Image: Panel 8 Photography
With just one week to go until the 2021 Annual International Conference, we have put together some programme highlights from across the week which you won’t want to miss.
The programme features a range of exciting sessions engaging with the conference theme of Borders, borderlands and bordering and kicks off with the Chair’s welcome event on Tuesday 31 August which features an opening address by poet and broadcaster Lemn Sissay, a series of responses to the conference theme from Patricia Noxolo, Ysanne Holt, and Nishat Awan, and a musical performance by the Welsh harpist Catrin Finch and Senegalese kora player Seckou Keita.
This year’s plenary lectures, organised by the Chair of Conference, Uma Kothari, feature Johny Pitts discussing slowness and the subaltern; Alison Mountz exploring the intimate geopolitics of asylum’s afterlives; Kathryn Yusoff discussing the ongoing process of colonialism and the geologies of race; and Kimberley Peters exploring the relationship between geography and the ocean. The details of the plenary lectures by Achille Mbembe and David Olusoga will be released shortly.
We also have a number of journal-sponsored lectures and panels including working with the spoken word (sponsored by Area), the challenges surrounding developing and taking new renewables to market (Antipode), and recent advances in transport geography (Transport Geography Research Group). Other sponsored sessions include activism and the public agenda for geographers (Space and Polity), contemporary African geographies (Singapore Journal for Tropical Geography), how deep neural networks are becoming the borders of our time (Political Geography), and feminist urban futures in community podcasts (Geoforum). Alongside this we have several ‘author meets reader’ sessions with Suzanne Beech, Ashok Kumar and Jamie Lorimer.
Other highlights from the programme include sessions on how podcasting can serve geography, rethinking the domestic during the pandemic and how automated text recognition (ATR) signals a new era of manuscript research.
See more of our programme highlights
Register for the conference today.
Find out more about this year’s conference.
Finally, we’re keen to hear from all our delegates taking part, so don’t forget to join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #RGSIBG21. Whether you’re a chair, speaker, or attendee, we encourage you to share your thoughts about the sessions, ideas which inspire you, and any interesting research – be that a blog, or a project website – we’ll be retweeting as many contributions as we can during the conference.