project’s progress over the next three years, and to its involvement of RHUL graduate students in a number of its activities. The project website, with links to its own blog, can be accessed here.

Philip Crang

WRITING DEEP

Continuing a strand of sessions formatted as creative workshops, our most recent meeting focused on writing, and inscription more generally, as methodology for thought, for probing depths. The session was convened by the ‘Think Deep’ project team (Eva Barbarossa, Wayne Chambliss, Harriet Hawkins, Una Helle, William Jamieson, Flora Parrott), with Will and Flora as the key facilitators.

Courtesy of Flora Parrott

Courtesy of Will Jamieson

In part the session was a chance for the wider group to hear about some of the forms of inscription being deployed within the practice-based research of the Think Deep project: Will’s fictional monologues; Flora’s ‘dumping space’ journals, less a record more an operational manual for her sculptural practice; Eva’s wall-filling chalk boards, developed over days, then captured as photographs; Wayne’s aphoristic and diagrammatic journaling, mixing over materials into new forms; Una’s drawing and doodling, associative rather than transcriptive. This post features illustrations of those practices.

Courtesy Eva Barbarossa

Courtesy Una Helle

However, the session was primarily based around a practical exercise, a guided inscription of a research-related object each of us had been asked to bring along. The various objects included: field drawings; a piece of tarmac; a collection of postcards based on RGS maps; Arabic poetry books; sand, put in a bottle in Singapore, quite possibly from Cambodia; a shamanic ritual bowl; leaves from London city trees; an ethically problematic sign, designed to direct tourists to a native American burial site; a flyer protesting 5G masts; a wood carving knife. Together, we inscribed different engagements with these objects: through words; through marks, lines and drawings; through sentences; through narratives; through patterns; through material forms fashioned from the paper on which we wrote.

Courtesy Wayne Chambliss

These inscriptions asked us to attend, in depth, to our subject matters: to look and touch; to see anew; to frame, reframe, associate. The workshop thus centred on writing beyond its roles in communication and transcription, but as an attentive, imaginative and speculative practice.

Philip Crang 

RED COATS AND WILD BIRDS

On November 15th, Landscape Surgery was delighted to welcome Kirsten Greer, Canada Research Chair in Global Environmental Histories and Geographies at Nipissing University, Ontario, to discuss her monograph Red Coats and Wild Birds. How Military Ornithologists and Migrant Birds Shaped Empire (The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill; 2020). Chaired by Innes Keighren, the session adopted an ‘author meets surgeons’ format, with general discussion energised by Kirsten talking through her intellectual trajectories prior and subsequent to the book, and responsive readings from Caroline Cornish (Honorary Research Associate and Humanities Research Coordinator, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew) and PhD students Christina Hourigan and Michelle Payne.

Red Coats and Wild Birds Front Cover. Cover Illustration: Cornelius Krieghoff, An Officer’s Room in Montreal (oil on canvas), 1846. Used with permission of the Royal Ontario Museum.

Red Coats and Wild Birds reflects on the ornithological practices of British army officers in the nineteenth-century, outlining their wider importance to cultures of nature, the accumulation of geographic knowledge, and empire building. More specifically, it focuses on the ‘British Mediterranean’ as an imperial space of connection where the mobile lives of military men and migratory birds intersected. The four substantive chapters of the book focus on specific life geographies, ‘avian vignettes’ and places: Thomas Wright Blakiston, the Great Bustard, and the Crimea; Andrew Leith Adams, the Hoopoe and Malta; Leonard Howard Lloyd Irby, the Golden Oriole and Gibraltar; and Philip Savile Grey Reid, the Osprey, and the English army home-base of Aldershot, Hampshire. The book’s Introduction and Afterword foreground questions of colonial afterlives and amnesias through reflections on twenty-first century conflicts over the hunting and conserving of migratory birds in the post-colonial context of Malta.

Author-Meets-Surgeons: from left to right, Caroline Cornish, Michelle Payne, Kirsten Greer, Christina Hourigan and Innes Keighren (photo — and arrangement of abandoned diary, notebook, book, pen and woollen hat — courtesy of Philip Crang)

The discussion reflected the thoughtful, suggestive texture of the book. The combining of human and bird ‘life geographies’ was one main area of reflection; for example, Michelle noted how the visual presence of bird portraits and human migratory diagrammatic tracings inverted expected representational tropes. Shaped by our group’s, and the panel’s, investments in the plant humanities, another talking point, as raised by Christina, was how ornithological knowledge and collection might differ from the botanical. Caroline opened up discussion of the masculinities that Kirsten argues were performed through this nineteenth-century ornithology, the ‘British Military Scientific Hero’, ‘Temperate Martial Masculinity’, and ‘Muscular Adventurism’ included. We debated how the migratory geographies of birds both chimed and chafed with imperial, national and local framings. And the role of critical historical geography in countering colonial amnesia was a particularly strong conversational thread, enhanced by Kirsten’s comments on her on-going assistance to First Nation Communities in Northern Ontario.

As a PhD researcher initiating this project, Kirsten had spent six months as a ‘visiting surgeon’ at RHUL under the supervision of David Lambert, so it was a particular pleasure to welcome her back to reflect on the fascinating book that work became, and the wider commitment to critical historical geography she has developed. Fortuitously, and mirroring the session’s theme of connective mobilities, the session’s participants included Joan Schwarz, Kirsten’s erstwhile PhD co-supervisor at Queens, with us as Leverhulme Visiting Professor in 2022-23.

Philip Crang

DRAWING OUT VIRAL ECOLOGIES

Landscape Surgery was delighted to host a creative workshop led by Dr Sage Brice (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Geography, University of Durham). Focusing on past and on-going experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic, we explored her participatory drawing method for engaging with vulnerabilities and their potentials.

Sage convened a two-part session, both involving us in a version of the creative research process she has developed to explore pandemic experiences, and staging critical discussion about that methodology.

The novel Coronavirus (WHO)

Practically, working in smaller groups of five or six, we focused on cartooning the early stages of the pandemic (for example, through lockdowns), with a brief to do this from the virus’ point of view. Particularly notable was the care that Sage exercised in bringing us into the process, and the clear emphasis not on representational skill but on a generative contemplation enacted through acts of drawing. Iconic virus images (round, fluffy spikes / tufts; see above), bodies, bubbles, doors / windows, outside environments, emotional sensings (fear, loneliness, calm, love, care), disabling physical states and more were sketched out with widely varying graphic skills. I shouldn’t speak for the whole group, but personally I failed, I think, in the viral point of view: my hand more mobilised by remembrance of personal experience, and with viral relationality largely reduced to projections from my own imagination (a variously angry, pleading or mocking virus observing my precautionary behaviours). Particularly powerful imagery and testimony came from others drawing the problematic relations of infection; the ‘virus’ not separate from ‘us’, but part of new embodiments. In parallel, our picturings of lockdown behaviours evoked the sense of changed subjectivities in relation to COVID-19.

Drawing courtesy of Sage Brice

More broadly, we discussed the development of Sage’s creative research practice, both in relation to conceptual fields such as queer ecologies and her biography of work on ‘transindividual’ relationalities. Discussion picked up on the traditions of drawing research in Geography and their renewed role within the GeoHumanities today, including amongst ‘surgeons’ present and past (Helen Scalway’s long-standing contributions deserving of particular mention). There was also a thread of discussion about the role of technical skill in drawing research, even when participatory in ethos. Does limited drawing skill inhibit or prevent evocation, despite the open, safe environment produced by a skilled convenor?

Issues around creative research methods will return at various points in our programme; so, particularly warm thanks to Sage for her generosity and care in visiting us and running such a rich workshop. Her departmental profile is here; and her twitter handle is Sage_Brice.

Philip Crang

CITIZEN SENSING OF AIR AND ATMOSPHERE

After introductions from returning and newly joined ‘surgeons’, our first Landscape Surgery meeting of the term focused on Sasha Engelmann’s new AHRC-funded fellowship on Advancing Feminist and Creative Methods for Sensing Air and Atmosphere.

Running from September 2022 until September 2024, Sasha’s fellowship is focused on developing citizen-led sensing of both air quality and weather. It draws on, and aims to contribute to, wider work on citizen sensing by scholars including Nerea Calvillo, Jennifer Gabrys and Max Liboiron. One key topic for discussion was how feminist thinking emphasises the relationality of environmental data, and promotes an environmental sensing committed to care as well as precision. We also reflected on how creative methods can advance these agendas, in particular when they foreground the sociality of environmental knowledge making.

open-weather, 2020. Decoding weather satellite transmission during a DIY Satellite Ground Station workshop led by Sasha Engelmann and Sophie Dyer at the Wagenhallen Kunstverein Cultural Centre in Stuttgart, Germany. (Photo courtesy of Sasha Engelmann)

The fellowship focuses especially on two projects. First, open-weather, where Sasha is working with Sophie Dyer and other collaborators on developing citizen-led weather monitoring networks that form an international ‘open-weather’ community, decoding weather satellite transmissions to image and imagine Earth’s weather systems. Second, a project on air quality in Villa Inflamable (‘the flammable town’, situated next to the largest petro-chemical facility in Argentina). Here Sasha will be working with residents of the town, Buenos Aires-based anthropologist Dr. Débora Swistun, the artistic Aerocene Community and others, to develop forms of air quality sensing that are locally embedded and attuned to residents’ lived experiences.

Aerocene sculpture launch in Villa Inflamable, Argentina, 2018. (Photo courtesy of Sasha Engelmann)

The discussions rightly focused largely on the methodological ambitions and case study projects of the fellowship, but Sasha kindly pre-circulated a version of the proposal, which gave us all a chance to reflect on the crafting of not only a ‘case for support’ but data management plans, work plans and justifications of resources that can combine precision with ethoses of collaboration and co-production.

The group’s thanks are extended to Sasha for sharing her work with us. Learning more about what she has planned for the next two years provided a suitably energising start to the new academic year.

Philip Crang

Machines in Flames

In May 2022 we welcomed the directors and producers of the film Machines in Flames, Thomas Dekeyser and Andrew Culp. For the first half of the session we each watched the film individually, which was then followed by a discussion with Thomas and Andrew.

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Machines in Flames is an experimental documentary that details the journey Thomas and Andrew underwent in the search for the group CLODO (Committee for Liquidation and Subversion of Computers). CLODO were/are an elusive group who were invested in attacking and burning down computer centres in France in the early 1980s. After a series of attacks in Toulouse, they disappeared and were never discovered.

Screenshot from Machines in Flames © Provided by Thomas Dekeyser

Thomas and Andrew are interested not only in CLODO’s actions, but their anonymity as a group – how they were present and then absent; and, how they disappeared without any arrests. Through the film, they try to make sense of CLODO and how they evaded ever being known. The film also addresses methodological questions of what it means to archive and what it means to conduct archival research. The evasive nature of CLODO can be seen in the difficulties Thomas and Andrew had in unearthing information on CLODO. They began their search by using investigatory computational tools, the exact tools that CLODO had fought against. Traces of the group can be found only in the remaining records – in the newspapers, legal documents, and photographs that have been archived since the 1980s. By combining footage of stakeouts, desktop choreography, and archival traces, Machines in Flames takes the audience on a journey to investigate cybernetics and fire (Machines in Flames, 2022).

Finding CLODO proved a challenge that required going beyond a computational search – CLODO had successfully evaded detection and concealed their actions. Therefore, to know CLODO, the filmmakers needed to become CLODO. Discussing the embodied approach to the film, by visiting the sites CLODO would have visited, Thomas and Andrew said they could gain an understanding of what CLODO experienced. They could gain familiarity with the buildings CLODO staked out and the streets they roamed. They could ask similar questions about the threats of computation and attempt to understand the reason behind CLODO’s attacks. This provided a connection to CLODO that had not been experienced before, a connection that was not possible by solely investigating newspaper articles or viewing locations through investigatory computational tools, e.g., Google Earth. Knowing CLODO meant becoming CLODO.

The stakeout © Screenshot from Machines in Flames, provided by Thomas Dekeyser

Perhaps one of the most powerful aspects of the film is the embodied projection of the stakeout, of becoming CLODO. The audience is emerged in the nocturnal stakeout as the camera travels across the various locations throughout the film. More than just panning, the camera moves like a person, embodying the role of the observer, the planner, the attacker. Suspenseful music accompanies the night-time scenes, the anticipation of the attack mounting, leading you to question how CLODO felt. Were they nervous? Did they get a thrill out of it? Why were they doing it?

To know CLODO is to become CLODO © Screenshot from Machines in Flames, provided by Thomas Dekeyser

Knowing CLODO’s view of the use of computers as tools to exploit and control sheds light on why they attacked them. Through the attacks, CLODO was not resisting the computational technology of these machines, but what these machines could lead to. They could be used to cause destruction through military violence, and they could be used for surveillance within everyday life, therefore, CLODO saw these machines as dangerous. Their focus of concern was on computers, and unlike other groups, CLODO caused violence-without-death. They did not target the people working or monitoring the computers, but the machines themselves, burning them to the ground. Engulfing these machines in flames destroyed an archive of data, it was present and then absent, lost in the flames with only fragments left behind.

The outcome of an attack by CLODO © Machines in Flames (2022)

Through the production of a documentary film, Thomas and Andrew engage in an interesting conversation about conducting archival research. In creating new traces, they suggest that they are adding – to the archive – material on a collective whose existence was concentrated on the need for self-erasure. Mapping out the locations of CLODO’s attacks on Toulouse, through the use of people of interest and archival material, led Thomas and Andrew to question whether all they discovered in their investigation was in fact adding to the archive they should have been depriving. Should an archive shrouded in destruction, both by the cause and effect of the attacks, be celebrated when additions are made several years later? Furthermore, Thomas and Andrew admit that they relied on machines throughout their research, the opposite of what CLODO warned of doing. Was this CLODO’s point then? That the archive cannot be undone by its own logic. This leads the filmmakers to ask a number of questions on the nature of archives; what it means to document a particular form of knowledge; if there can ever be an anti-authoritarian archive; and, the destruction of archives by flames.

Map of attacks linked to people and archival material © Screenshot from Machines in Flames, provided by Thomas Dekeyser

Machines in Flames provokes a discussion around CLODO as a group and its politics, exploring how control and surveillance through computation led to a response with flames. CLODO showed coordination and purpose in their attacks, targeting computers that were being used to control, dominate, and exploit. The film also investigates important methodological questions around producing a documentary film and the nature of the archive. CLODO realised that the archive is not only underpinned by control and containment, but also by an “uncontainable entropy that leads only to self-combustion” (Machines in Flames, 2022). As Derrida (1996) argued in Archive Fever, the archive is both memory and loss, where things are created but also destroyed. Therefore, like fire, the archive is a measure of both life and death.

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We would like to thank Thomas and Andrew for presenting such a thought-provoking documentary film which led to an engaging discussion at Landscape Surgery. You can find Machines in Flames on Twitter (@flames_film).

Written by: Beth Williamson

Edited by: Eva Barbarossa

Derrida, J. (1996) Archive Fever: a Freudian impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Why All Poetics Must Ultimately be Considered as Geopoetics

On 18th January 2022 we welcomed Oliver Dawson, a final year PhD student at University of Bristol, to Landscape Surgery. Oliver’s thesis, titled “Poetic Cartographies and Ecosophic Thought” focuses on poetry as a process of encountering non-human forces which operate within this world, disrupting its obvious and performative imagination of worlds.

About

After finishing his Undergraduate degree in American Literature at the University of Sussex, Oliver began working in the arts and cultural sector and ran The Poetry School, an organisation based in London which provides poetry writing classes for adults. Through this organisation, Oliver was introduced to a range of poets and began to explore the contemporary poetry scene in the UK. The organisation saw people from all walks of life engage with poetry, many of whom went on to publish their work and return to teach at the The Poetry School.

Oliver went on to study an MSc in Human Geography: Society and Space at the University of Bristol where the university’s strong philosophical roots influenced his approach to poetry. Through his exposure to the works of thinkers such as Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, Oliver began to approach poetry as an encounter with impersonal forces and sensations.

Research and Influences

Whilst Oliver did not set out his career as a ‘geographer’ he states that he is on a journey to become a geographer. The combination of his studies, work and research have situated his research within cultural and historical geography, with a particular interest in geopoetics.

“Geography is not confined to providing historical form with a substance and variable places. It is not merely physical and human but mental, like the landscape” – Deleuze & Guattari 1994: 96

Guattari has had significant influence on Oliver’s research; his thesis aims to enact a certain ecosophic thought traditionally associated with Guattari, focusing on the combined importance of mental, social, and environmental domains in the production of subjectivity.

Deleuze & Guattari. Image Source: https://bit.ly/DeleuzeGuattari

Ecosophic thought centres on how thinking these domains together actively composes a ‘wisdom of the home’. Oliver talked us through the understanding processes and productions of subjectivity as more than human, as a process which always involves non-human forces and therefore can be seen as a way of “thinking with the earth”.

“Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.” – Deleuz, 1998

Oliver’s research aim therefore, is to think of poetry as an operational part of this world, as opposed to a commentary of the world. “Once poetry is a commentary it is a representation and confirmation of existing thoughts and ideas, the realities of what we already know”. Discussing the climate emergency, he argues that geopoetics should be less attached to commenting and responding to preconceived problems. Instead we should use geopoetics as a way of thinking with the earth when addressing realities such as the climate emergency. Oliver states that he has resisted engaging with ‘obvious’ poetry within his field such as eco-poetry, in doing so he establishes the challenges of geopoetics as not thinking from the self but instead thinking with the forces of the earth, deterritorialising the language used by thinking without a ground or foundation. By removing the ‘ground’, poetry and language have the potential to connect with the changes and movements of the earth.

His research reveals an interest in the relation of poetry and language, and understanding language as a system which covets order. In his attempt to address the asignifying side of language, Oliver draws on the disruption to order, by assigning events with poetry as ‘sites of disruption’ for performative ways of thinking. This has influenced his research methodology whereby he takes onboard the experience of meeting a poet, reading their work as well as the work which has influenced them, and then introducing his own philosophy. This method allows Oliver to be alert to the potential eruption of ideas by letting things emerge through the encounter, disrupting habitual patterns of thought and altering the production of subjectivity in novel, unpredictable ways.

Oliver sees geopoetics as a field he would like to explore further, potentially through the publication of a book. He is particularly interested in further exploring the meaning within the ‘geo’ and how his approach to poetry can act as a contribution to geopoetics as a whole.

We would like to thank Oliver for sharing with us his thought-provoking research and look forward to seeing his further exploration of geopoetics.

By Evie Gilbert

DELEUZE, G. & GUATTARI, F. 1994. What is philosophy?, New York, Columbia University Press.

In Conversation with Ed Armston-Sheret

Landscape Surgery@25

Landscape Surgery Alumni 2017-2021 

About

Ed Armston-Sheret completed his PhD at Royal Holloway in the Geography department in 2021. His PhD, titled ‘Exploring Bodies: Recentring the Body in Histories of British Exploration, c.1850–1914,’ investigated the history of exploration and the bodies of explorers and those they travelled with. By offering a new perspective on Victorian exploration, Ed’s research is attentive to the contributions and experiences of people who are often ignored in mainstream histories of exploration, such as the porters who carried explorers’ equipment, sailors who worked on the ships, and so on. Ed is also interested in the role of animals in exploration and the collaboration between humans and animals on expeditions. 

Ed now works for the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) in the Research and Higher Education Team.  

Image source: https://bit.ly/EdArmstonSheretRHUL

What are your reflections on the atmosphere and the community of Landscape Surgery? 

I always enjoyed going to Landscape Surgery. It was a nice community and there were always lots of fantastic discussions – it always made me realise what a broad discipline geography is. As a historical geographer you often have certain types of conversations, but interacting with people from the broader research group was always interesting to learn about something slightly different and seek parallels between that and your own work. It also created a cohort of PhD students who went through it at the same time which I think was really valuable in terms of building up a community spirit.  

What do you remember about who was there when you were a part of Landscape Surgery, and can you remember any of the key topics or trends that were spoken about? 

I remember in my second year of Landscape Surgery organising a session which was on the history of exploration. We used some funds from Landscape Surgery to invite Vanessa Heggie, who is doing some interesting research on extreme environment physiology, to speak. I remembered that talk because she is a fantastic scholar, and it was great to meet her.  

Session can be found here. 

There was a great talk from Flora Parrott, Rachel Squire, and Pete Adey on analogic spaces, caves, and the ends of the earth.  

Session can be found here.  

I also remember discussing the project Making Suburban Faith with Natalie Hyacinth, a PhD student working on the project. Making Suburban Faith explores how suburban faith communities create space and focuses on eight different faith communities in Ealing in West London. Laura Cuch presented her film, Spiritual Flavours, at Landscape Surgery which is part of the wider Making Suburban Faith research project. 

Session can be found here.  

I always enjoyed the first year presentations which I thought was a good aspect of Landscape Surgery. You would meet people in Landscape Surgery, but you didn’t always know what they were researching, therefore it was always fantastic to get people to talk about their research.   

What impact do you feel Landscape Surgery had on your work as a student? 

I think it was always the chance encounters and conversations you would have with people which was productive in terms of thinking about your own research. You would say what you had been up to, and someone would suggest something to read or give ideas to think about which was really useful. Conceptually I remember it being invaluable because the value of collaborative working is something I end up talking about in my own research. I think the importance of collaborative work within geography is something you realise by doing it, it’s not just specific conversations but working with other people which contributes to your own work. 

How did Covid-19 change the space of Landscape Surgery and impact the relationships between people at Landscape Surgery? 

I think the talks are still valuable online. A good thing was that you could have speakers from a wider cross-section of geography, as people couldn’t necessarily come to London. However, I did miss the in-person element. Working online affects the networking aspect of Landscape Surgery and getting to know people. 

Why do you think Landscape Surgery has been so successful? 

I think because it has got a lot of support from everyone in the department – people will try and attend the sessions. Also, people are interested in each other’s research, it’s a good way of hearing about that – it has become an established way for people to talk about their research. 

How important do you think the students who join Landscape Surgery are to its continued success? 

The students are incredibly important to Landscape Surgery. I think they are the centre of it in many ways as it keeps breathing new life into the surgeries, especially the first year presentations which are great because it gives students the opportunity to talk about their new research. As students play such an important role in organising Landscape Surgery sessions, keeping the blog up-to-date and so on, it is a good way of students gaining experience. 

What would you hope Landscape Surgery to achieve or continue to achieve in the next 25 years? 

One of the talks I remember, organised by Saskia Papadakis, was titled Why is my research group so white? I couldn’t attend but I remember talking to people about it afterwards and it started a really good conversation about the lack of diversity in geography in many ways. If I was to go forward 25 years, I would like Landscape Surgery to be more diverse, more representative of people who are currently excluded from academic geography. Some of that is down to Landscape Surgery, but we also need to put pressures on the wider system to make changes that need to happen.

Interview conducted by Beth Williamson 

In Conversation with David Rooney

  Landscape Surgery@25

Landscape Surgery Alumni 2010-2016  

About

David Rooney completed his PhD in 2016 in Royal Holloway’s Geography department. His PhD research, supervised by David Gilbert, is titled ‘The Traffic Problem: Geographies, Politics and Technologies of Congestion in Twentieth Century London’ and explores movement in the country’s capital at the intersection of political, geographic and technological spheres. David is a writer and curator and has spent 25 years working in science and maritime museums. His latest book ‘About Time, A History of Civilisation in Twelve Clocks’ is based on 15 years of research into why civilisations make clocks and why we should understand them better.  

A link to David’s website, with information on his new book other books and exhibitions can be found here.  

David joined Landscape Surgery around the same time he started his PhD in 2010. During his time in Landscape Surgery, David gave 2 presentations. In 2011 he worked alongside Mustafa Dikec and Carlos Alveros Galves on their project exploring time distribution and infrastructure in cities. In 2015 David presented his PhD research on traffic congestion in 20^th century London, drawing on London as a global city through which he studied global flows of capital. 

Image source: https://www.davidrooney.uk/about

What are your reflections on the atmosphere and the community of Landscape Surgery?  

Landscape Surgery and the Geography department was a big community, they had the most supportive, warm, inclusive and encouraging people I have ever worked within in my career. We met in Bedford square, which was a small room and you had to fight to get a seat! It was always sociable, you would be able to talk about work but also have social and moral support from the Landscape Surgery community.  

What do you remember about who was there, and what were the key topics/trends/turns? 

The diversity of topics was notable, all of the presentations were so far from your own research study but it did not matter because the work was all so thoughtful that you gain a lot out of everyone’s work. There was always a sense of togetherness and sharing, like a flat hierarchy. The presentation topic was only part of it, hearing people’s approach to their studies was something I had never experienced before and being able to see new ways of thinking and approaching research. You could apply other people’s approaches to your own studies even though your topics were worlds apart.  

What impact do you feel Landscape Surgery had on your work as a student and then later as a researcher?  

Landscape Surgery has definitely impacted my work now. It was so inclusive, so sharing, with no gatekeeping. People wanted everyone to benefit, and that’s something I have taken into my own work, I want to meet people and be able to share my work with them.  

Why do you think Landscape Surgery has been so successful?  

People feel like they are part of something bigger. My experience wasn’t unique though, I think that feeling applies to everyone. It was so inclusive that it encourages you to stay connected and stay involved.  

How important are the students who join Landscape Surgery to its continued success/ progression/ development? 

The inclusivity and sense of community among the students are what makes them want to be a part of it, and which helps with its success and its progression.  

What would you hope Landscape Surgery to achieve/continue to achieve in the next 25 years?  

I would hope to see it go back to Bedford Square, and back to in-person meetings. Landscape Surgery needs the in-person element to create that exciting atmosphere, you could be sat next to a fellow student or a hero of your field and the democratic nature of Landscape Surgery meant that you could speak to and learn from anyone.  

Interview conducted by Evie Gilbert

Look out for our next blog on Ed Armston-Sheret, his work, and his experience of Landscape Surgery by Beth Williamson.

In Conversation with Ellie Miles

Landscape Surgery@25

Landscape Surgery Alumni 2008-2013

Ellie Miles was a Phd Student with Landscape Surgery between 2008 and 2013, completing a thesis on the subject ‘Curating the Global City’. Ellie specialises in online and digital curation, joining the London Transport Museum first as the Contemporary Collecting Curator and then later in her current role as Documentary Curator. Before joining the London Transport Museum Ellie also spent time as the Digital Curator at the Museum of London and as the Interpretations Officer at the British Museum.

As part of Ellie’s work, she is focussed on contemporary collecting, in particular exploring the ethical principles and practices which can inform museum curation. Ellie was also a visiting Lecturer at the University of Westminster for 2 years, where she developed and taught the course ‘Online Museums and Galleries’.  

Follow Ellie’s work on her blog here, and on twitter here.

Interview conducted by Cynthia Nkiruka Anyadi

Look out for the next blog on David Rooney, his work and his experience of Landscape Surgery by Evie Gilbert