Geography Department PhD students, Adeniyi Asiyanbi , Julian Shaw , Hannah Schling and Ashley Crowson recently travelled to San Fransciso to participate at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers using Geography PhD Small Grants.
Here’s what they said:
I was awarded a Geography PhD Small Grant to attend the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AM AAG) in San Francisco, USA, from the 28th of March to the 2nd of April, 2016. At the conference, I presented a paper from my PhD research titled: “Payment for Ecosystem Services or ‘floating symbols’: scalar politics, discursive flourishing and symbolic implementation in emergent conservation projects”.
I had looked forward to attending my first AM AAG and my experience at the conference in San Francisco was certainly valuable. I had the opportunity to present my work to a small international panel of scholars working on very similar topics. The session, made up of about 15 – 20 people, had scholars from Germany, UK, Brazil, France, USA, and Mexico. These scholars brought a wide range of perspectives which enriched discussion but also generated some useful questions for my research. I am in the process of reworking the paper I presented at the session, in the light of some of the comments I received. The diversity of this panel also allowed me to appreciate the range of REDD+ research and analysis being pursued across various areas and the different points of intersection with my research. I am still thinking through various insights garnered, and bringing my PhD thesis up to date as appropriate. It also allowed me to network with scholars working in areas closely related to my research.
Besides the session in which I had presented, I also attended a range of other sessions of topical and methodological relevance to my work. This allowed me to further interact with scholars and network, and reconnect with colleagues. I made new contacts and had very fruitful discussions with more senior colleagues and some thought leaders in the field. Sampling through the many of the other sessions gave me a good feel of the emergent research trends and agendas across human geography. I was also able to speak to book publishers about proposing a manuscript from my PhD thesis. My experience of volunteering as a conference assistant also gave me some insights into the level of work that goes into planning such a huge academic event. Overall, it was a very useful and productive academic and professional experience.
However, the cheer size of the conference was a little bewildering. The host city, San Francisco was also significantly dense and expensive. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the opportunity of exploring the bay area and other interesting sites in the city. I have since returned to King’s to continue building on the research insights, and the various relationships developed during the time. The conference was indeed productive, and I do appreciate the financial support from the Geography PhD small grant.
Adeniyi Asiyanbi is a PhD Student in the Geography Department at King’s and a member of the Contested Development research group.
“Given the expectations on PhD candidates to present their work at international conferences, it is a constant worry where to find the funds to make this possible. This year I was fortunate enough to be granted the Geography Small Grant to assist with my attendance at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in San Francisco; the biggest human geography conference held anywhere in the world, and attended by thousands of current academics in the discipline.
I used the Geography Small Grant to pay for my accommodation. Given the extortionate prices of hotel rooms in San Francisco, I teamed up with some fellow researchers in London and we found a house to rent in the suburbs of the city. With significantly fewer rooms than people; let’s say we left closer than we started! Staying not far from Sunset Boulevard was a really fantastic experience. I got to share memorable times with fellow academics, witness the unfamiliar everyday routines of local commuters, and fathom a unique and aged public transport system. The next time I see trams rattling up the steep slopes of the city in some blockbuster film, I’ll feel that I know a bit more subtext to the material exterior of this iconic city.
The opportunity to attend the AAG 2016 was a key milestone in my academic development. I organised and chaired my first academic paper session; bringing together intellectuals from across the UK, Germany, Ireland and the USA. I also presented my PhD findings in a paper presentation to an intellectually diverse audience, and spoke as a discussant in a session on ‘Ordinary Spaces’ organised by academics at Manchester Metropolitan University. Without the Geography Small Grant none of this would have been possible.”
Julian Shaw is a PhD Student in the Geography Department at King’s and a member of the Spatial Politics research group.
“With more than 9,000 geographers from 87 different countries in attendance, the AAG is one of the world’s biggest geography conferences. I presented a paper entitled, ‘Journalistic Constructions of our Globe, Global Space and Global Politics: Considering the Geographies of Media Production Culture and Practice’. I presented to approximately 20 people in a session focussed on “state-favourable media narratives” and how “these media narratives and discourses produce common knowledge and taken-for-granted truths, durable tropes, and measurable effects on behaviour, attitudes, and even material conditions.”
Without an event on the scale of the AAG, it is difficult to conceive of many other occasions when the group of geographically dispersed experts and scholars interested in the same niche and specialist topics as I am would be brought together in the same location. Presenting to such a well-informed and interested audience is an invaluable experience for refining and improving your work, especially with an eye to publication. The contacts I was able to foster during the AAG, I am sure, will prove enormously useful in the future; without the assistance of the Small Grants Fund, however, the cost of flights to California alone would have made the trip prohibitively expensive.
Aside from the business of conferencing, I took the opportunity to explore San Francisco and the bay area, making sure to incorporate some time before and after the conference for a little sightseeing. As a cash-strapped PhD student a trip to sunny California was not on my immediate itinerary; the grant I was awarded, however, gave me the opportunity to explore a vibrant and iconic city.
I am very grateful to the Small Grants Fund for the personal, professional and academic opportunities that this grant gave me.”
Ashley Crowson is a PhD Student in the Geography Department at King’s and a member of the Spatial Politics research group.
“I received funding from the Geography Department Small Grant Fund to attend the American Association of Geographers (AAG) conference in San Francisco in March/April 2016, thus allowing me to attend one of the largest international conferences for geographers. Hosting thousands of speakers, who present research spanning the discipline and often pushing at its boundaries, the AAG is the place to find cutting-edge research across physical and human geography and it’s many sub-disciplinary groups.
I presented a paper within a two-part panel titled ‘Organizing for life’s work: the present and future of social reproduction’, which was itself part of a larger stream of sessions on social reproduction. This was fantastic, as I got to meet and exchange ideas with a large group of critical geographers working with similar theory and analytical lenses as me, towards furthering the critical scope of social reproduction theory. Papers included critical attempts to queer social reproduction, examinations of how workplace organising can be understood as reproductive labour, and my own research on migrant workers’ dormitories within the electronics manufacturing sector in Eastern Europe. The session had good discussion and pushed the presenters to draw comparisons between our different cases. Questions about my positionality and methodology gave me a lot to think about and work into my research.
With Tom Cowan, also a PhD student at KCL Geography, I also co-organised a session at the AAG titled ‘Transforming regimes of (re)production: gender, labour migration and the city in the Global South’. I was pleased that we were able to put together an all-woman panel including both eminent scholars and PhD students, presenting research from across the Global South, but speaking to area-crossing themes of the dialectical relation between production and reproduction in the context of labour migration and processes of urbanisation and industrialisation. Papers addressed the ways that labour migrants’ means of reproduction, and the gendered relations implicated in them, have been reconfigured with and within these processes – and how this articulates with changing spatialities of the ‘rural’ and the ‘urban’. Rachel Silvey, a feminist geographer who has been a leading light in research on migration, presented on the ‘undocumented time’ of Indonesian migrants in Malaysia. Janvi Gandhi presented on the gendered and caste-based dynamics bound up in out-migration from rural households in Rajasthan, India. Implications for the forms of politics engaged in by migrant workers at sites of both production and reproduction, as well as how they are gendered, were explored in particular in a paper on migrant sex workers in Vietnam by Daniéle Bélanger. Finally, Kath Griffiths presented on the gendered and racialised geographies of migrant work between ‘rural’ Bantustans and ‘urban’ Durban in South Africa. The session was well attended, by about 40 people, and the papers provoked an in-depth and exciting discussion. Tom and I are now pursuing possibilities to put these papers together for a journal special edition.
San Francisco felt like an ironically appropriate setting for the AAG, hosted in the Hilton Hotel, which sits on the edges of the Tenderloin District. This district has a very high concentration of street homeless and drug users, a space in which the stark inequalities of contemporary US society are vividly played out in public space. It felt highly relevant, if also at times highly uncomfortable, to inhabit the Hilton Hotel with so many critical geographers many of whose research targets precisely the social relations so dramatically visible in our immediate surroundings.
Throughout my stay I was persistently confronted, in my interactions with local activists and in my experiences of everyday life in the city, by the broader story of contemporary San Francisco: processes of gentrification and racialised displacement merged with the expansion of the tech industry and the proximity of Silicon Valley. So, during a trip to Oakland’s monthly ‘First Friday’ street festival, I encountered a protest against the relocation of Uber’s HQ to central Oakland. Protesters saw this move as continuation of processes that have seen rents rise and Oakland’s African American population decline. Similarly, whilst visiting Dolores Park in the Mission District I had the opportunity to meet and speak with activists campaigning against police violence, and the all-too-often unaccountable police shootings of people of colour. Two days later the police shot a Latino homeless man named Luis Gongora just streets away from where we had been sitting. The activists’ work mapping racialised displacement and police violence with the spatial development of the tech industry led to very fruitful conversations for my own research investigating transnational processes bound up with the spatial movements of the electronics manufacturing sector. How does my work on Foxconn’s globalised manufacturing and the system of migrant labour it produces and utilises, intersect with work around the tech industry in San Francisco?
The thriving political cultures in Berkley and Oakland meant I could attend a speaker tour meeting of Chinese activists presenting on the rising level of strike action by Chinese migrant workers in the Pearl River Delta’s manufacturing sector, highly relevant for my own research. After so much intellectual, political and spatial engagement during the conference, I spent a few days with fellow PhD students relaxing in California’s stunning Big Sur, enjoying the incredible cliffs, beaches, waterfalls and redwood forests. So, all round, the trip to the AAG in San Francisco was invigorating and inspiring for my research, and allowed me to experience and think about a whole host of things I would otherwise never encounter first hand.”
Hannah Schling is a PhD Student in the Geography Department at King’s and a member of the Spatial Politics research group.
To find out more about the Geography PhD Small Grant please go to https://internal.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/stu/geog/pgr/index.aspx