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

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

Welcome to Warsaw: 17th ICHG Conference 2018

Warsaw University, Old Library

The triennial International Conference of Historical Geographers is a truly international gathering of scholars whose interests lie at the intersection of the temporal and the spatial.  This year the conference, which attracted participants from 39 countries, was held at the University of Warsaw, Poland, from July 15-20. To give some idea of the scale of ICHG 2018, there were 106 thematic sessions giving 365 papers on subjects ranging from the medieval to the digital, from the Crusades to the Cold War, and from mining to memes.

Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences, Market Place, Old Town, Warsaw

The conference was launched on the evening of Sunday July 15 with the keynote address given by our own Felix Driver in the picturesque setting of the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences, in the Old Town.  Warsaw’s Old Town has itself a remarkable historical geography: first established in the 13^th century, much of it was destroyed by bombing in the Second World War and meticulously rebuilt using, wherever possible, the original materials.  Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it can be seen as a symbol both of Polish resilience and nationhood.  Felix spoke on the theme of “Biography and geography: from the margins to the centre,” in which he outlined the advantages of adopting a biographical approach to the writing of historical geography.

The rest of the week took place in the elegant former library building of Warsaw University, an institution which dates from 1816.  There we were generously fed and watered four times a day, and what a difference that can make to overall morale, motivation and energy levels!  A series of daily plenary talks began on Monday July 16 with Karen Morin’s sense- and thought-provoking “Prisoners and Animals: An Historical Carceral Geography,” an exploration of the linkages between human and non-human incarceration spaces and practices.  Another highlight of Day One was the roundtable discussion “Maps and Stories: What does the future look like for historical geographers?” chaired by former Landscape Surgeon David Lambert. From Miles Ogborn’s signal discussion of the limitations of current digital formats deployed in the publication of historical geographies (“Trapped in PDF world”), to Maria Lane’s advocacy of “slow scholarship,” David Bodenhamer’s revelations on the potential of “deep maps,” Jo Norcup’s call for greater intersectionality, and concluded by David Lambert’s consideration of the future for “exhibitionary geographies,” alternative approaches to our disciplinary practice were offered up for further discussion and consideration.

Our Kew session—“Biocultural Collections in Circulation”— took place on the afternoon of the same day.  Chaired by Felix Driver, with Michael Bravo as the discussant, the three papers shared the common themes of Kew Gardens’ collections and object circulation, but beyond that were significantly different in their respective foci: Keith Alcorn began with his analysis of plant and seed circulation from Kew over the extended period from the “Banksian era” to the state-funded Kew of the mid-nineteenth century; Felix and I, reflecting the research conducted in the course of the “Mobile Museum” research project, spoke of the motives, modes and meanings of distributions of objects from Kew’s Museum of Economic Botany in the 19^th and 20^th centuries; and Luciana Martins concluded the session with reflections on the ethnobotanical collecting practices of explorer Richard Spruce, and on the relevance of his legacy for present-day inhabitants of the Rio Negro region of Brazil.  We are thankful to Michael Bravo for his comments, which we all found helpful for the further development of our papers, and to the audience for their active interest and questions.

Echoing the theme of our session, the following day saw the double session “Mobility and the archive,” chaired by David Beckingham.  And the mobility of knowledge also emerged as a theme in Ruth Craggs’ and Hannah Neate’s session later in the week, “Global Histories of Geography 1930-1990,” in which we were invited to consider the question, “How do we globalise histories of geography?”

POLIN, Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw

The programme of talks and papers was intersected mid-week by a day of field trips.  My choice was the Warsaw Jewish History Tour beginning at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, a museum opened in 2013 and curated by Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimlett.  The museum celebrates 1,000 years of Jewish history in Poland and commemorates the injustices perpetrated on the Jewish community on Polish soil.  I think we all had a greater understanding of both by the day’s end.

After a stimulating week of listening, thinking and talking, the conference ended on the announcement that the next conference, in 2021, will take place in Rio de Janeiro.  Até no Rio!

Caroline Cornish

Towards a generic history of geography textbooks

Catechisms, grammars, and readers: towards a generic history of geography textbooks

Innes M. Keighren

 

Introduction

Scholarship in book history and the history of geography has highlighted considerable generic diversity in the evolution of geography’s textbooks, showing their form, content, and purpose to have be shaped variously by pedagogical, political, and moral concerns (Brückner 2006; Marsden 2001; Ploszajska 1999; Sitwell 1993; Withers 2001, 2007). The historical publication of geographical textbooks was shaped too, as it is today, by the commercial interests of publishers; questions of price, format, and audience sat alongside those of intellectual value and practical utility (Clark and Phillips 2014). The historical decisions made by authors and publishers over the appropriate stylistic means and material form by which to present geographical knowledge to an audience of, typically, young readers are important for what they reveal about perceptions of geography’s value and assumptions made about how it might most effectively be communicated. In what follows, I trace briefly the generic development of Anglo-American geography textbooks from their early-modern origins to

Collecting Natural Selection: The multi-sensory collecting journeys of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace

by Dr. Janet Owen

The collecting journeys of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace were undertaken to remote parts of the globe. They were, hazardous, multi-sensory journeys of heat and cold, tempest and calm. They were intense physical and mental encounters with alien environments: natural as well as cultural. They involved intense fear and diseases that brought them close to death. Throughout these travails they wrote how it was their zeal to collect natural history which helped them cope and gave them the will to live. For both men these journeys were uniquely memorable and life-changing. My research explores these complex experiences in more detail by focusing on two of the remotest locations on the European nineteenth-century world map: Tierra del Fuego and the Straits of Magellan which Darwin visited in 1832-3 and 1834, and Dorey in New Guinea which Wallace visited in 1858. They are places where both naturalists made rare acquisitions of human cultural artefacts as well as prolific collections of natural history specimens. Collecting specimens from the human and natural worlds provides a rare opportunity to gain a fresh perspective on the drive to collect which Wallace and Darwin embody. That these took place in two environments and cultures that could hardly be more different provides an opportunity to explore concepts of deep mapping and place this in an appropriate sensory framework.

I am currently writing an article for submission to the British Journal for the History of Science about these historical, multi-sensory journeys. As part of my research methodology, I travelled to these past theatres of collecting and captured my own sensory data, which helped me to ask new questions of the historical data left behind by Darwin and Wallace. I plan to prepare an article about these travels in due course, and am working on the idea of a long-term research project which centres on the interactive digital mapping of Darwin and Wallace’s collecting journeys.

 

Film: returning from Cape Horn 9th February 2016, in waters where HMS Beagle sheltered from storms in January 1833

Film: Wulaia Bay 9th February 2016. Where Darwin collected geological specimens, Yaghan body paints and other items for his zoological collection. 

Dr Janet Owen is currently an honorary research fellow in the Geography department at Royal Holloway. With an original background in archaeology and anthropology, she works in the arts/ museum sector and is the author of ‘Darwin’s Apprentice: An Archaeological Biography of John Lubbock’. All film content is author’s own.

CFP: Networks of Knowledge: Communicating Geographical Knowledge in the Long Nineteenth Century

Call for Papers
RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, London, 29 August–1 September 2017.

Networks of Knowledge: Communicating Geographical Knowledge in the Long Nineteenth Century

Sponsored by the Historical Geography Research Group

Convened by: Benjamin Newman, Royal Holloway, University of London & Royal Geographical Society (w. IBG) & Innes M. Keighren, Royal Holloway, University of London.

The long nineteenth century witnessed a spike in the production and dissemination of geographical knowledge—a consequence of imperialism and scientific exploration on the one hand, and of improvements in the technologies of print and visual illustration on the other. Whether in the guise of thrilling accounts of heroic “discovery”, or more mundane records of empirical observation, such geographical knowledge was communicated to growing popular and professional audiences through books, periodicals, illustrated lectures, and exhibitions. The development of geographical societies and disciplinary periodicals during this period facilitated the dissemination of knowledge through institutional networks.

In recent years, historical geographers and historians of science have been concerned with the role of institutional networks in the circulation and consumption of knowledge, and with how local circumstances influence the mobility and reception of ideas (Finnegan, 2016; Keighren, 2010; Ogborn, 2010; Rupke, 1999; Secord, 1999; Withers, 2010). It is in relation to such work that we invite historical geographers and allied scholars to present current research concerned with the dissemination of geographical and related knowledge. We welcome papers that consider, among other things, geography’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century print culture, its performed oral traditions, and the technological advancements that encouraged the spread of knowledge to domestic and international audiences, both lay and specialised. Papers dealing with the role of speech, print, image, and object are particularly welcome.

Please submit abstracts (250 words max) to Ben Newman (benjamin.newman.2010@live.rhul.ac.uk) and Innes Keighren (innes.keighren@rhul.ac.uk), along with a title and author details, by 10 February, 2017.

Geography in Review: Historical Perspectives, Practical Advice.

Governing our scholarly output, the peer review system is a much-discussed component of the academy’s publishing nexus. Following our Easter break, Surgeons reconvened to explore the history of peer review as it manifested itself in the Royal Geographical Society’s Journal, before benefiting greatly from some excellent advice given by staff emerging from their experience as reviewers, editors, and authors.

The historical emergence of peer review and the value of considering the system’s historical development has been demonstrated in some excellent accounts by historians of science. The disparities of peer review’s emergence have been evidenced in the work of Alex Csiszar and Melinda Baldwin. Although Csiszar has dismissed suggestions that peer review began as early as the seventeenth century in the pages of Henry Oldenburg’s Philosophical Transactions, he has evidenced peer review emerging in the nineteenth century throughout London’s burgeoning learned networks and societies. Baldwin complicates the trajectory of peer review’s emergence by demonstrating how the respected scientific journal Nature eschewed a systematic approach to peer review until 1973. As such, the history of peer review is long, contested, and particular to disciplines and publications.

George Greenough by Maxim Gauci.

I understand the term ‘peer review’ itself to be a twentieth-century creature. During the nineteenth century, reviewing, refereeing, and referee were the commonplace terms. George Bellas Greenough—a founding member of the Royal Geographical Society in 1830—is the gentleman whom Csiszar credits with introducing the term ‘referee’ to the scientific community, having done around 1817. Whilst Greenough is known for his work as a geologist, it was in his earlier training as a law student where he had first encountered the term. Throughout the 1820s, learned societies—including the Astronomical Society and Geological Society—had begun to experiment with reports on papers they received.

Given the Royal Geographical Society’s close and intimate relationship with London’s learned societies it is not surprising that reviewing existed in the Society’s publications from its establishment in 1830. The practice of reviewing papers submitted for publication in the Society’s Journal can be conceptualised in two distinct periods: 1830–1850 and 1850–c.1900. Quite how reviewing took place in the first twenty years of the Journal’s history is difficult to establish. Reviewers typically wrote a letter to the editor conveying their thoughts on the manuscript, some reviewers were involved in direct correspondence with authors asking them to answer a series of questions about their manuscript, and, I suspect, other reviews were delivered orally at the Council’s meetings. In this early period having a paper published in the Journal was not simply the product of receiving a favourable review—some manuscripts passed into the pages of the Journal without being subjected to independent evaluation. Even when receiving a favourable review, publication was ultimately decided on by the Council who voted on each paper. Reviewing at this point was largely in the hands of those closest to the Society, often council members themselves.

The arrival of Norton Shaw as Secretary of the Society and Editor of the Journal in late 1849 brought a change to the Society’s reviewing practice. Shaw proposed a so-called ‘referee’s circular’ at the Council’s meeting on 14 January 1850. The minutes of the meeting record that with “some alteration” it was to be printed. Shaw’s circular asked reviewers to evaluate the paper on the basis of four predefined questions that related, variously, to the manuscript’s originality, its potential for publication, its possible abridgement, and whether it should be accompanied by any illustrations. Now each manuscript—whilst still being reviewed by a single fellow of the Society—was subject to the same evaluation criteria. Before sending the circular to the reviewer, Shaw would write the title of the paper and the name of the author on the sheet, and as such any notion of anonymity was largely lost in this closed network of geographers.

Norton Shaw by Maull & Polyblank, 1855.

Shaw’s ‘Referee’s Circular’

Shaw’s circular and the increasingly formalised networks of review at the Society continue into the twentieth century. Here, then, we begin to see the emergence of system which resembles our contemporary practice—this also extends to author’s and editor’s frustrations and anxieties. One referee, George Long, returned his circular complaining that the manuscript that had been sent to him was too long and “had taken up a great deal of his time”. Occasionally authors objected to suggestions or corrections. On return of his manuscript marked with reviewer’s corrections, Robert FitzRoy penned a letter to the editor stating:

Some of your suggestions I have more or less adopted with thanks—but others I not only cannot concur in but should entirely oppose if I thought anyone would interfere in matters of opinion or statement for which I alone am responsible. We look at things through various glasses—& I may have reason for my views which do not occur to another person.

Other referees complained of being overworked or that the refereeing practice was antiquated. In 1845 one anonymous contributor to Wade’s London Review launched an attack on the reviewing system of the Royal Society (a system similar to that of the RGS). The Review saterised the internal reviewing culture of the Royal Society and the process by which papers were communicated and accepted. The critique culminated with a description of the possible fate of a manuscript in the hands of a reviewer:

The paper is referred, of course, to some person of the same class of pursuits, a rival for fame in the same line of inquiry, carrying on a similar course of investigation, meeting perhaps with obstacles which the ‘referred paper’ itself may have successfully removed; possibly, too, intending to make these topics important elements in his own communication to the society. The referee may be a man of integrity in general matters; he may have no personal animosity, no ‘green dragon’ in his eye; he may even soar above all personal feelings, and with a noble disinterestedness give a fair and candid report…On the other hand, he may be a very different person; he may be full of ‘envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness;’ he may, in fact, wish to ‘Burke’ or ‘Bank’ the paper which is submitted to him, and what is there to prevent him? His enemy is in his hands, the darkness of night covers the deed, no record can exist of the part he takes in the matter, and he is overcome by the temptation!

Following on from the discussion of peer review’s historical emergence and its nineteenth-century frustrations (which appear remarkably contemporaneous) we received helpful advice from around the room. Some of the top tips for academic authors included:

• Before you begin writing think about the focus of your article, where you want to publish, and how the two fit together.

 

• Keep your submission well within the word limit as it is likely that a revise and resubmit will require you to add words.

 

• Remember that you do not have to respond to every comment made by reviewers. When you are responding to comments, remember what the core of your paper is to avoid making so many alterations you receive another R & R.

 

• When first receiving feedback it can be helpful to bullet point the report to unpack the comments. This way you can make notes on the points you have addressed.

Reading

On the history of scientific peer review, see: Alex Csiszar, “Peer Review: Troubled from the Start,” Nature 532, no. 7599 (2016): 306–8.

http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/1.19763!/menu/main/topColumns/topLeftColumn/pdf/532306a.pdf

On the history of peer review in the journal Nature: Melinda Baldwin, “Credibility, Peer Review, and Nature 1945–1990,” Notes and Records 69, no.1 (2015): 337–352.

http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/roynotesrec/69/3/337.full.pdf

On contemporary frustrations of peer review as an editor, see: Stuart Elden, “Editorial: The Exchange Economy of Peer Review,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26, no. 6 (2008): 951–3.

http://epd.sagepub.com/content/26/6/951.short

On the popular press and peer review, see: Elaine Devine, “Why Peer Review Needs a Good Going Over,” The Guardian (UK), October 28, 2015.

http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/oct/28/why-peer-review-needs-a-good-going-over?CMP=share_btn_tw.

Stress: Approaches to the First World War – exhibition and talks at UCL Art Museum

This series of events may be of interest to LS members: More details here

Remembrance Day Curators’ Talks

Wednesday 11 November 13:00-15:00

UCL Art Museum

“Stress: Approaches to the First World War” is an interdisciplinary, cross-collection exhibition curated by six PhD students at University College London which seeks to explore the effects the war had on minds, bodies, the landscape, and culture. On display in UCL’s North Lodge until the 20th of November, overlooked by the University’s monumental portico, this unique examination of the First World War includes objects as diverse as Magic Lantern Slides from Francis Galton’s eugenics laboratory to a preserved coal miner’s lung and from UCL’s pathology collection.

At lunchtime on the 11th of November four of the exhibition’s curators are staging a special event in UCL’s Art Museum to mark Remembrance Day. Each curator will give a short, informal presentation on how their research at UCL connects with the exhibition and provides novel perspectives on the First World War and its legacy, followed by questions and discussion with the audience. These presentations will cover a varied and singular range of themes including masculinity and the First World War; literature, trauma, and remembrance; the forgotten dead and human remains; and the staging of war in Greek drama.

Attendees will then be invited for refreshments in UCL’s South Cloisters where they can continue the discussion with the curators and visit the exhibition itself.

This is a free event and is open to all.  However, booking is required and places are limited.

Women, editing and geographical publishing

‘Women, editing and publishing: Ivy Davison and the Geographical Magazine in its first thirty years‘ is the title of the 2015 E.G.R. Taylor Lecture by Felix Driver at the Royal Geographical Society on Thursday 8 October (6:30pm).

Eva Taylor was the first woman appointed as Professor of Geography in the UK in 1930, and remained Britain’s only female Professor of Geography until 1962. She was to be the single most prolific academic contributor to the Geographical Magazine in the three decades following the Magazine’s foundation in 1935 by Michael Huxley with the support of the literary publisher Chatto & Windus. That fact raises intriguing questions about the relationship between academic geography and popular publishing in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

This lecture explores the life and career of another woman associated with the Geographical Magazine – Ivy Davison, who served as its editor for six years during the Second World War, but whose name does not figure in any history of publishing or geography. A significant contributor to Britain’s leading literary magazines in the interwar period, as an editor rather than author, her name is also absent from the scholarly literature on women’s writing and journalism, even though she worked with many well-known authors including Virginia Woolf who employed her briefly in the early 1930s. The lecture suggests that Ivy Davison’s career as journalist, reviewer and editor sheds light on wider issues about women’s role in editorial work and popular geographical publishing during the twentieth century.

FD

‘Geography Flies’ Through Years of International History

By Benjamin Newman and Hannah Awcock

The International Conference of Historical Geographers took place from the 5th to the 10th of July at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) in Kensington (Photo: Ben Newman).

As the International Conference of Historical Geographers drew to a close, amidst bids from St Petersburg and Warsaw to host the next meeting of the conference, Innes Keighren took to twitter to write that it was:

https://twitter.com/inneskeighren/status/619566844635127808

This, of course, was true in every respect. Over the previous six days, historical geographers from around the globe had come together in a frenzy of papers, plenaries, field-trips, lunches, dinners and a general hum of enthusiasm for historical geography. There was more to celebrate than just a successful conference with ICHG observing its 40th anniversary, and it was on that subject that Alan Baker (University of Cambridge) was invited to give the first plenary talk of the conference on the opening Sunday inside The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)’s Ondaatje Theatre. His plenary would serve both as a celebration of the evolution of the meeting of British and Canadian Historical Geographers in Kingston, Ontario 40 years previous, and also as a reminder of the barriers to participation in historical geography, both at the conference and in the Journal of Historical Geography. His talk and invited contributions from international scholars left much to muse over at the welcome drinks reception that followed.

Professor Catherine Hall gave an excellent plenary about British slave-owners (Photo: Hannah Awcock)

Monday would see the conference officially begin with eleven parallel sessions offering a feast of historical geography for delegates to enjoy. It would be difficult to summarise the diversity of the contributions, from urban historical geography, feminist historical geography, and GIS, to historical geography of extreme weather, war, knowledge, instruments, books, architecture, photography and many more. As the full first day of the conference drew to a close delegates excitedly gathered in the Ondaatje Theatre to listen to the first of three evening plenary sessions. UCL-based Professor Catherine Hall spoke to the title: Rethinking Slavery and Freedom. Professor Hall took a novel approach to slavery, focusing on the slave-owners rather than the slaves themselves. Thinking about how slave-owners constructed their world and justified their ownership of human beings allows us to put slavery back into British history.

Tuesday would be another busy day of all things historical geography, with Landscape Surgery’s first speaker, David Rooney. He got the Surgeons off to a good start with a paper on ‘Technologies of Segregation on the Streets of East London.’ He would be the first of a large number of Surgeons who participated in the conference, with Liz Haines, Noeme Santana, Hannah Awcock, Bergit Arends, Bethan Bide, Janet Owen, Innes M. Keighren, and Veronica della Dora, all involved in either convening, speaking, or both. And of course our own Felix Driver was Chair of the local organizing committee! Tuesday’s plenary was a landmark session with Felix chairing the inaugural British Academy Lecture in Geography, welcoming Bill Cronon (University of Wisconsin-Madison) to talk under the provocative title: Who reads Geography or History Anymore? The Challenges of Audience in a Digital Age. His talk discussed the death of the book length monograph, reading practices in the digital age and challenged the academy to consider the potential of various non-traditional outputs.

The RGS-IBG provided a perfect backdrop for lunch in the sunshine (Photo: Sophie Brockmann).

Conference delegates may have embraced Bill Cronon’s calls for academics to engage with social media a little too enthusiastically with the appearance of the @Geographyfly twitter account. The tweets were supposedly by a fly who liked to participate in proceedings by crawling around on the projector in the Ondaatje Theatre during plenary sessions. There was a certain amount of ‘buzz’ about who the genuine culprit was.

There's a real buzz about the Ondaatje Theatre today…will I make a dramatic appearance or just watch from the safety of a wall? #ICHG2015

— Geography Fly (@GeographyFly) July 9, 2015

All this talk of the web is making me feel uncomfortable #ICHG2015

— Geography Fly (@GeographyFly) July 7, 2015

On Wednesday there was a break from formal sessions for a series of field trips. A series of 17 trips, ranging from the historical geography of hop picking in Kent to a musical tour of Soho, proved that historical geographers do far more than just sitting in the archive. Surgeon Innes Keighren was one of the organisers of a trip to Maritime Greenwich. We both thoroughly enjoyed our field trips, and the general consensus was they were all well organised and informative.

The field trip to the site of the 1862 Great Exhibition also included a tour of the Albert memorial in Hyde Park (Photo: Ruth Mason).

Thursday’s tube strike—minus some sore feet from walks across London—did little to dampen the atmosphere as parallel sessions kicked off again after Wednesday’s hiatus. That evening the final plenary of the conference was given by Professor Simon Schaffer (University of Cambridge), on the topic of ‘Astronomy at the Imperial Meridian: The Colonial Production of Hybrid Spaces.’ It is of note that none of the plenary speakers (apart from Alan Baker) identify as historical geographers, which reflects the truly interdisciplinary nature of the subject. In the opening plenary on Sunday evening Professor Mona Domosh (Dartmouth College) had suggested that maybe it doesn’t matter so much whether scholars call themselves historical geographers. Rather, what matters more is that people are doing historical geography in new and interesting ways, and after attending the ICHG it would be very hard to argue that it is anything less than a vibrant and dynamic discipline.

Historical geographers work hard, and they play hard! (Photo: James Kneale).

On Friday morning the finish line of this six-day marathon was in sight, but sessions continued unabated. The conference drew to a close with delegates choosing the hosts of the next ICHG. We would personally like to thank the Local Organising Committee and the RGS-IBG for doing such an excellent job of organizing and running the conference, and then all that remains is to say see you in Warsaw in 2018!

by Benjamin Newman and Hannah Awcock.