It was a joy to attend the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) conference this week, and to meet many new colleagues doing amazing work. This was the first time I attended the conference and it was also exciting to learn more about some of the breadth of research happening within Geography as someone who is new to the discipline.
I loved being part of the beautifully crafted and curated session 'Repoliticising Inequality: Organised Abandonment, Carceral Violence and Actively Working Towards Abolition' where I facilitated a singing workshop inspired by Mariame Kaba's writing on abolition as a group improvisation. Huge shout-out to Anish Chhibber, Abbie Hardcastle, Maéva Thibeault, Kathryn Cassidy, Marina Politis and Megan Davidson who showed us an alternative vision of what a care-full, creative, and inclusive academic space could be. I made an instagram reel about it here, because I was so moved by the ways the room was set up to be a soft, inclusive and friendly space for imagining together.
I was also happy to have the opportunity to present some of my ongoing research on collective music and sound making and some of its relationships to (well)being, as part of a session on Participatory Health Geographies chaired by Poppy Budworth and featuring brilliant papers by Ryan Petteway, Mingjia Chen, and Megan Dennis, who are all doing amazing participatory and creative health research.
I also came away from a session about care and migration studies with a lot of bigger questions around why we do research to begin with - who does it, who it’s for and who it benefits. Is it sometime more caring to not do research? I will write more on this soon I think.
Thank you to everyone who contributed in so many ways to such a rich and full few days!
