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.

Comfort Viewing: Detectorists in an Age of Anxiety

In the final, pitch-perfect episode of Blackadder Goes Forth, as the protagonists ready themselves to leave their Western-Front trench and take the fight to the enemy, George – the eager and idealistic lieutenant – is suddenly struck by fear and nostalgia. Recalling the enthusiasm with which he and his fellow Cambridge recruits had signed up at the outbreak of war, giddily leapfrogging one another to the recruiting office, George realises that he is “the last of the tiddlywinking leapfroggers from the Golden Summer of 1914”. “I don’t want to die,” he tells Captain Blackadder; “I’m really not overkeen on dying at all, sir”. If only for a moment, we have all – at some point in the last year or so – been George: apprehensive about the future and longing for the perceived certainties of the past. The COVID-19 pandemic has, perhaps indelibly so, divided the chronology of our lives into two distinct periods: before and after. Rarely in peacetime has everyday life been so disrupted and made so unpredictable for so many people at the same time. The fundamental uncertainties that the pandemic has brought in respect to health, money, and family and social life, has necessarily seen us seek comfort and reassurance in things that feel safe, familiar, and predictable. For many viewers in Britain and internationally, Detectorists has been a source of that assurance. In what follows, I consider why this might be so and what it might tell us about the programme’s continuing relevance and possible longevity.

“I’m the last of the tiddlywinking leapfroggers from the Golden Summer of 1914”.

In the middle of March 2020, as the world went into lockdown, Joanne Norcup and I were finalising the text of our soon-to-be-published edited collection, Landscapes of Detectorists. As we made a final round of phone calls to the rapidly emptying offices of cast members’ agents, striving to secure the permissions necessary to reproduce screengrabs in the book, we had a shared and growing sense that we had missed our moment: that, from the rapidly changing perspective of 2020, Detectorists seemed suddenly dated – a swiftly fading echo of the culture of a pre-pandemic, pre-Brexit Britain. Yet, in creating the temporal disjuncture that marked out Detectorists as coming from the “before” times, the socio-political events of 2020 served in unexpected ways to renew the programme’s relevance, both for existing fans and for new viewers. The advent of the pandemic, and the arrival of its associated lockdowns, was marked by a proliferation of articles in print and online offering advice on how best to navigate the “new normal”, many of which, in providing lists of recommended viewing, sought to guide readers through the vast range of entertainment available to them via television streaming services. Detectorists featured prominently in many of these lists.

Beyond its obvious comedic qualities, Detectorists was often recommended as a visual treat – a bucolic escape from the domestic confines of lockdown. For the journalist Paul Kirkley, for example, Detectorists represented “a whole new genre of television – the pastoral sitcom”. While there are undoubtedly earlier examples of this genre, such as Green Acres in the US and Last of the Summer Wine in the UK, Detectorists is perhaps unique in the degree to which the rural landscape is central both to the programme’s narrative and to its visual identity and distinctiveness. “Watching the show,” Kirkley noted, “is like stepping into a landscape painting, with flat Essex fields laid out beneath vast Eastern skies, while bees and insects buzz drowsily in the cowslip and foxglove”. Here, Detectorists is seen to have value in relation to its visual spectacle – a quality more often associated with the cinematic rather than the televisual. The scholar of film and television Helen Wheatley has shown, however, that a wider cycle of “landscape programming” has seen television increasingly deliver the immersive viewing experience more ordinarily associated with film. For Wheatley, series such as Coast and Britain’s Favourite View, while depending for their success partly on the visual fidelity of high-definition film and broadcast technology, address a desire amongst audience members for a less frenetic and more contemplative viewing experience – a desire often associated with the so-called “slow television” movement. Detectorists sits firmly at the intersection of these trends, its visual richness matched by its measured tempo.

The first pastoral sitcom? © Chris Harris Photography.

The pacing of Detectorists is, by design, gently meandering – a choice that mirrors both the unhurried approach to life which Lance and Andy assume (often to the understandable frustration of their partners) and the leisurely and deliberate nature of the hobby they pursue. On the rare occasions during which this lack of hurry is subverted in the programme’s narrative, it is for comic rather than dramatic effect: think of the incomprehensibly rapid delivery of Kevin Eldon’s auctioneer or the chase sequence in which Lance and Andy in the TR7 pursue Paul and “Art” on an underpowered scooter. In Detectorists, speed, in all its guises, is rendered absurd and unnatural. The rural setting of Detectorists certainly plays into this construction of slowness as natural – the programme’s action (such as it is) unfolds in a landscape where time is marked out by the passing of seasons and the rhythms of nature. While the reality of rural life might not correspond with such an imagined ideal, the apparent slowness of Detectorists was, for many viewers during the pandemic, a source of its appeal. Together with programmes like Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, Detectorists was espoused by online commentators as a source of almost meditative calm – a tranquilising retreat from an anxiety-inducing world. Described variously as gentle, tender, sweet, and pure, Detectorists was seen by many to embody qualities that appeared otherwise elusive in a global culture defined increasingly by antagonism and hostility.

The rural setting of Detectorists, and the importance of landscape to its storytelling, has, of course, long been recognised by critics as central to the programme’s lure. Writing in the Los Angeles Times in 2015, for example, Robert Lloyd argued that Detectorists was “a pastoral comedy in which characters (philosophers, lovers, clowns) go from the town to the country and into the woods, to be translated, deepened, changed, improved or beloved, as in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ or ‘As You Like It’”. Adam Mars-Jones, writing in the Times Literary Supplement in 2017, concurred with Lloyd’s analysis and heaped further praise on the programme in declaring it to be “the best pastoral comedy since As You Like It”. For audiences in lockdown in 2020, the pastoral qualities of Detectorists took on a new significance as a visual replacement for the landscapes to which their physical access was temporarily denied. Writing in Square Mile magazine – a publication targeting residents of the highly urbanised City of London and Canary Wharf – Max Williams called Detectorists “the perfect show for these troubled times,” on account partly of its calming and transportive visual qualities. “Gorgeous imagery abounds,” he noted, “imagery that makes you think, or perhaps realise, that tree leaves sparkling with the morning rain might be the most beautiful sight in creation”.

Our collective Golden Summer?

The cinematography of Jamie Cairney and Mattias Nyberg succeeds in capturing the mythical “Golden Summer” invoke by George in Blackadder Goes Forth. While such a vision of Britain, and of England specifically, might be dismissed as tritely nostalgic (a visual resonance of John Major’s “long shadows on county grounds”), the summer landscape of Detectorist comforts precisely because it elicits memories, real or imagined, of an earlier time. Redolent of the seemingly endless summers of childhood, landscape in Detectorists transports us not only in space but also across time. Detectorists is an escape because it takes place somewhere else but also, in effect, at another time in our collective past. Writing on Twitter the day after the UK entered lockdown in March 2020, the novelist Linda Grant captured this sense of the programme’s comfort: “I assert that it is the perfect diversion from our troubled times, in which everything is ordinary, the skies are blue and nothing bad happens”. It is, of course, not true that nothing bad happens in Detectorists – relationships are repeatedly strained and tested, individuals are lied to and hurt, and a priceless Roman mosaic is destroyed. Rather, it is truer to say that wrongs are generally righted in the end and that, by and large, the characters’ lives become richer and more fulfilled as the series progresses. Like our childhood summers in this respect, the programme becomes a comforting memory when considered in retrospect: its narrative ups and downs are smoothed out in the process of remembering.

While the gentleness of Detectorists might be understood pejoratively as tweeness, it is both more subtle and more important than that. Gentleness is not only the absence of violence and aggression, it is also the presence of empathy and care – both for others and for the world at large. Gentleness, in this sense, is evident in the actions of many of the programme’s characters: in Andy’s attentiveness to the welfare of wildlife, in Terry’s unswerving devotion to Sheila, and in Lance’s capacity to bury the hatchet and extend the hand of friendship (albeit one holding a glass of Sheila’s lemonade) to “Art”. Their gentleness does not mean, however, that the characters of Detectorists lack flaws – rather it shows that, despite their ordinary human faults, they retrain a capacity for decency. Gentleness is evident, too, in the way the programme deals with what might otherwise be considered difficult themes. This tendency is perhaps best exemplified in the subtle but deeply poignant way in which Sheila’s heartbreak over the presumed loss of a child is revealed to the audience. Disguised in words of support and reassurance to Lance, Sheila hints, much too delicately for Lance to realise, at a hidden personal tragedy, the precise details of which remain unspoken. Sheila’s pain is, as a consequence of her selflessness and of the programme makers’ gentleness of touch, turned into a gift of comfort for Lance. Gentleness – as a character trait and as an approach to storytelling – strikes a chord with viewers because it seems to run against the grain of so much of contemporary cultural and political life, in which a ruthless emphasis on individual difference feeds social polarisation and the erosion of compassion. Gentleness matters because it is a deeply humanising quality.

“But what you’ve got going for you now is that she’s met you, Lance, and you’re lovely, so she’s bound to come back when she’s ready”.

As much as Detectorists might appear so idiosyncratically British so as not to travel well as a cultural export, the positive international reception of the programme – facilitated by its availability across a range of streaming platforms and the provision of subtitling in various languages – has shown that its appeal is neither linguistically nor geographically specific. Whilst the pandemic is responsible for having created a shared context in which the programme’s intrinsic qualities became topically appealing, the way Detectorists deals with generic themes of friendship, belonging, and the search for meaning in life are arguably so universal that they are immediately relatable. Across the world, viewers have found comfort in Detectorists and a surprising sense of kinship with the DMDC. Taking to Twitter, one viewer in France epitomised the thoughts of many in describing the programme as “un petit cocon de bein-être [a little cocoon of well-being]”. That Detectorists has succeeded in transcending linguistic and cultural barriers is at least in part attributable to its hybrid status as a comedy-drama. For every reference to Blankety Blank or Linda Lusardi that might fall flat with international viewers, the character-driven nature of the programme presents a fundamentally relatable human story; we do not need to be from north Essex to care about, or to understand, the residents of Danebury and their hopes and their fears.

For all that the pandemic has brought new viewers to Detectorists, it has also encouraged many existing fans to return to the programme, often multiple times. The pleasure derived from the repeated viewing of a favourite television programme is well documented in the academic literature. Writing in the journal Television & New Media, Anne Gilbert – a scholar of popular culture – has argued, for example, that enjoyment in repeated viewing derives from the predictability and familiarity of the programme in question. Rather than a disincentive to watching again, knowing what will happen is precisely the reason for doing so – it is a guarantee of the temporary absence of uncertainty. In this respect, Detectorists sits alongside other sitcoms like Friends and Frasier in functioning for many viewers a self-prescribed treatment for anxiety – a safe and certain window of time in which there is no jeopardy, only predictability. Detectorists is one of those programmes that, for some viewers, has become more than simply a sitcom; it has become a lifeline. For one Twitter user writing in March 2020, the programme’s therapeutic value was clear: “When I find myself faced with a terrifying, unstable world, gripped by fear and anxiety, there’s one thing I can always rely on to make me feel safe: Detectorists”.

That Detectorists has become what the American journalist Ben White has called “an anxiety antidote”, goes some way to explain its cultural significance in 2020. Three years after the series ended, it acquired – as a consequence of the most exceptional of global events – both a new audience and a new meaning. When so much in the future can feel frightening – with climate change, democratic instability, and social polarisation making it difficult to feel optimistic about what is to come – we seek comfort in the things that counter that trepidation, in things that make us feel reassured and hopeful. For those who wish for a gentler and more inclusive world, Detectorists offers that reassurance – it is not a lost fragment of the “before” times, but rather is an image of what we might wish to see in our collective future. For as long as we live in an age of anxiety, Detectorists will remain relevant and will be there to comfort us.

Innes M. Keighren

This essay originally featured in issue no. 2 of Waiting for You: A Detectorists Zine, published by Temporal Boundary Press.

Plumbing a vertical path through the planet – Social and Cultural Geography responses to the climate crisis

NOAA-19 S 75W 2021-07-20 12-18 GMT pristine from NOAA APT 1.3.0.png
NOAA-19, London, 20 July 2020, 12:18 GMT
Source: open-weather CC BY 4.0

What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic. The region is warming three times faster than the global average and staying within 1.5 degrees temperature increase has been top of the news agenda. To coincide with COP 26 in Glasgow, Landscape Surgery showcased three projects that capture responses to the climate crisis; from China, from the depths of an underwater cave and from outer space.

Liling Xu, a historian in the third year of her PhD at Royal Holloway, has been tracking China’s national security policies alongside accelerating climate change impacts. China has been experiencing increasing numbers of extreme weather events, threats to food security and other emergencies. A central focus of Xu’s work has been to investigate if, and how priorities have changed in China since the United Nation Security Council‘s first debate on the impact of global warming on global peace and security.

China became an observer in the Arctic Council in 2013 and as part of her research Xu has been looking for the “missing link” which connects China’s national security policies to more frequent climate impacts. Early policy papers use vague wording, “affects” and “impacts”, to refer to extreme weather events in parts of China.

China has significant interests in the Arctic. The shipping routes through the Northwest Passage are like a Polar Silk Road. Nevertheless, even in 2018 a policy paper outlining those concerns used slippery language when mentioning threats to national security due to the impacts resulting from global warming, says Xu.

Images such as the vertical map visualise China’s positioning as a growing economic powerhouse. Europe is represented as an outpost, squashed up at the top of the world while China opens out to a vast and ice free Arctic, criss crossed with shipping lanes that reduce the distance between the markets of the East and the rest of the world.

A Chinese ‘vertical world map,’ showing the world in a different perspective from the Eurocentric view that has mostly dominated cartography. Credit: Prior Probablity.

Shifting away from the Arctic and geopolitical narratives of the climate crisis, the next presentation plunged us deep underwater. An ongoing collaboration between artist Flora Parrott and writer Lindiwe Matshikiza centres a moment of encounter between a cave diver and a previously unknown species of cave fish, which has seemingly adapted itself from a surface dwelling species of loach. In the video, we follow the dim light of the divers as they swim deeper into the cave system. In those murky underground habitats, different imaginaries emerge as humans find themselves surviving only by means of technology and scuba skills. Perhaps when we emerge again at the surface we find our reflections bubble with new ideas and a rethinking of human relationships to environments.

Listen

Soaring upwards once again, this time beyond land and sky, and into space, Sasha Engelmann let us into a secret… It’s not that hard to photograph space…. With a bit of know how and a radio antenna, Open-Weather (Sophie Dyer and Sasha Engelmann) alongside Rectangle (Lizzie Malcolm and Daniel Powers), created a global network of citizen-artists to collectively image earth.

‘When I image the earth, I imagine another‘ is a global weather report made up of snapshots taken by people engaging in the project from all over the world. Operating DIY satellite ground stations, citizen-artists from Buenos Aires to Abu Dhabi captured a collective snapshot of the Earth and its weather systems: a ‘nowcast’ for an undecided future.

On the eve of COP26 (October 31st 2021), tuning into transmissions from three orbiting National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites, members of the network captured their images and submitted their fieldnotes. Combined, these contributions generate a polyperspectival (from many angles) image of the earth as experienced from Japan, Mauritius, Los Angeles and countless other locations.

Satellites transmit in analogue and the signal can be encoded mechanically into a radio wave. The radio environment can interrupt the signal and Engelmann described how the movements of the photographers were inscribed in the images. Swirls and patterns from multiple perspectives and many situated positions, helped to close up the gap between a detached and politicised understanding of the climate crisis and the everyday experiences of people. Weather fronts forming far away, at the edge of earth entwined with the familiar, intimate experience of someone in their balcony, arm outstretched and holding a radio antenna.

A participant in Glasgow captured an image of a cyclone passing over the city and their field notes describe the moment in time when they took the picture. The artwork is a feminist experiment in imaging and reimagining the planet in an era of climate crisis and, I think, a collection of images and words that spark enchantment and hope.

More about ‘When I image the earth, I imagine another‘ here

Written by Viveca Mellegård

Edited by Evie Gilbert

More information on; China’s geopolitical imaginations of the Arctic, explorations into how climate change has been embedded into China’s imaginations, representations and practices in foreign policy, academic research, popular culture and domestic tourism:

• Portrait of the week: Zhai Mo
• Article on Chinese painter-sailor Zhai Mo to circumvent the arctic, non-stop
• Article on how a Chinese Sailboat Became a Microcosm for Arctic Geopolitics

New Additions to the PhD Cohort

The start of the new academic year brought some new additions to the Landscape Surgery cohort. Seven PhD students joined us in Septembe 2019, bringing a set of new projects that span the discipline(s). Some of these projects are practiced based, whilst others will deploy some unique creative methodologies. Together, they tackle an array of interesting and pressing issues, showing strong variety, and are sure to lead to great bodies of research.

So, introducing our new doctoral researchers..

Angela Chan

Angela is a doctoral researcher with StoryFutures, Royal Holloway’s new immersive and VR lab. Her research focuses on creative clustering, exploring the business models and behaviours that drive successful growth in the digital and immersive sectors. Her particular focus is on the role that diversity plays in innovation and new forms of digital storytelling. 

Bethan Lloyd Worthington

Bethan is an artist working with installation, objects, writing and artists books. Her practice-based research takes as a starting point the excavation of Gully Cave in Somerset and practices of climate reconstruction.

Stefano Carnelli

With a background in architecture, urbanism and sociology, Stefano’s work explores the intersection between photography and cultural geography. Stefano’s practice-based research investigates the ERUV, the ritual urban enclosure that allows Orthodox Jewish communities to circumvent some of the restrictions imposed on the public domain during Sabbath and other festivities.

Rachel Tyler

Rachel’s research explores geographies of garments and making, and how these can be expressed through cartography. Her AHRC Techne funded PhD employs creative practice-led methodology, with a specific focus on London’s fashion industry.

Holly Nielsen

Holly’s research, “British Board Games and the Ludic Imagination, c.1860-1960”, explores the history of play, materiality, intergenerational familial dynamics, and understanding categories of age through analysing the presence of board games both in domestic spaces and their wider cultural presence.

Jack Morton

Jack is a Doctoral Researcher with StoryFutures specialising in cultural and political geographies with his PhD research focusing on freelance labour in the video games industry. He has been at Royal Holloway in the Department of Geography for 4 years, completing a BSc in Geography and MSc in Geopolitics and Security.

Rhys Gazeres de Baradieux

Rhys’ PhD explores skateboarding’s debut inclusion into the 2020 Olympic Games, and the tensions that this has with skateboarding as it is practiced and lived in the urban environment, created ultimately by the further entrenchment of the neoliberal doctrine onto a subversive urban practice.

Written by Rhys / Edited by Rachel.

Commons, Greens, and the end of a decade

The last Landscape Surgery session of the decade was opened by Katrina Navickas’s (University of Hertfordshire) presentation : ‘Customary rights, property and contested belongings in English commons and village greens, 1765-1965’. The seminar was a collaboration with Provincialism at Large – a new seminar series co-ordinated by Ruth Livesey (RHUL),  building on the collaboration between the Centre for Victorian Studies and the Centre for the GeoHumanities. Katrina was joined by Ruth and two PhD researchers (RHUL) Saskia Papadakis and Gemma Holgate, whose doctoral research projects are titled  ‘Northerners in London: Englishness, place and mobility’ and ‘Writing Socialist Feminism: Women Activists and the Novel, 1887-1908,’ respectively.

Katrina positions herself firmly as a regionalist, and promotes the study of particular regions in English history.  Today, she is presenting her research on legal geographies of the commons and village greens in England.  The 1965 Commons Registration act was legislation which aimed to survey all common land in England and Wales, however it was flawed and revealed the widespread difficulties of defining a common, its rights and ownership — many of which still exist today. The resulting registers are inaccurate and conflicting. 

1965 Commons Registration Act

But, how is common land defined? We were challenged to define these three terms as a group– with varying degrees of success!

• Common: Private land which is subject to rights of common–  including pasture, turbary (taking peat or turf), estovers (taking wood), piscary (taking fish)..etc. The land could be fenced or open and was usually attached to private property.

• Waste: Land which belongs to the manor, is uncultivated and while is not subject to rights of common can be used for pasture. 

• Village Green: Land ‘owned’ by the village parish, which has been allotted for recreation and leisure for the inhabitants of the village.

A sign listing Coulsdon Common’s byelaws, and list of fees. From 1954 – still erected today it the common today. 

Katrina reminds us of the importance of commons, to working people particularly, throughout history as meeting places; their integrity to political movements; the commons preservation movement; and points to the new shift to ecological concerns. 

Today many are fighting for their commons to prevent housing developments and retaining commons as nature reserves. Katrina also points to the landmark case in November 2019 in the which the Supreme Court ruled the banning  of Extinction Rebellion’s Autumn protest between 14-19 October was unlawful, which reminds us of how important laws on customary rights can be in the present: the right to liberty and protest still need to be protected. 

We would like to thank Katrina Navicka for her engaging presentation, and imagery; Ruth Livesey and Sasha Engelmann for organising this session; Saskia Papadakis and Gemma Holgate for presenting their research; and the other Landscape Surgery participants for their contributions to the discussion.

Written by Rachel Tyler.

Safe Space

For our fourth Landscape Surgery of the autumn term, we were kindly joined by members of our affiliated research group, Geopolitics, Development, Security and Justice (GDSJ), to deliberate the notion of ‘safe space’. The surgery was chaired by Professor Katherine Brickell (Royal Holloway), and was divided into two presentations given by Dr Janet Bowstead (Postdoctoral Fellow at Royal Holloway) and Riina Lundman (Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Turku, Finland) respectively, before concluding with an open panel discussion that sought to think more broadly about the geographical importance of ‘safe space’ in today’s social and political climate.

From the outset, the task of defining ‘safe space’ presented itself as a challenging undertaking, perhaps a consequence of the expression’s resurgence within the public domain of late that has prompted rather unapologetic and heated debates “over what ‘safe spaces’ mean and if they should be encouraged and protected” (Djohari et al., 2018, p351). As noted within the latter group discussion, it seems as though the term has become obscured to negatively describe ‘sanitised’ spaces of ‘free expression’, often being paired with other culturally loaded neologisms such as ‘snowflake generation’ and ‘political correctness’ to incite adverse confrontations of speech (Djohari et al., 2018). Whilst these particular mobilisations of the term cannot be ignored, Katherine noted that ‘safe space’ in its most rudimentary form, describes:

“A place or environment in which a person or category of people can feel confident that they will not be exposed to discrimination, criticism, harassment, or any other emotional or physical harm.” – (Oxford dictionary)

Indeed, when probed further this particular explanation raises important questions surrounding the theorisation of the material, physical, emotional and imagined capacity of ‘safe spaces’. However, it is starkly apparent that the concept is inherently contested, diverse and subjective, meaning that no solitary definition is ever quite appropriate, and its geographical relevance is substantially entwined within ever expansive political and social webs of understanding.

A pink inverted triangle encased within a green circle used to symbolise alliance with LGBTQ+ rights. This is just one example of a safe space symbol. Source: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_space

To highlight the individuality of our own perceptions of ‘safe space’, the session’s convenor, Katherine Brickell, encouraged the group to mental map our own spaces of safety through the medium of language and illustration. As a critical methodology, mental mapping has been utilised by feminist geographers to allow participants to reflexively consider their own “geographical imaginations and complex identity negotiations” in relation to social locations (Jung, 2012, p985).  In this sense, mental maps are not solely reflections of an individual’s cognitive identity, but are a multi-layered artefact rife with emotion, impression and knowledge.

Among the group, the home and the bedroom featured heavily as perceived sites of safety. Whilst this is unsurprising given the popular tropes of peace and security that resonate in imaginations of the domestic, it is evident that for many the home is deeply unsafe, with 1.9 million adults in the England and Wales experiencing abuse within the home in 2017 alone (ONS, 2017). For others, ‘safe space’ was recognised to be unbound by specific locations, but as visceral encounters between friends, family, animals and nature. Similarly, for some, safe space is temporally attached to particular hours of the day, fleeting feelings of comfort found in the early morning or the last few moments before nightfall.

A mental map of my own safe spaces. Source: Authors own, 2018. 

Our first speaker, Dr Janet Bowstead, is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow within the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway. Janet conducts interdisciplinary research that cuts across geography, sociology and social policy to examine strategies of safety for women who have suffered from domestic violence. In her presentation, entitled: “Safe Spaces of Refuge, Shelter and Contact”, sought to consider service responses to women and girls at risk of abuse in both the global North and South by examining a forthcoming selection of articles in the journal of Gender, Place and Culture.

Janet begun by suggesting that safe spaces of shelter have the potential to offer freedom to victims of violence when (1) explicit boundary work is done to carve out safe spaces in hostile environments, (2) the practices for ensuring safety are central in allowing women to evoke relational place-making performances, and (3) the shelter becomes a temporary contact zone of refuge, safety and autonomy.

Thinking specifically about research conducted by the ASPIRE Project (Analysing Safety and Place in Immigrant and Refugee Experience) that examined community-led responses to violence against immigrant and refugee women in Australia, Janet noted that minority groups of women face unique barriers when attempting to access domestic violence services (Murray et al., forthcoming). For instance, many women travelled long distances or entirely relocated to gain access to help, yet once they had moved were judged or shamed by other members of their community for leaving violent relationships. Moreover, language barriers between shelters and vulnerable women ultimately impacted their overarching perceptions of safety, as services could not regularly provide appropriate interpreters with correct ethical training, resulting in women feeling fearful that confidentiality breaches could leave them at risk.

Similarly, research conducted in shelter homes in Eastern India by Mima Guha (forthcoming) found that shelters can prevent emotional healing from abuse by enforcing punitive measures, leaving women feeling isolated and punished for their experience as victims. As Janet further highlighted, some protection schemes in East Indian shelters showed evidence of mistreatment by the state and families to punish ‘sexually deviant’ young women for eloping with partners without familial consent. In these cases, women’s subversive sexual behaviour became reframed as ‘victimhood’, resulting in alleged ‘safe spaces’ becoming a site in which to control and manage female agency under the guise of state protection and rehabilitation.

It is clear that “women need to be safe from abuse before they can be safe to achieve wider control, autonomy and freedom” (Lewis et al, 2015 n.p.). As such, it is necessary for shelters and refuges to offer support throughout the emotional stages of recovery and empowerment following abuse. For Janet, this is carried out through the nature of the safety, and by the nature of the space. For instance, shelters with communal facilities produce a very different rehabilitation programme than those with self-contained flats. Likewise, shelters that implement collaborative participatory creative outputs ‘can enable processes of self-help and collective support to counteract the isolation of abuse and to help prepare women for their lives after the refuge’ (Bowstead for RGS-IBG, 2017). However, this is not to suggest that the onus for rehabilitation is solely the role of shelters and the individuals themselves. Instead, it is critical that discussions on ‘safe space’ continue to be opened up and dissected to generate a new narrative for a human rights approach that allows women to feel truly, and unequivocally, safe and free within society.

Indeed, as Janet’s presentation summarised, safe spaces across the global North and South are not static or singular in their ability to afford safety and freedom for women. However, “temporary spaces of shelter, refuge and contact can be powerful places of protection and recovery” (Bowstead, 2018 in presentation) that can transform lives, inspire collective support and encourage wider societal change in attitudes towards women who have experienced violence.

Our second speaker, Dr Riina Lundman, is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Turku, Finland, with interests in urban studies, public space and creative geographies. Riina’s presentation continued the session theme and discussed the idea of ‘safe(r) spaces’ for the elderly.

Paraphrasing Furedi (2002: n.p.), Riina suggested that “safety has become one of Western society’s fundamental values”, as organisations, institutions and social groups strive to offer diverse spaces of inclusivity, to which everyone feels welcome. However, for Riina, ‘safe space’ is intrinsically paradoxical by nature. If one space is safe, does that mean all others are unsafe? And if that is the case, is it possible to generate a new ‘safe(r) space’ attitude that reduces the disparity?

In response, Riina argues that a ‘safe(r) space’ narrative could be pivotal in bridging this gap, particularly in Finland where social and political knowledges on ‘safe space’ are yet to build substantial prominence within legal research. As such, Riina is currently in the process of investigating Finnish laws and policies to examine what safe(r) spaces could mean for elderly people, and moreover, the kinds of solutions that could be implemented to allow a more sustainable practice for creating and managing elderly spatial safety.

Following Koskela’s (2009) dimensions of safety and security, Riina illustrated that in order for senior care homes to become safe(r) safes, they should cohere to the following aspects: (1) be well calculated and measured, (2) designed to be experienced and to feel personal, (3), respect cultural differences and structural duties of care, (4) have strong social elements to reduce isolation, (5) be imaginative and creative, and finally, (6) have these ideals manifested in physical and material elements, rather than allowing the notion of safety to exist solely on a theoretical basis.

However, as one would expect, the generational group of the elderly is incredibly diverse, from differences in social, cultural and political values, to what is needed and required from a medical standpoint to ensure that a space is entirely safe. With this in mind, Riina is sympathetic that there is no ‘cookie-cutter’ formula to generating ‘safe(r) spaces’ for the elderly, but rather that there is a wealth of work to be done in social and legal policy to enable the best care to be given.

For Riina, much of this can be done by confronting the negative stigmas of ageism and ableism that frequently infiltrate discussions on senior safety. By looking at specific case examples of senior co-housing communities that offer more relaxed approaches to elderly care, for instance the Loppukiri in Helsinki that provides private housing clustered around communal spaces, Riina is hopeful that spatio-legal approaches to safe(r) spaces will begin to adopt a far more open and accepting attitude towards elderly care.

We would like to extend our warmest thanks to Katherine, Janet and Riina for their fantastic Landscape Surgery session, and for their continued work in sustaining what can be extremely difficult conversations regarding safe space.

 

Bibliography

Bowstead, J. (2017) AC2017 – Geographies of Safe Space (1): Spaces of embodiment, identity and education. [online] Conference.rgs.org. Available at: http://conference.rgs.org/AC2017/315.

Djohari, N., Pyndiah, G. and Arnone, A. (2018) Rethinking ‘safe spaces’ in children’s geographies. Children’s Geographies, 16(4), pp.351-355.

Furedi, F. (2002) Epidemic of Fear | Frank Furedi. [online] Frankfuredi.com. Available at: http://www.frankfuredi.com/article/epidemic_of_fear.

Guha, M (2018) ‘Safe spaces’ and ‘bad’ girls: Child-marriage victims experiences from a shelter home in Eastern India. Gender, Place and Culture (forthcoming)

Jung, H. (2012) Let Their Voices Be Seen: Exploring Mental Mapping as a Feminist Visual Methodology for the Study of Migrant Women. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(3), pp.985-1002.

Koskela, H. (2009) The Spiral of Fear: Politics of Fear, Security Business, and the Struggle over Urban Space. Helsinki: Gaudeamus.

Lewis, R., Sharp, E., Remnant, J. and Redpath, R. (2015) ‘Safe Spaces’: Experiences of Feminist Women-Only Space. Sociological Research Online, 20(4), pp.1-14.

Murray, L., Warr, D., Chen, J., Block, K., Murdolo, A., Quiazon, R., Davis, E., Vaughan, C. (2018) Between ‘here’ and ‘there’: family violence against immigrant and refugee women in urban and rural Southern Australia. Gender, Place and Culture (forthcoming)

Ons.gov.uk. (2017) Domestic abuse in England and Wales – Office for National Statistics. [online] Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/domesticabuseinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2017.

Written by Megan Harvey, edited by Alice Reynolds and Jack Lowe.

Literary Geographies

Our third Landscape Surgery of the autumn term discussed the topic of Literary Geographies, with presentations from three of the department’s visiting scholars: Nattie Golubov (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), Lucrezia Lopez (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) and Giada Peterle (University of Padua). Each presenter discussed the ways in which their research has engaged with different forms of literature, and what their individual methodologies can contribute to geographical study. This was followed by a panel discussion that grappled more broadly with what encounters between literature and geographical inquiry can achieve.

Our presenters in discussion during the session

Our first speaker on the day, Nattie Golubov, has been a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature at UNAM since 1995, having taught widely on English literature, literary and cultural theory. Her research engages in the critical study of a variety of types of American texts, to understand how relationships between diverse groups of people in the US are expressed culturally.

Nattie began by highlighting how academic literature on migration has tended to view the process from perspectives of postcolonialism, diaspora and exile, while focusing disproportionately on the point of departure and the point of arrival. Using Teju Cole’s (2017) book Blind Spot as a point of reference, she explained how literary approaches to the topic of migration can be fruitful for scholarship on this subject, with stories in the form of novels and other texts being able to evoke the translocal (relationships between specific locations within countries, not just between countries); complicate the binaries of nomadic/sedentary and centre/periphery which have characterised existing migration scholarship; and foster critical reflection on the geographies of where texts on migration are written, published, read and translated.

In her current research, Nattie has been examining contemporary US romance literature that tells stories about American soldiers in Afghanistan. What she finds interesting about these texts, she explained, is how the subject matter of the stories is at once heavily geopolitical, yet grounded in the ‘normal’ and everyday. While the locations portrayed by the novels can lead to an awareness of the planetary, this is typically foregrounded by familiar tropes of small-town America and the space of the house/home.

With romance being a very popular genre that is widely read in the US – especially by women – this can render the representations used in the novels problematic, notably through the sometimes shocking language that describes places in the Global South. Nattie gave the example of one location being referred to as the ‘armpit of the world’; while simultaneously the novels perpetuate a fantasy of whiteness and enclosure in these territories.

Nattie’s work is seeking to ask what it is about the ‘normal’ that is so attractive and tenacious in literature. And in turn, what kinds of (geographical) relationships do these novels forge with the reader? Can they produce a new type of sociality around the topic of migration?

Our second presenter was Lucrezia Lopez, whose research explores practices of tourism, heritage and religious expression by investigating how they are represented and interpreted culturally. Her current research, titled in this presentation as ‘The Contemporary Spaces of the Way of St. James’, studies the travel diaries of those sharing their experiences of pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago.

Lucrezia started by outlining how literature, cinema and the internet are contributing to a new spatial discourse of the Camino de Santiago; reinforcing the notion that there are multiple ‘Caminos’ articulated by the different artists and writers who represent it.

Travel diaries in particular are a relatively new method people are using to share their experiences of travelling on the Camino, reflecting a broader turn in the literature towards exploring the internal journeys of pilgrims taking part. Lucrezia identified two trends within the travel diaries’ representations of walking the Camino: neo-romanticism, reflecting the aesthetic value of travel diaries in conveying emotions/feelings and representing an idyllic rural landscape; and neo-realism, reflecting the testimonial value of travel diaries in drawing attention to traffic, waste and issues of sustainability on the Camino.

As for the act of writing itself, Lucrezia has found that a concept of liminality or ‘in-between’ space is expressed through practices of documenting the pilgrimage using travel diaries. The process of writing about the landscape in this way is believed to cultivate a different sense of self; a cathartic, therapeutic and/or spiritual practice that is part of the pilgrimage. However, some of these writers have been exploring this intimacy using alternative forms of representation than just text. Lucrezia referred to the comic book On the Camino by Norwegian artist Jason (2017), and how his use of images portrays the practice of pilgrimage on the Camino using popular visual tropes of the solitary thinking walker, bridges, and rural landscapes.

Ultimately, Lucrezia located three spaces through which the travel diaries operate: the space of the reader, the subjective space of the pilgrim/author, and the physical space of the Camino itself. How the Camino is imagined is a product of the work that varying forms of representation (e.g. comic book versus text) do in these spaces, alongside the personal discourses that are performed through individual practices of writing, reading and walking.

With wider relevance for thinking about methodology within literary geographies, Lucrezia finished by speaking about some of the challenges she has faced while studying travel diaries for her research. Which sources do you choose to consult, which do you leave, and why? Which academic research should be consulted, amongst the wide range of scholarship on the Camino? And could examining this kind of literature for research be a ‘leading’ methodology, privileging the researcher’s own interpretations of the texts?

Our final speaker was Giada Peterle, a post-doctoral research fellow and lecturer whose work is creative and interdisciplinary, bringing a range of narrative forms to her academic study within geography to think about the ways we understand, shape and represent the places we inhabit. Her current project is titled ‘Urban Literary Geographies: Mapping the city through narrative interpretation and creative practice’.

Giada’s presentation started by situating her work within a wider trajectory of creative geographies. She charted how the dialogical exchange between geographical and literary theory, as well as an existing and ongoing reciprocal exchange between place and literature, has been an important influence within the recent creative (re)turn in geography (e.g. Hawkins 2013; Madge, 2014). As well as fostering interdisciplinarity, this scholarship has approached storytelling not just as a form of representation, but as a creative practice to engage with, in which the embodied experiences of academics themselves can inform research.

Giada illustrated how her work has entered the domain of creative practice through Street Geography, a collaborative project between several geographers at the University of Padua with Progetto Giovani (based in the Office of the Municipality of Padua), which aims to encourage dialogue between academic research, art practice, and Padua citizens in an effort to contribute to the conceptualisation and realisation of more meaningful and sustainable cities. Street Geography brought together three geographers and three artists to create three site-specific exhibitions in Padua that question the ways people live in cities, as well as the significance of change, movement and relationships in shared urban spaces.

This presentation concentrated on one of these site-specific exhibitions, A station of stories: moving narrations, which was undertaken in Padua railway station. Giada recounted how the project team wanted this site-specific work to reflect the varied mobilities and stories that the station embodies, as an environment of co-presence and contradictions: between transit and encounter, consumption and dwelling, work and criminality, encounter and exclusion.

This conceptual approach led to an idea of the material space of the station itself being a narrator. Using this tactic in their writing, the team aimed to provoke empathy with the place; challenging anthropocentric understandings of the station by imagining the site telling stories of its own changing environment from a non-human perspective. In turn, the team hoped to enable readers to think about how, when and on what terms different stories of the city are told. This latter objective was especially relevant as most of the station’s spaces are normally used for advertising. How could these spaces be appropriated to encourage people to think critically about the station as a confluence of diverse stories?

The team’s answer was to use the comic book form. As a type of literature that is easy to read and accessible, but also quite mobile in how it is read, using comics took into account the different entry points and directions of movement from which the story could be approached and interpreted in the station. This depth of engagement was facilitated by the comic’s physical presence as a public art exhibition; though the physicality of the comic panels also brought practical challenges. Giada recalled finding all the exhibition panels face down on the ground only the morning after mounting them for display, and consequently having to change the way they were stuck up. The team were also concerned that members of the public writing on the panels might obscure the material shown.

In the end, the physical positioning of the panels in the station successfully engaged diverse audiences of academics, travellers and residents through a series of intentional and accidental encounters with the artwork. Creative geographical approaches such as those adopted in Street Geography, Giada contended, demonstrate how encounters between geography and art can engage wider communities with the discipline, by seeing it as a creative approach towards understanding spaces that incorporates their materialities and affects, as well as the personal experiences of researchers.

The three presentations were followed by a panel discussion, which picked up on points of crossover between Nattie, Lucrezia and Giada’s work.

In a conversation on what the spatial perspective of geography can offer literature, our presenters considered the complex relationship between ‘real’ physical spaces and how they are represented in fiction. They reflected on how geographical approaches and (creative) methodologies that investigate the spaces of readers, writers and publishers, such as Innes Keighren’s work on geographies of the book (e.g. Keighren, 2013), can attend to the ways in which literary representations of space are implicated within the wider social, political and material processes through which different literatures are produced and consumed.

It was also suggested that the themes of mobility and non-linearity within geographical thought can help with understanding how the form of a text interacts with the way its geographies are experienced by the work’s creators and readers. Our presenters concurred that such experiences of literature have become increasingly non-linear, through both the unique and interactive forms of consumption that digital technology enables, as well as postmodernist trends in literature that have sought to think beyond linear constructions of narrative.

Thank you to all three of our presenters for sharing some fascinating insights from their research, and for all they have contributed as visiting scholars to our research community in the Social, Cultural and Historical Geography Research Group during their time at Royal Holloway.

Lucrezia Lopez, Nattie Golubov and Giada Peterle

Bibliography

Cole, T. (2017) Blind Spot. London: Faber & Faber.

Hawkins, H. (2013) “Geography and art: An expanding field: Site, the body, and practice” Progress in Human Geography 37(1): 52-71.

Jason (2017) On the Camino. Seattle: Fantagraphics.

Keighren, I.M. (2013) Geographies of the book: review and prospect. Geography Compass 7(11): 745-758.

Madge, C. (2014) “On the creative (re)turn to geography: poetry, politics and passion” Area 46(2): 178-185.

Written by Jack Lowe, edited by Megan Harvey and Alice Reynolds

PhD Studentships in Cultural and Historical Geography

The Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London is delighted to invite suitably qualified candidates with research interests in cultural geography, historical geography, or the GeoHumanities to apply for doctoral funding under the auspices of the AHRC’s technē Doctoral Training Partnership and the ESRC’s South East Network for Social Sciences (SeNSS).*

The Department of Geography has a long-standing reputation in cultural and historical geography and its staff currently take a leading role in a number of the sub-disciplines’ key bodies (e.g., the Historical Geography Research Group and the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group of the RGS-IBG), journals (e.g., cultural geographies, Journal of Historical Geography, and GeoHumanities), and seminar series (e.g., the London Group of Historical Geographers). The Department is also home to the interdisciplinary Centre for the GeoHumanities. The Department has formal partnerships with the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland) and the University of Padua (Italy), providing the opportunity for PhD students, where appropriate, to undertake exchange visits as part of their studies.

We would welcome enquiries from students interested in working in the following areas:

• histories of geography; historical geographies of science;
• history of cartography; the geography of the book;
• histories of travel, tourism, and pilgrimage; cultures of exploration;
• heritage, landscape, and memory; collecting and collections; museum geographies;
• historical geographies of religion and sacred spaces;
• cultural and historical geographies of the Mediterranean, especially Greece and Cyprus;
• creative geographies; geographies of art and activism; creative experiments;
• geographies of air and atmosphere; elemental geographies; sonic geographies;
• citizen science; geographies of listening; feminist geographies of radio.

Interested candidates are invited to contact the Director of Graduate Studies (Admissions and Recruitment), Dr Innes M. Keighren (Innes.Keighren@rhul.ac.uk) to discuss supervisory possibilities.

Further details about the Department of Geography’s vibrant Social, Cultural and Historical Geography Research Group are available on its homepage: https://intranet.royalholloway.ac.uk/geography/research/researchgroups/schg/home.aspx The Group’s blog, Landscape Surgery, details the activities of our postgraduate researchers: https://landscapesurgery.wordpress.com/

* Applications to SeNSS and technē are governed by specific eligibility criteria (see, respectively, http://senss-dtp.ac.uk/application-faqs/ and http://www.techne.ac.uk/how-to-apply-for-a-techne-ahrc-studentship) and are dependent upon candidates applying successfully for admission to study at Royal Holloway, University of London.

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

Aërography

Aerography Panel: (left to right) Pete Adey, Gwilym Eades, Sasha Engelmann and Anna Jackman

After a long Easter break, this week was a welcome return to Landscape Surgery’s seminar series. We were welcomed back by a wonderful panel of guest speakers, as Pete Adey (Professor of Geography, RHUL), Anna Jackman (Lecturer in Human Geography, RHUL), Gwilym Eades (Lecturer in Human Geography, RHUL) and Sasha Engelmann (Lecturer in GeoHumanities, RHUL) each presented their work around the theme of aerography.

The session starts with an introduction by Sasha as she briefly explores the definition of aerography. Taken literally, aerogeography means a description of the air. However, when considering the term more deeply,it comes to embrace the whole domain of atmospherics from the flow and counter-flow of the air, the pressures, temperatures, humidities, dust content, electrical charge, as well as their function in relation to living systems. Citing the work of Alexander McAdie (1917) Sasha presents how aerography looks to engage with the multiple textures, nuances, and material resonances of the atmosphere and how by attending to them, we can develop new understandings around the wider energetic politics of the atmosphere. This is particularly poignant because, as Sasha goes onto discuss, geography has for too long been focused on the surface of the earth. She argues increasingly there is a need to attend to the new power geographies of the air. Especially when considering that the atmosphere is more and more beyond our control, as it becomes increasingly populated by drones, aircraft, pollutants, legal regulations, and waves of communication.