The Historical and Cultural Geographies Research Group is committed to conceptual and methodological innovation in social theory, cultural geography, geo- and environmental humanities, and history. The group is internationally recognised for its work in landscape studies, more-than-human geographies, decolonial and postcolonial geographies, non-representational theory, health and demographic geographies, aesthetics, and environmental history. The group also cultivates rigorous and experimental research techniques that animate its wide-ranging empirical concerns, from film-making and collaborations with creative practitioners, to migration and diasporic cultures, to the politics and affects of embodiment, from the riparian histories of English landscapes to contemporary planetary ethics, and from geohistories of fashion to the prospects of future liveable worlds.
Members
Franklin Ginn: cultures, politics and histories of nature, environmental humanities, and philosophical questions concerning the planetary and plant life.
Jennifer Crane: medical humanities, geographies and histories of activism, childhoods, reproduction, creative and participatory methods.
Joe Day: nineteenth century demographics, social change, labour and migration.
Joe Gerlach: cultural geography, non-representational theory, geophilosophy, ethics, Spinoza.
John Morgan: early modern environmental history, with a focus on histories of water and flooding.
John Wylie: cultural and historical geographer and spatial theorist with a longstanding interest in landscape as an experiential, visual and literary framework.
Kate Goldie: affective more-than-human geographies, and the care and welfare of animals used in research.
Mark Jackson: geographies of modernity; postcolonial, decolonial, anti-colonial geographies, and posthumanisms.
Merle Patchett: cultural-historical geographer researching specialist craft skills and theorising geohistories of fashion, with a long-standing engagement with curatorial practices and institutions.
Thomas Jellis: geographies and histories of exhaustion; the relations between geography and experiment; forms of minor theory in human geography; translation.
Vickie Zhang: affective geographies of working life amidst economic change; migrant and industrial workers; non-representational methodologies
Research Highlights:
Hidden Labours
The Research Group is collectively writing a book, ‘Hidden Labours: Pasts, Presences, Futures,’ showcasing the work of researchers across the School of Geographical Sciences. The book aims to transform our understandings of why, when and where labour is hidden, exploring under-recognized forms of labour and the politics, ethics and act of hiding itself.
Collaboration
The Research Group is committed to collaborative and participatory knowledge. Many of us work with creative practitioners, on topics as diverse as memories of the NHS, taxidermy, mapping, plant care, landscape, contemporary affects of work, and animal geographies.
The Non-Representational Theory Reading Group
Is a scholarly forum for dialogue in contemporary social and cultural theory. A longstanding fixture of the School of Geographical Sciences, the reading group comprises academics and postgraduate students working and researching across cultural geography, the environmental humanities, continental philosophy, and the geohumanities. Meeting fortnightly during term-time, the aim and ethos of the Non-Representational Theory Reading Group is to encourage and nurture conceptually generous and theoretically experimental research cultures.