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RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2017: London, 29th August - 1st September 2017

 

 

Convenors: Peter Adey (Royal Holloway, University of London), Justin Spinney (Cardiff University), and Simon Cook (Royal Holloway, University of London).

 

CFP - Teaching mobilities: practice, pedagogies, power

 

Geographers are well attuned to mobilities – everyday mobilities that constitute our social lives, permitting social reproduction and subverting rules and restrictions to reassert people’s rights to public space; international mobilities that speak to the precarity of our current times, from a global migration crisis, war-torn displacement to eviction; mobilities that comprise expressive cultural practices and movements or perform deep-rooted histories of cultural identity.. Mobilities pervade our research and understandings of the world.

 

But how do we, or could we teach mobilities? Is mobility, as a concept or concrete example, something we can easily convey or does it offer particular difficulties or opportunities for engaging students?  Are the multiple (sub)disciplinary and theoretical lineages, trajectories and discourses of mobility advantageous or unhelpful when it comes to actually teaching the topic? How do these questions, concerns and debates play into our teaching of mobilities? To what extent do they provoke pedagogic innovation in our curriculum design, lecture formats, seminar activities, field trips and assessments types? What other priorities also affect our curation and delivery of mobilities scholarship: (sub)disciplinary identity, departmental specialisms/identity, research expertise, TEF, other pressures of the neoliberal academy?

 

Whilst we may be used to discussing and teaching from our research, or expressing the wide breadth and scope of the field, academics and researchers have perhaps thought less coherently and collaboratively about how we go about teaching mobilities research. This session aspires to create a forum within which to explore the practical and pedagogical challenges associated with teaching mobilities. In doing so, it aims to act as a state-of-the-discipline review of teaching mobilities and to provide a platform for sharing, collaboration, innovation and future trajectories.  Accordingly we welcome papers which speak to the below themes and beyond. We especially encourage papers that enliven, illustrate or perform practical examples or activities from their teaching.

 

Potential themes might include but are not limited to:

• Geography, interdisciplinarity and the teaching of mobilities
• Geography, subdisciplinarity and the teaching of mobilities
• Breadth and overlap: the place of mobility in the Degree course
• Teaching theories and concepts of mobility
• Curriculum development in teaching mobilities
• Teaching mobile methodologies/methods
• Supervising dissertation on mobilities  
• Assessing mobilities
• Examples and activities from the teaching of mobilities 
• Pedagogical issues/opportunities in teaching mobilities
• Practical issues/solutions in teaching mobilities
• The contemporary academy and the teaching of mobilities.
• Student perspectives on the teaching of mobilities.

 

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to all convenors by Friday 3rd February 2017. They can be contacted on the following email addresses: [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask]