Dear Paul
Thanks for your response to my Cultural Turns email. Thanks also to those
people who also responded. I'll reply to each of your points:
>1] This conference is entiely in English
Granted, language is a vehicle for exclusion. However, I agree with both Chris
Hamnett's and Jane Jacobs points that language is also a communicative
convenience. I would hope that using English as the communicative technology
at a conference in the UK where English is the most commonly used (although I
accept not the only) language might be interpreted as a logistical necessity and
not a careful and malicious practice of exclusion. (I am afraid that our budget
does not stretch to interpreters.) Upon attending a geography conference in
Argentina earlier in the year I did not feel that the conveners or paper-givers
were setting out to preclude my presence simply because they spoke in
Argentine Spanish and did not use my first language.
>2] It is organised by the Institute of British Geographers
While the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group are part of the IBG the
conference has been organised with no help from the 'upper-echelons' of the
organisation. This includes finance - the conference is entirely self-funding. I
think you are also missing the heterogenous nature of the organisation. Would
you so easily label the Gender Geography Study Group part of an imperialist
conspiracy I wonder (and sorry for dragging the GGSG into this!). And before you
stereotype them too, their remit for staying in the IBG-RGS is to make sure that
this organisation has to remain accountable to them over gender and sexual
equality issues.
>3] All the speakers and convenors come from British universities, with
>the exception of one artist from London.
As Sheila Hones has noted, you have made incredible assumptions simply from
a list of names. And as she notes, we have attendees from China as well as
Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Russia etc etc. You also group attendees diverse
backgrounds into 'British' when they also have very different sexual, gender,
racial, class and cultural affiliations.
>4] All the suggested readings are in English.
See comment on my attendance of Argentine conference.
>It is also being held at Rhodes House. Clearly, Empire is not as dead as
>claimed.
While I acknowledge that architecture as complexly bound up in power (and
including imperial) relations, I would justify our use of this building on the basis
of finance. Rhodes House is free for use for members of Oxford University
(okay, before you say anything, another exclusionary practice) and so enables
us to keep the costs of the conference down and allows us to make the
conference as accessible to as many people as possible - postgraduates and
unwaged. Hence we turn a controversial and problematic site into a space of
increasing inclusion!
Hope my comments go some way to answer your points. And anyway, all
publicity is good publicity...
Best wishes
Simon Naylor
(Cultural Turns conference convener)
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Geography Department, Keele University,
Staffordshire, ST5 5BG
email: [log in to unmask]
phone: (01782) 621111 ext. 7028
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