The Royal Geographical Society’s yearly conference highlights the discipline’s expanding horizons
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A few years back, midway through the first term of teaching, a new undergraduate approached me after a lecture. As I collected my notes and rucksack, he asked ‘When will we start learning proper geography?’ The question took me back. What does he mean? What is proper geography? I had started the module lecturing on how agriculture spread around the world in the neolithic period, later given classes on the ways in which colonialism had made an uneven world, and recently been teaching about the geographies of financial crisis in the 2000s. For this fresher, use to a more traditional and conservative school syllabus focused on topics like gentrification and the climate change, these subjects were alien. He struggled to see the relevance of these historical processes to today’s global challenges. Yet for me these themes, while looking back at the past, were important dynamic moments, that shaped contemporary global inequality and are at the cutting edge of conversation in academic geography. I thought about this encounter as I was walking in the late summer sun through Hyde Park to the Royal Geographical Society’s 2024 Conference. What new ideas would I hear about and how would these shape and change what I thought of as proper geography?
The three-day RGS-IBG Annual International Conference attracts 2,000 geographers from around the world. It alternates between the society’s base in West London and cities around the UK. This year the conference had the overarching theme of mapping – surely a proper geographical verb – but this served as a point of departure for an impressively wide range of sessions: Mapping Fuel Poverty Around the World, Mapping the Future of Political Geography in the UK, Thick Mapping for Socio-Ecological Transitioning, and More-than-Human Cartographies: animals as map-makers and the mapping of animal worlds. And many other mapping acts filled the conference program, as well as sessions with titles that were further from the traditional heartlands of geography such as Digital Black Dance Ecologies and (Un)writing the Earth: genre, story and inscription in the Anthropocene. That said, despite breadth in topic areas on societal questions, the conference does not cover the full depth of the discipline as there are fewer sessions devoted to physical geography. Researchers from that side of geography tend to meet in more multi-disciplinary environmental science forums.
The first session I attended was for the launch of a new academic journal: Finance and Space. The lecture introduced how the publication would interrogate new fiscal relationships between businesses, cities and regions. For example, London is in relative decline as a financial hub, whereas former UK colonies and protectorates like Hong Kong and Dubai, that retain an understanding of British economic systems and English Common Law, are becoming increasing important. In a geopolitically complex world, flows of funds from places like Russia and Iran pass easily through these increasingly important spaces of finance. During this session the presenters used cartographic techniques to animate the ways in which different economic systems interact, this included the brilliant The Waterworks of Money presented by Dutch researchers Carlijn Kingma and Thomas Bollen. Visualization brings difficult to follow processes to life. New maps can chart the stormy waters of finance and well-trained geographers have a leading role to play in helping everyone understand the world economy.
Later that day I was in a very different type of session ‘Spatial Contestations: Dispossession, Dissent, and Development in Africa and the Levant’. A very academic sounding title, but a session that was less heavy in theory and more about telling stories of under-represented people. This included a pair of papers on Lebanon. One by a historian, Zeead Yaghi, from Beirut, who was drawn towards geography to progress his understanding of the interactions between cities and countryside. Yaghi showed how plans to irrigate land across Lebanon for agricultural development accompanied political change alongside new vision for farming. Ecological, political and sectarian obstacles to this plan were a microcosm of the challenges the state faced. Government aimed to reanimate rural life but had the exact opposite effect and propelled people towards the cities, and centralized power. The other paper by Diala Lteif focused on protest around a slaughterhouse in Beirut. It was an icon of modernity, that mechanized butchery, but with it came job losses, and created a moment of territorial contestation as there was a struggle to change a traditional place into a modern one. Other papers in the session came from Cameroon and Palestine. All of them opened questions about the ways in which geographers can understand movements for resistance and change.
Keynote lectures are often a highlight of the conference program, and this year included one sponsored by the radical geography journal Antipode, hosted in the Society’s historic Ondaatje Theatre (a handsome wood-paneled space familiar to anyone that has attended a Monday night lecture). This was delivered by Laleh Khalili a scholar who writes with passion and beauty. Here, her talk, titled ‘Where is Palestine? Singapore on the Med, Spaceships, and the mount of Olives’, considered the interrelationships between struggles for Palestinian spaces, and the way Palestine is built by artists as a site of memory, desire and dream. Against the backdrop of the unfolding tragedy in the Middle East her lecture moved some audience members to tears. One of my own interventions in the conference was in a panel on Geographical responsibility and scholasticide in Palestine. Scholasticide is this context is a term which describes the ways in which Israel’s violence in Gaza extends to universities and represents a systematic assault on Palestinian education and knowledge production.
My other highlights of the conference were two ‘author meets the critics’ sessions. The first was on the new book Decolonising Geography? Disciplinary Histories and the End of the British Empire in Africa, 1948-1998 by Ruth Craggs. Much of the history of the discipline is associated with colonialism and that is very present in the past culture of the Society. As a rejoinder to all that, this book talk showed the way in which geography departments in the world’s poorest continent evolved through the decolonial process. The critics introduced us to the books many strengths and provoked both the author and the audience to think about what still needs to be done to decolonise the discipline. There was an interesting exchange around the provocation ‘What topics are Black geographers allowed to write on?’ In the 1970s when Black PhD students came to the UK they had to change what they wanted to study when their white supervisors were unable to support their projects. Yet these experiences are familiar in the present and oftentimes topic areas are bent away from the new ideas of young BAME scholars and towards the established practices of ‘proper’ geography. Secondly, I was the other side of the lectern for the critics’ review of my own Bullsh*t Comparisons: A field guide to thinking critically in a world of difference. Despite a few butterflies before the session, I was pleased to have a really engaged and colorful discussion, and flattered by my fellow geographers considered and thoughtful comments, which were (mostly) complimentary.
Away from the heavier conference sessions the event is also a great opportunity to showcase the vibrancy of the Royal Geographical Society’s work and there were exhibits, film screenings and examples of recent publications. At break times the grounds of 1 Kensington Gore were overflowing with conference guests, and as is often the way, the really networking happened beyond the confines of the formal sessions. Here I enjoyed meeting with an early career researcher and helped them develop a new project idea, and in turn bumped in to my own undergraduate tutor of two decades ago, who wanted to learn about what I had been up to. Feeling part of a community of geographical scholars which is bigger than a single workplace, is a real strength of the discipline. Sadly though in multiple sessions we had to hear from international geographers speaking online because their visas to attend the conference had been denied, but it was a small grace that the technology enabled their partial participation in the gathering. The geographical community present at the conference extended far beyond academics and I enjoyed talking with teachers, consultants, publishers, government officials and journalists. When I speak about the RGS to lecturers from other disciplines they are often envious of this unique and valuable learned society which does not have a direct equivalent in many other fields.
Returning to the question of what is proper geography? This summer’s conference opened my eyes to many new and exciting ideas and a few strange ones. Some of the topics like Dance Ecologies, Scholasticide and More-than-Human Cartographies, might not sound like geography as you know it, but that is one of the purposes of academic geography – to push forward the frontiers of the discipline. In previous years terms like the Anthropocene and decolonization where debated and contested in conference sessions, but now are moving towards the mainstream of the discipline. Even established ideas like climate change and gentrification got their first airings in forums like the RGS-IBG conference many decades ago. I will certainly be taking ideas from the conference back to my lecture theatre, and sharing some in future columns, even though it might take longer for them to percolate to, and change, the familiar, proper school syllabi.
