Funding available from the Higher Education Academy

Posted on 02/01/2012 by

The Higher Education Academy has a range of funding opportunities and events to support teaching and learning across geography. The following might be of interest to members of the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group.

Doctoral research programme

International scholarship scheme

Seminar and workshop series

Academic associates

UK travel grants

Teaching Development Grants

HEA conferences

HEA Geography and Earth Sciences events

Keep in touch

With thanks to the SCGRG team for posting this and Dr Helen Walkington of the HEA for her presentation to the RGS-IBG Research Sub-Committee meeting in January 2012.

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RGS-IBG Postgraduate Forum Mid-Term Conference 2012

Posted on 01/30/2012 by

Call For Papers: ‘Geographical Reflections’

University of Nottingham

This is a call for papers for the RGS-IBG Postgraduate Forum Mid-term Conference, to be hosted over the weekend of 20th – 22nd April 2012 at the School of Geography, Nottingham University. The aim of the conference is to provide a welcoming, relaxed and supportive environment for postgraduates to present any aspect of their research to their peers.

Papers with any theme on any topic within geography or a related discipline are invited, and postgraduates should feel comfortable presenting their work at any stage of its development. We would also welcome any papers or posters which deal with this year’s conference theme: ‘Geographical Reflections’. This could include:

  • How has postgraduate work furthered debates in geography?
  • How have postgraduates developed new and innovative methodologies?
  • How has postgraduate research challenged previous geographical work?
  • How can reflecting on past debates inform our understanding of present and future geographies?

This broad theme is designed to appeal to postgraduates at any stage of their degree working in or on geographical topics, from both the physical and human domains of geography, and to all related disciplines.

As well as the paper sessions we will also run several interactive workshops covering a range of topics such as publishing during your PhD, practical tips for teaching and demonstrating, common methodological approaches and issues and securing post-PhD grant funding.

We are delighted to announce that Nick Clifford (Professor of Physical Geography, King’s College London) will present the pre-conference plenary to the conference theme of ‘Geographical Reflections’ on the evening of Friday 20th April.

The RGS-IBG Mid Term Conference event has been kindly sponsored by the University of Nottingham Graduate School, the School of Geography and the RGS-IBG Postgraduate Forum.

The guidelines for abstract submission are as follows:

Papers: Papers should be no more than 10 minutes in length with 5 additional minutes allocated for discussion afterwards. Abstracts of no more than 200 words should be submitted to RGSmidterm2012@nottingham.ac.uk

Posters: Posters should be A0 in size. They will be mounted on display boards throughout the day and presenters will be allocated a 15 minute slot in which to answer questions. Abstracts of no more than 200 words should be submitted to RGSmidterm2012@nottingham.ac.uk

The deadline for paper and poster abstract submissions is 5pm 3rd February 2012.

ALL DELEGATES MUST REGISTER BEFORE SUBMITTING AN ABSTRACT: please see http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/geography/research/rgs-ibg-postgraduate-conference/rgs-ibg-postgraduate-mid-term-conference-2012.aspx for registration forms and further details.

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Overview of research quality in History & Philosophy of Geography

Posted on 01/30/2012 by

A message from Felix Driver:

As HPGRG members may know, the ESRC is currently undertaking a review of UK human geography in partnership with the AHRC and the RGS-IBG, the latest in a series of subject-based reviews. This is intended to ‘highlight the standing and contribution of UK human geography against international benchmarks’, and to ‘identify ways of enhancing performance and capacity, and promoting future research agendas’. This review is being undertaken by an international panel of eight academics, chaired by Professor David Ley from UBC, and is independent of the REF exercise.

ESRC are commissioning a number of sub-disciplinary overviews which will inform the work of the panel, including a review of research in history and philosophy of geography which I have been asked to undertake. Subject to a tight schedule, I am encouraged to liaise with senior academics and appropriate study groups in order to gauge views on a number of key issues, and to produce a brief report by 27 February.

This is potentially an important exercise, and it is obviously vital that UK history & philosophy of geography is fully represented in the review. I would therefore value any comments or observations from HPGRG members on the following questions posed by ESRC:

1. How has research in UK history & philosophy of geography developed over the last 10 years, and what are its major strengths and weaknesses?

2. What are the key academic outputs in history & philosophy of geography (including books and other outputs) which have ‘made important contributions to scholarship and/or have helped to set or move intellectual agendas?’

3. Are there good examples of key non-academic impacts of research in history & philosophy of geography (including involvement with policy and practice users), including ‘changes in policy, practice, debate and thinking arising from research’. Indicative evidence on the latter would be useful.

I would be very grateful if you could send comments under these headings to f.driver (at) rhul (dot) ac (dot) uk by Friday 3 February at the latest.

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Report on ‘Re-doing Biopolitics’ session, RGS-IBG 2011

Posted on 11/30/2011 by

A report by Olly Zinetti, Open University

The session, ‘Re-doing Biopolitics’, was rooted in conceptions of biopolitics derived in particular from Esposito’s text, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (2008). It was from the interconnected nature of livingness the text proposes, and the political consequences affirming such interconnectedness generates, where discussion began. Knowing, then, that biosecurity – making life safe – is not static, rather it is a set of ongoing practices (Hinchcliffe and Bingham, 2008), the session and its speakers sought to tease out the workings of those practices, with papers focussed on the empirical.

The papers presented were diverse and exciting. Charles Mather’s paper took us to sites in South Africa where efforts were made to reduce the spread of foot and mouth disease (FMD). Taking the UK’s 2007 FMD outbreak as his point of comparison, Mather went on to talk through the complex sociopolitical landscape this outbreak negotiated in its South African context. Specifically, Mather refers to a sociopolitical landscape in which the ways state and citizens interact determine the practices that state could employ when responding to FMD as a biosecurity concern, directing specifically whether to cull or vaccinate animals. Kezia Barker’s paper too addressed a space in which a political framework to securitise life was to be negotiated. Drawing on fieldwork in the Galapagos, Barker’s paper examined the ways by which the tensions created by movements of people and industry could be regulated such that they might coexist with the needs of a space, home to a unique and important ecosystem, for which stability, particularly in the context of protection from invasive and non-native pests and diseases, is central to its preservation.

For Olly Zanetti, variation rather than stability was found to be key to the biosecurity regime he discussed. Examining the way plant genetic resources are mobilised in practices of food security, Zanetti showed how, in a range of agricultural techniques, genetic change and difference were central to the creation of novel new food plant varieties, and as such were vital in the undertaking of food security practice. Though disorder was key to the biosecurity regime Zanetti outlined, that disorder was only useful because it could be known and understood. A similar theme underpinned Linda Masden’s paper, which focussed on avian influenza in Turkey. Masden examines how various knowledge practices are employed to link domestic and wild birds and thus plot cartographically ways the country might be bioinsecure.

Finally, Stephen Taylor’s paper was centred on his ethnographic fieldwork in an South African HIV/AIDS support group. Citing Esposito’s notions of community and immunity, he explored how that group and its incorporation into wider networks in the HIV/AIDS sphere works to transform individual bodies into a community of political actors and in so doing engendering an affirmative biopolitics.

This vibrant session drew together a broad body of work which examined the doing of biopolitics in numerous contexts. In a world where the falsity of a bifurcation of nature and culture is widely acknowledged, and where practices of securitisation are continuously climbing the political agenda, the session offered useful insights into current work in what will surely remain a pressing area of research.

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Report on Re-imagining Biopolitics and Biosecurity, RGS-IBG 2011

Posted on 11/29/2011 by

A report by Krithika Srinivasan, King’s College London

I presented a paper entitled ‘Controlling dogs, protecting turtles: Contemporary biopolitics in more-than-human India’ in the HPGRG session ‘Re-imagining biopolitics and biosecurity’ at the RGS-IBG AC 2011. This paper stems from my PhD project, and examines two cases of public debate around human-animal relationships in the world’s largest democracy, India. While one case deals with conflicts around the control of street dogs (animals that are considered ‘pests’), the other explores conflicts relating to the protection of ‘vulnerable’ Olive Ridley turtles.

The paper starts by pointing out that we now live in a world in which the sovereign human right to do ‘what you will’ to nonhuman life is no longer unquestioningly accepted. This shift is seen in discourse around environmental issues and animal welfare and rights, and in policy and daily practice as well. In such a context, how can we understand power in human-animal relationships? How can we understand the always difficult issue of how humans share physical, moral and political space with nonhuman animals? It is in pursuit of these questions that the two cases of public debate are examined, in particular, focusing on the ‘how’ of power, and looking at how humans affect animals. All through, the paper works with the Foucauldian concept of biopower, and adopts a Foucauldian understanding of discourse and practice as co-constitutive.

After a brief overview of Foucault’s original work on biopower, the paper discusses some key aspects of the data in order to identify the manners in which these animals and their relationships with human beings are (attempted to be) managed in the contemporary world. It interrogates discourses about human and nonhuman well-being articulated in these situations, and points out that that the different discursive positions are bounded by conflicting normative objectives in each case. The debates, then, are about how the manage the human-animal relationships so as to achieve these objectives.

After this, the paper deploys Foucault’s methodological and conceptual work on power to critically examine the different configurations of human-animal relationships that are explained, advocated, and practised in these contexts. In doing this, it question the strategies and techniques of (bio)power that infuse human-dog/turtle relationships in an era in which human indifference to nonhuman ill-being is no longer considered legitimate, even while human exceptionalism pervades mainstream ethico-political imaginations. The paper then demonstrates how this theoretical toolkit clarifies densely entangled discourses and practices of care and harm that characterise the ways in which human-animal relationships are fostered and regulated in the effort to secure and improve human lives. Finally, it discusses how this empirical examination develops Foucauldian analytics for the study of more-than-human assemblages, and how such analyses, in turn, help query what is considered normal-natural-right in the context of human interactions with our nonhuman co-inhabitants of this world.

The presentation took around 15 minutes, followed by 5 minutes of questions. The questions related to the role of culture and religion in public debates around animals in India, and to the shifting categories of ‘good’ dog and ‘bad’ dog attributed to dogs depending on the kinds of human spaces they occupy. The presentation helped me clarify some of my thoughts about the data, thus enabling the sharpening of the analyses I am undertaking for my PhD.

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Echoes of the New Geography? Progress in Human Geography review

Posted on 07/17/2011 by

The Chair of the HPGRG, Dr Richard Powell, recently published his first in a series of articles for Progress in Human Geography concerning the History and Philosophy of Geography. Please find the abstract below:

Taking as its cue the debates in 2009 at the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) about the relative role of the institution in geographical exploration, science and pedagogy, this essay reviews recent work in the history and philosophy of geography. It argues that there is a long tradition of debates between educators and explorers within the RGS, and shows how these have been revisited in current work on Halford Mackinder and Charles Darwin. It concludes that attention to the processes of remembering and forgetting should be particularly acute at this moment in the history of geographical practices.

This article is available online from Sage.

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HPGRG Postgraduate Dissertation Award

Posted on 05/18/2011 by

The prize will be awarded to an outstanding & original Dissertation concentrating on History and/or Philosophy of Physical and/or Human Geography or associated fields. We welcome nominations that examine geographical knowledge, discourses and practices in academia, but also within schools and the public sphere. Nominations are requested from Dissertation Supervisors or Heads of Departments. As long as the Dissertation & Application files are written in English, we welcome nominations not only from the UK but also from other countries. Depending on the number and quality of submissions, the prize may not be awarded every year. The Dissertation should have been defended between January 1st 2009 and December 31st 2010. Each submission file must include: letter of recommendationfrom the Dissertation Supervisor or Head of Department; short letter from the Master sudent stressing the originality and novelty of the findings; and a copy of the dissertation.

Please email submissions (as attachments in pdf, doc or rtf format) to Mathilde Leduc-Grimaldi (mathilde.leduc@gmail.com) prior to 26 June 2011.

For any additional information, please contact mathilde.leduc@gmail.com, Phone (+32) 473 174 827.

Deadline: 26 June 2011.

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