Webinar Series

The Institute of Australian Geographers, Geographical Research journal and Wiley publishers are delighted to announce a new Webinar Series. We launched the Webinar Series in 2021, and we encourage your participation in these events.

Geographical Research, Wiley and the Institute of Australian Geographers invite registrations for our next Webinar:
Geographies for just outcomes for early career academics: writing for Geographical Research journal
Editor-in-chief, Elaine Stratford
Tuesday 12 March at 4.30 pm 
Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney,
Register: https://bit.ly/geor2024mar

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Human Geographer Professor Phil McManus chatted to us ahead of his Geographical Research webinar called ‘Infrastructures of Settler Colonialism’. He reflected upon the recent referendum, his work and geography career

Infrastructures of Settler Colonialism.
Professor Phil McManus  University of Sydney, and Dr Naama Blatman from Western Sydney University
Thursday 2 November at 4.00 pm – 5.00 pm Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney, 

GEOR Nov23 Webinar

To view all previous Webinars see: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/17455871/homepage/webinar

GEOR Sep Webinar

In the wake of the excitement around the Women’s World Cup, we talked to two Griffith University geographers ahead of their Wiley Geographical Research Webinar about women in sport. The researchers are interested in how sport can influence ‘spaces’ and narratives. We also discussed how mentors have impacted their geography careers and work. Read the interview with Dr Adele Pavlidis and Dr Diti Bhattacharya.

GEOR Aug Webinar_Option 2

We spoke to Scientia Associate Professor Paul Munro ahead of a Wiley Geographical Research Webinar on 22 August 2023. In his presentation, Energy geographies of justice, access, and poverty: The solar object in Africa, Paul shared his work in Ghana, Uganda, and Zambia including challenges for communities to access energy. Watch the replay.

To view all previous Webinars see: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/17455871/homepage/webinars

The Abstracts for past webinars are below:

This Webinar held on 2 November 2023 is now available as a video at:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/17455871/homepage/webinars

Infrastructures of Settler Colonialism

Professor Phil McManus  University of Sydney, and Dr Naama Blatman from Western Sydney University

Indigenous infrastructure is a rapidly expanding field of study. Yet in Australia, Aboriginal stories, perspectives, and voices remain largely absent from infrastructure research despite persistent infrastructural gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians that must be understood in the context of Australia’s settler-colonial structure. This webinar engages the authors of a forthcoming special section issue of Geographical Research who are forging new directions in the study of settler colonial infrastructures. In conversation with them, we will explore their work to centre Aboriginal lands and Country and to unsettle conventional colonial narratives of infrastructural triumph and expansion.

This Webinar held on 26 September 2023 is now available as a video at:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/17455871/homepage/webinars

In 2018, Adele Pavlidis published her Fay Gale Lecture in Geographical Research, arguing there is need to rethink how sport is inherently spatial and political. She outlined why we need to do research on the spatiality of inequality in sport and on how ideas about affects and emotions can aid our understandings of sport as experienced by girls and women. And she proposed an agenda for geographers to take up.

As this space continues to grow in uneven ways we have invited Adele and colleague Diti Bhattacharya to join in conversation about what now and what next.

Dr Adele Pavlidis is an interdisciplinary scholar based at Griffith University, Australia. Her work traverses sport, leisure and culture as gendered spaces of transformation. She is author of two books and over 60 high-quality publications.

Dr Diti Bhattacharya is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research at Griffith University. Her work in human and cultural geography centres on migration and South Asian diaspora, heritage, wellbeing, leisure, and sport sociology.

This Webinar held on 22 August 2023 is now available as a video at:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/17455871/homepage/webinars

Over the past decade, the sale of small-scale off-grid solar products such as solar lanterns, and solar home systems has boomed across Africa. The impetus driving this boom is complex, and has been underpinned by various political, economic and technical changes, including new off-grid solar designs, growing Sino-African trade and increasing investment in the Africa off-grid solar sector by shadow banking operators based in North America and Europe. This African solar boom by those directly involved in selling off-grid solar products and a range of development actors has often been framed within a distinct moral economy: an exemplar of “making money”—that is, selling off-grid products—while “doing good” by expanding renewable energy access. In this presentation I draw on recent research conducted in Ghana, Uganda, and Zambia to challenge this triumph narrative by teasing out the justice implications entangled within this market-based approach to energy access.

This Webinar held on 30 May 2023 is now available as a video at:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/17455871/homepage/webinars

Australian legal geographers’ are key players in the field’s development. In this webinar we highlight contributions from a special section in Geographical Research that shed light on how legal geography tackles contemporary challenges. From considering the impacts of PFAS contamination to drawing out how court processes reinforce the suppression of landscape connectivity, participants offer insights about how legal geography improves understandings of how law and geography collide to shape the way we live. 

This Webinar held on 20 March 2023 is now available as a video at:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/17455871/homepage/webinars

Many children are suffering increasing anxiety as they encounter the climate crisis, fearing the planet is doomed, and that they have been betrayed by adults. Climate change will impact the health, wealth, life choices and career trajectories of today’s children across their whole lives. In the absence of a democratic right to vote, asking questions is one avenue through which children can be involved in climate discourse and decision-making. In this webinar, the Curious Climate Schools team describe a two year climate literacy intervention involving 50 classes and more than 1000 children aged 10-18 from Tasmania, Australia. We explore what we can learn from their questions, and how our 80 experts have responded and connected with students. We reflect on the challenges for teachers introducing climate change into the classroom, and the urgent need for holistic and sensitive climate education in schools.

This Webinar held on 15 February 2023 is now available as a video at:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/17455871/homepage/webinars

A question for geographers and allies always seems to be will we flounder or flourish? Join Australian Geography Teachers Association Immediate Past President Susan Caldis and Vice President Simon Miller; the Institute of Australian Geographer's President Jen Carter; and others in this latest webinar in our series. Our guests work as geography educators in schools, initial teacher education, higher education, and publishing and advocate for the field, take action to support it, and strategize to deal with pinch points. In this webinar they will consider how and with what effects the future of geography education is in lockstep with the discipline's and profession's futures in postsecondary spaces. Discussion will deliberately be framed around the role of advocacy, curriculum, and pedagogy in light of recent media focus on the Australian Curriculum: Geography. We will include in our conversation a range of provocations and an evidence-based overview with panellists from publishing, research, and teaching backgrounds and invite questions and comments from our audience. We hope the session will provide an opportunity to celebrate geography education.

This Webinar held on 25 October 2022 is now available as a video at:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/17455871/homepage/webinars

Join Geographical Research journal, the Institute of Australian Geographers, and Wiley as we host an exciting conversation about polar studies with Elizabeth Leane and Klaus Dodds. Elle is Associate Dean, Research Performance and Professor of English at the University of Tasmania. Klaus is Professor of Geopolitics and Executive Dean of the School of Life Science and Environment at Royal Holloway University of London. Both are world-leading scholars on matters polar and their consequences, and we are delighted they are able to join us across hemispheres and disciplines.

Publishing 101: A step-by-step workshop

This free, openly accessible, webinar is focused on the needs of new writers, established writers wanting a refresher, and anyone interested in writing, editing, and publishing! Wiley Journal Publishing Manager, Rebecca Ciezarek, and Geographical Research editor, Elaine Stratford, will consider the process of publishing journal papers. Organised as a series of short presentations interspersed with Q&A and discussion, we will start with recent changes to the publishing landscape, then move to consider tools and tips for authors. We will share insights on writing your paper, selecting the right journal, navigating peer review, dealing with publication ethics, and promoting your research, preprints; publishing Open Access. checklists before submitting your paper, and production and copyright. And we will talk about how to work with journal editors and think about what they need to help you thrive in journal publishing environments, not least by knowing the central value of editing itself. The webinar is a joint initiative of Wiley, the Institute of Australian Geographers, and Geographical Research.

Workshop slides are available here.

Disruption, transformation, and innovation have an ambivalent presence in economic geography, contributing uneven spatial development as well as the necessary ingredients for economic growth and prosperity. On one hand, economic power and higher-value production concentrate in certain locations and warrant the study of regions from the core. On the other hand, there is a need to be mindful of consequential conceptual and empirical distortions of what we know of the periphery on its own terms. At its most basic, working at the periphery draws attention to activity not visible from the centre, a position enabling other valuations of the significance of what is observable at the periphery. Things might be constituted differently away from the centre and may need interpreting in new ways to understand their seemingly distant geographies. Observations and interpretations at a distance might also render knowledge generalisations from the centre incomplete or redundant. This panel brings together contributors to a special section in Geographical Research who consider peripherality as a way of being placed in order to show how this position promotes innovation and to reveal how dynamics in peripheral economies may aid our collective understanding of them and, perhaps unexpectedly, of the core.

The panel includes: Al Rainnie, Alexander Wentworth Vaughan, Thomas Sigler, Sally Weller, Tom Barratt, Sophie Webber, Anton Klarin.

In 2022, eastern Australia has been subject to extreme floods, including what are being dubbed rain bombs. Needed now is focused attention on the geographical effects of these events and on their implications for geographers. One would be hard pressed to argue against the proposition that, in fact, all aspects of geographical concern are at stake here. Consider the spatial, place-based, mobile, multiscalar, and intersectional implications of these events for health, geomorphology, biogeography, and economic, social, cultural, and political issues not least and not solely among them. In this webinar, a panel was invited to converse with our audience about flood events and the contributions that geographers have made and can continue to make in response to them. At the same time, responsiveness is necessary but insufficient, so we also explored what anticipatory work can be done in terms of theorization, methodological innovation, empirical labours, rapid analysis, and policy advice. The webinar will, we hope, be of wider interest to all those grappling with disaster, risk, and resilience and with all of the other geographical concerns that are part of that assemblage.

Panellists include: Brian Cook (University of Melbourne), Emily O’Gorman (Macquarie University), and Jason Alexandra (Alexandra Consulting).

University capitalism thrives by integrating Indigenous, minoritized and southern peoples and their knowledges into “western” paradigms. That practice disrespects rights to justice and profits from insecure academic labour. In this webinar we invited participants to question colonial legacies, destabilise institutional whiteness and share ideas about how we can participate in affirmative thought and practice in ways that lead to just university systems. The webinar follows the publication of a special section on decolonising the university from the Antipodes in Geographical Research. As contributors we sought to drive and strengthen, Indigenous, Southern, Black and Feminist scholarship and voices in research in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ecuador, and India.

Panellists include: Michele Lobo, Denisse Rodríguez, Vanessa Cavanagh, Haripriya Rangan, Sharon J. McLennan, Margaret Forster, Richard Howitt, Leanne Holt, Michelle Lea Locke, and Robert Anders.

For the first webinar of 2022, we welcomed Miri Raven [UNSW], Jason Prior [UTS], Kristian Ruming [Macquarie], Jason Byrne [UTAS], and Philipa Duthie [RSA Oceania]. Together they explored a report, published in October 2021, by Josie Warden from the Royal Society of Arts. The paper is entitled 'Regenerative Futures. From sustaining to thriving together'. In it, Warden considered the meaning of the term regenerative, shared varied perspectives on the term, outlined the ways in which it signifies living systems perspectives, invited readers to think deeply about questions related to the future, and described eight guiding principles for regenerative design. Geographers surely will have much to contribute to the ways in which these principles are made manifest, and this webinar heard views from several leading members of the discipline.

In July 2021, Lauren Rickards gave the Wiley Lecture at the joint Institute of Australian Geographers/New Zealand Geographical Society Conference. In this inaugural webinar hosted by the IAG, Geographical Research, and Wiley in November, Lauren returned to provide a brief reprise on the lecture in light of COP26 and to converse with panellists and the audience in a Q&A session.

Our guest: Lauren Rickards is a Professor in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University where she leads the Climate Change Transformations research program, a new Climate Change Living Lab and a cross-university Urban Futures platform.

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