Urban Geography Study Group Symposium

EOI Urban Geography Study Group Symposium -
30 June – 1 July (pre IAG 2024)
University of Adelaide, Kaurna Country

Dear Urban Geography Study Group members,

We are pleased to announce our call for expressions of interest in attending this year’s Urban Geography Study Group Symposium.

This symposium explores the experiences and politics of working within institutional settings that often feel incapable of addressing and intervening in the politics of the urban questions we attend to. Progressing the ideas in the 2023 symposium that grasped at the ‘so what’ question in urban research, this 2024 symposium similarly dwells in the context of multiple, long-standing, escalating, and foreshadowed urban crises. We ask how our work can withstand and learn from the experience of failure — in method, analysis and action — particularly in projects and agendas that seek to repair, protect or enhance urban infrastructures/assemblages/spaces that scaffold equitable futures.

We are especially interested in the process of moving forward after failure through sharing rarely acknowledged insights on ‘how is the sausage made’ and how our positions within the academy can be leveraged in the service of impacts that resist metric capture. In this two-day symposium we grapple with these questions, inviting critical and collective reflection, discussion, and strategizing. The symposium will combine brief informal presentations from participants and panels on different approaches to failure and impact in the field. A keynote will be delivered by Professor Kurt Iveson and a fieldtrip will be held on the first half-day to ground our conversations in place, in the context of existing urban struggles and crises.

The event will be in person at University of Adelaide, Kaurna Country, immediately prior to the IAG Conference. Expressions of Interest are due 26 April 2024, and we are able to offer bursaries to HDR students and low-waged participants to help assist with travel costs.

Please find more information and complete the EOI form at:
https://www.iag.org.au/eoi---urban-geography-study-group-symposium
(Form is available to Urban Geography Study Group members once logged into the IAG Website).

All the best,
David, Alistair and Naama (Study Group Convenors)

URBAN GEOGRAPHY STUDY GROUP
Current Office-bearers:
Alistair Sisson: alistair.sisson@mq.edu.au
Naama Blatman: n.blatman@unsw.edu.au
David Kelly: david.kelly2@rmit.edu.au

https://www.iag.org.au/urban-geography-study-group