Social and Cultural Geography Research Group

Thanks to everyone who submitted sessions for sponsorship to the SCGRG for the 2010 RGS conference. We were delighted with the quality and range of sessions proposed. The sessions with the SCGRG name on them next year are likely to be the following:

Sponsored sessions:

• Geography and the Future, Ben Anderson (Geography, University of Durham)

Co-sponsored sessions:

• Absence: Materiality, embodiment, resistance, Lars Frers (University of Oslo) Lars Meier (Institute for Employment Research, Nürnberg) and Erika Sigvardsdotter (Uppsala University)
• Citizens-in-becoming? New spaces of parenting, early childhood and welfare, Eleanor Jupp (Department of Planning, Oxford Brookes University)
• Getting away from it all – Embodied practices and engagements with the ‘natural’, Paul Barratt (Geography, Hull University) and Leila Dawney (Geography, Exeter University)
• Lifestyle Mobilities and Corporealities: Intersections and Issues, Scott Cohen (Department of Tourism, Otago University) and Tara Duncan (Department of Tourism, Otago University)
• Modern British Poetry and Geography, Amy Cutler (Geography, Royal Holloway University of London)
• ‘Places without a place’: The geographies of ships, William Hasty (Department of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow) and Kimberley Peters (Geography, Royal Holloway University of London)
• Social and Cultural Geographies of Rural and Urban Coasts , Kim Ward (Geography, University of Exeter) and Owain Jones (Countryside and Community Research Institute)
• Travelling faith: exploring the intersections of religion and migration, Claire Dwyer, (Geography, University College London) and Betsy Olson (School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh)
• Youth geographies of in/civility, Donna Brown (Scottish Institution for Policing Research) and Matej Blazek (Geography, Dundee University)

We hope members will support these through submitting papers and attending sessions. You can find more details about the calls for papers on the RGS website or by contacting the session organisers.

The Social and Cultural Geography Research Group (SCGRG) is pleased to present a call for sponsored sessions for the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference in London, 1st-3rd September 2010. The chair of the conference is Neil Wrigley (University of Southampton) and the theme is ‘Confronting the Challenges of the Post-Crisis Global Economy and Environment’ (see http://www.rgs.org/ac2010 for more details).

The SCGRG seeks to support research interested in the way the world works to produce social and cultural difference, engaging with key social science debates concerning identity, subjectivity, citizenship and belonging. The group is committed to encouraging inclusive and accessible knowledges, destabilising hierarchical and centred knowledges in favour of those which foreground diversity and difference. As such, the group is keen to promote areas of geography that have often been Othered within the discipline, such as geographies of the lifecourse, sexuality, disability, ethnicity and religion, as well as geographies of the non-human and the animal. The group also has an active postgraduate membership and is keen to support sessions aimed at new career and emerging researchers.

Research group sponsorship can help promote your session, manage timetable clashes and enable you to bid for money for Research Group guests. We have a limited number of sessions we are able to sponsor and are likely to prioritize sessions which most closely reflect the aims and interests of the full SCGRG membership. This year we are particularly keen to encourage high profile sessions that take forward key themes in social and cultural geography.

To put forward your session for SCGRG sponsorship, please send your session abstract (max 400 words), contact details and session format to me at r.hitchings@ucl.ac.uk by the 30th November.

Russell Hitchings

Hello, my name is Alex Tan and I am the new postgraduate representative for the Social and Cultural Geography Research group for the RGS/IBG.

My current research concerns the experiences of young British Chinese people, with a view to understanding various beings and becomings. My research is critical of current youth transitions approaches which may be grounded in linear or phasal models; in themselves these models are either too rigid or do not account for variation, informed in particular by culture. British Chinese young people are one example of a group not well served by current transitions research or within Human Geography itself.

As part of my position I would be very interested to hear from postgraduates about either the role of the research group itself, how postgrads make use of it and would like to in future.

I also would like to hear about your ideas for the future of social and cultural geography itself. Perhaps there are some key authors or ideas you have found whilst doing your research. Perhaps you feel some are outdated and can suggest more relevant ones as you see it.

In the future we are planning a postgraduate conference and gathering some of your views as above might be helpful in planning this and getting some initial ideas on contributions.

Please get in touch with me at a.m.lee-tan@newcastle.ac.uk and mark the email heading with ’social and cultural geography postgraduates’.

Many thanks.

Alex

Welcome to the new Social and Cultural Geography Research Group website.  In this post, I’d like to introduce the new committee and a few new resources on this site.   First, my thanks to Phil Hubbard for all his work in chairing the group from 2006-2009, and to Kezia Barker, Amanda Claremont, Elaine Ho, Peter Hopkins and Jamie Lorimer for their contributions to the smooth running of the committee.

I am delighted to be taking on the mantle of chair, with support from Russell Hitchings (moving from the committee to secretary), Louise Holt (who has a further year as Treasurer), and a large and vibrant committee.  You can read more about the new members of the committee here.

We have designed a new website, which we hope will make it easier for us to communicate with you, and for you to find out relevant information about the group’s activities.   We have added links to journals, RGS/IBG sessions and other activities supported by the group.  These resources will be developed further over the next couple of months.  The SCGRG is a large and diverse group. If we have missed anything off, please let us know.   We hope you find these useful and we look forward to hearing from you.

Gail Davies