About the funding for British postgrads to attend the proposed
Vancouver conference - according to one of my student colleagues in
Manchester, the ESRC does make special money available to the
students it funds to attend overseas conferences, in addition to
funding for British conferences. I understand as well that this
funding is more generous than the conference attendance funding I
received as a Canadian Commonwealth Scholar in the U.K.!
I think there is a more general issue that needs to be addressed
here: *how can critical geographers facilitate the participation of
foreign students, who tend to be among the least advantaged of
postgraduates, particularly in the U.K.* This is a particularly
important question re students from the Third World who are studying
in First World countries.
As a foreign student in the U.K. I became convinced that while
postgraduate students may be generally disadvantaged in the system,
this is particularly the case for foreign students. Academic
barriers include 1) the difficulty as a student of having a paper
accepted in a RGS-IBG annual conference session, because many session
organizers favour established researchers and the number of abstracts
exceeds the available space; 2) the U.K.-Europe-Third World focus of
the sessions of certain study groups, which excludes those of us who
do work in other regions; e.g. successfully conniving to have a paper
on the politics of expatriate Japanese corporate employees in Canada
incorporated into a session on the 'geopolitics of international
migration in Europe'; 3) the highly informal nature of British
academic structures, in which there are often not clear rules and
procedures (in contrast for example to Canada). Foreign students can
be significantly disadvantaged because of their difficulty in
accessing information.
These issues of foreign student participation are very important, but
they have received minimal attention from critical geographers.
How can an international network of critical geographers operate so
as to be inclusive of foreign students and not perpetuate the
patterns of 1)-3) above?
Felix makes a valid point about the cost for postgrads to
attend the conference in Vancouver. However, we also need to
think about facilitating the participation of other postgrads,
particularly those from third world countries (some of whom would be
studying abroad). One solution would be to arrange for special
fares/group rates arranged through a specific airline. The AAG
annual conference does this, as do smaller non-academic events.
Liisa Cormode
Postgraduate, University of Manchester
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