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.

Year 1 Presentations: 29th May 2018

Following on from last weeks post, this weeks Landscape Surgery saw the next round of first year presentations, with each surgeon presenting their PhD research:

Emily Hopkins: 

Creating the ordinary city: Creative policy and the making of place and community in small cities

The ‘creative city’ continues to be used as a tool in urban development policy, with little sign of abating: 47 cities are now listed as part of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s Creative Cities Network (UNESCO, 2015).  However, studies have focused on the extraordinary narratives of iconic ‘global’ cities, like London, New York and Berlin. My research aims to extend existing ideas on creativity and its social, cultural and economic conceptualisations within urban communities and infrastructures. It counters current foci by attending to the ‘ordinary’ city, as an urbanity that intertwines with creative policy and cultural regeneration decisions, which is increasingly occurring in middle-sized UK cities. The case study is Coventry, a city in the West Midlands of the UK with over 300,000 residents – a place I know well, as my home city. In December 2017, Coventry won the title of UK City of Culture 2021. This will involve a year of cultural and artistic events to entice local civic pride, while attracting millions of pounds worth of regeneration investments, both private and public. This multi-dimensional thesis will use in-depth ethnographic methods and participatory action research to study the vernacular creativity, everyday communities and localised cultural ‘place-making’ processes to evolve discussions on creativity in cities, encouraging the appreciation of ordinary urban space in the midst of regeneration.

Year 1 Presentations: 22nd May 2018

On Tuesday, Landscape Surgery saw the first round of Year 1 surgeons presenting on their research:

Rachael Utting:

Collecting Leviathan: curiosity, exchange and the British Southern Whale Fishery (1775-1860)

My research project is titled Collecting Leviathan: curiosity, exchange and the British Southern Whale Fishery (1775-1860). The project looks specifically at the collecting activities of whalers and whaling surgeons within the BSWF and at the role played by these individuals in supplying the trade in curiosities in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. My presupposition is that during the regular layovers for fresh food, water and wood, the whalers also engaged in exchange relations to acquire indigenous artefacts which were retained for personal interest or sold as curiosities upon returning home. By analysing these moments of exchange and encounter through whaling logs, journals, auction house records and public and private correspondence, I propose to build an understanding of the networks of exchange spreading out from the London dockside and thereby enhancing our knowledge and understanding of early British collecting practices. To evidence this, I am reviewing journals (and to a lesser extent) logbooks relating to the BSWF to look for examples of cross cultural trade.

Visiting Academic Interview – Martin Thomas

Our Surgeries have been greatly enriched by our occasional academic visitors. Those that I have had the opportunity to meet have been fascinating people, and yet few of us get the chance to chat to them much. So it occurred to Katy and I that it would be a good idea to interview them for this blog while they’re here. We have developed ten questions and our first volunteer is Martin Thomas from Australian National University – many thanks Martin!

Surgeons and readers may remember that in May, Martin, with Béatrice Bijon, shared Etched in Bone, their documentary film, a work in progress, with us; you can read more about that here.

So, on to our first interview, which I’m sure you’ll find very engaging.

Speculation and Meaning in the 1980s Swedish Arts World: The Making, Display and Dispersal of the Financier Fredrik Roos’ Art Collection: Jenny Sjöholm

Landscape Surgery’s summer term programme started on 2nd May with a round of news about the varied and fascinating things that Surgeons have been up to over the past few weeks. These involved suitcases, corridors, conferences, placements, submissions, and a fellowship. The one I will give a specific mention to is Ben Murphy’s show at the Architectural Association’s School of Architecture until 27^th May, to give you all a chance to see it in the next couple of weeks or so. It sounded like Ben gained some rich experience about dealing with press interviews along the way.

For the main part of afternoon, Jenny Sjöholm, Marie-Sklodowska Curie Fellow with the Department, introduced us to an art collection created by Frederick Roos. This collection was remarkable in many ways as we shall see; but Jenny’s particularly fascinating work has been to trace the collection over its life. This is not an object biography but a collection biography if you will.

Notes on a Conference: RHUL Geographers at the RGS-IBG Postgraduate Midterm Conference 2017

As a first-time conference go-er, I was admittedly pretty nervous when I jumped on the train to Cardiff. Holding my prompt cards in one hand and my phone in the other, I found myself running through Paddington station at 9am with my (two!) backpacks, voice-recording my slightly-out-of-breath self reciting my presentation in preparation for the conference. This was not the picture of serenity I had hoped I would embody, but it did (and still does) make for quite an amusing listening experience.

In hindsight, I wish I’d have been able to relax a little more. Because the first thing to say about the RGS PG Midterm conference, is that it is very friendly; and very supportive. People had said this to me before,

Introducing New Staff

Janet Bowstead British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow

I am currently (2016-2019) a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. My project is “Women on the move: the journeyscapes of domestic violence.” My research continues to explore domestic violence