There are a couple of points which I would like to make in reply to Jo
Norcamp's posting.
1) To avoid disappointment, I think it is important to re-iterate that the
Open Forum meeting on April 15th is not part of the decision making
process on Shell's sponsorship of the RGS-IBG. It is important that
everyone who is able to attend goes along, in order to make sure that
Shell do not dominate the debate, but it is set up as a discursive
conference rather than a business meeting. No vote will be taken, and I
suspect attempts to move the debate on to the specific issue of RGS-IBG
sponsorship will be resisted by the chair.
The motion passed at Strathclyde was on the agenda for the meeting of the
RGS-IBG Council on 18th March, but it was decided to postpone discussion
of the issue until the Council's next meeting on 10th June; in order that
Council members might be informed by the Open Forum meeting on April 15th
and by comments on the guidelines for sponsorship proposed by Crispin
Tickell's working group. (Incidentally the draft proposals of the
sponsorship working group are available for consultation for RGS-IBG
members from the RHED office).
There are constitutional means by which the motion can be furthered and I
shall write in more detail about these after I return from the AAG -
please excuse my current haste.
2) Jo Norcamp also raises the issue of undergraduates and their relation
to the geography discipline as a whole. I think the old IBG mindset tends
to think about postgrads and forget undergrads, and perhaps this is one
area where the RGS has made us broaden our horizons. Certainly as a result
of the crisis over Associate Fellowship subscription rates, attention is
slowly being paid to the whole issue of what the RGS-IBG offers both
undergrads and postgrads and how membership amongst both can be increased.
I think it is very important that undergrads should be introduced to major
issues within the discipline such as the RGS/IBG/CGF/Shell saga - but at
the same time, I think it is unfair to ask students to choose between
rival camps. As we think about setting up a Critical Geography Forum,
therefore, I think that we must also be thinking about how the CGF and the
RGS-IBG could perhaps co-operate to provide some kind of 'infrastructure'
for geography students, which may or may not be an extension of the
present Postgraduate Forum.
Mike Woods
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