Today we welcomed delegates to the first day of this year’s Annual International Conference. The conference is one of the largest geographical conferences in Europe, with close to 3,000 delegates joining us both in the building in South Kensington and online over the next four days.
Many of today’s 270 sessions engaged with the Chair of Conference, Uma Kothari’s, theme of Borders, borderlands and bordering, cutting across many areas of the discipline. Conference delegates were also very active on social media, sharing details of their sessions and presentations, as well as praising those that they had seen.
Programme highlights from today included the Political Geography Research Group Book Prize Panel, which saw Aya Nassar (Durham University), Alan Ingram (University College London), Estella Carpi (University College London), and Mona Fawaz (American University of Beirut), come together with Sara Fregonese (University of Birmingham), to discuss her prize-winning book, War and the City: Urban Geopolitics in Lebanon.
Another highlight was the session Geography listening lounge: how does podcasting serve the discipline? where Celia Robbins and Nicola Thomas (both University of Exeter), were joined by Rosie Cox (Birkbeck, University of London, and editor of Geo: Geography and Environment), Harri Hegarty (Royal Geographical Society with IBG and host of the Ask a geographer podcast) and Michael Umney (Resonance FM) to talk about the interactions between scholarly work and the world of podcasting.
The day also included several workshops, and informal gatherings for early career, pre-career, and postgraduate geographers, including the RACE Working Group’s full day pre-conference event, and the Political Geography Research Group’s panel: Sharing experiences of being a PhD/ECR in the Academy.
The biggest highlight of today, however, was of course, the chair’s opening event, which was livestreamed directly from the Society. Uma opened the event by introducing the conference theme of Borders, borderlands and bordering, noting its salience and significance in the current moment. She also introduced the keynote speakers for the rest of the week and highlighted the sessions sponsored by journals and other partners.
Poet, Lemn Sissay, then took to the stage to offer some words and poems to open the conference. His poetry covered themes of climate change, his own background and identity, borders and migration, family and friendship, race and belonging, nature and humanity, time and space, and knowledge, information, technology, words, stories, language and life.
Following Lemn’s words, a small panel, made up of Patricia Noxolo (University of Birmingham), Ysanne Holt (Northumbria University), and Nishat Awan (University College London) responded to the conference theme. Pat spoke to her ongoing research, and particularly the Dreading the Map project, which took place at the Society, and how this disrupts the ways in which borders are constructed. Ysanne discussed two related works by the artist Sally Madge (Shelter, 2002-2014, and Scatter, 2019-present), which to her, epitomises what it means to deal with, and cross borders – between the human and non-human, and between nature and culture. And Nishat discussed the ways in which borders operate through ideas of race, and how this relates to migration patterns from Pakistan to Britain and back again.
The event was then concluded with a musical performance from Welsh harpist Catrin Finch and Senegalese kora player Seckou Keita.