Cultural and Historical Geographies

Since the mid-2010s, statues of individuals related to the history of European empires have been the target of physical attacks and public debates.

Some of the most controversial and widely known of these episodes have been:

• the Rhodes Must Fall movements in Cape Town and Oxford in Britain;
• the toppling of the statue of Colston in Bristol;
• the removal of the statue of Victor Schoelcher in Martinique;
• and the smearing of the statue of King Leopold in Brussels with red paint.

This project brings together scholars of French and British imperial history, historical geographers, legal scholars, and art historians. By pooling our expertise, we intend to study the complex histories of these statues, situating them in their local contexts, understanding their iconography, tracing the connections between sites, and gathering the conflicting emotions and memories that have built up around them.

In doing so, we aim to go beyond flattened descriptions of ‘vandalism’ and ‘patriotism’ and instead produce a citizens’ archive and interpretive tool that can assist with dispassionate, positive and democratic decision-making with regards to difficult heritage.

Co-Investigator: Nicola Thomas

Website: Cast in Stone

"Valuing the things we buy today as the heritage of tomorrow.

The Museum of Contemporary Commodities is neither a building nor a permanent collection of stuff - it’s an invitation. To consider every shop, online store and warehouse as if it were a museum, and all the things in them part of our collective future heritage.

Imagine yourself as this museum’s curator, with the power to choose what is displayed and how. To trace and interpret the provenance of things and how they arrived here. To consider the effects this stuff has on people and places close by or far away, and how and why it connects them.

What do we mean by things or stuff? Everything that’s bought or sold for profit in today’s society. The full range of contemporary commodities available to consume.

Does it seem an impossible task? It’s definitely not one we should do alone. In this museum, we are all the curators…” (Crutchlow & Cook 2022, 3).
 
Co-founder: Ian Cook
 
Website: www.moccguide.net

Zine: Paula Crutchlow & Ian Cook (2022) The Museum of Contemporary Commodities. Exeter: Museum of Contemporary Commodities

Details coming soon.
 
Researcher: Caitlin DeSilvey

“We're very pleased to announce that our new, improved, expanded database and online store for trade justice activism - followthethings.com - is now open.

First published in 2011, it contains 120 examples of trade justice activism which can be searched by date, brand, commodity, origins, destinations, intentions and tactics. It pieces together conversations about their making, discussion and impacts from comments and reviews we've found online. It's a 'one-stop shop' for anyone teaching and learning about, as well as making, this kind of work. And there's more to come” (lan Cook, March 2025).
 
CEO: Ian Cook

Website: followthethings.com

Abstract:

Writers, artists, activists, and others are finding creative ways to engage with, and disrupt and unsettle, commentaries on the climate emergency. In this article, we argue that the do-it-yourself ethic and aesthetic of zines (small-circulation, self-published magazines) and zine-making offers a creative and empowering approach to environmental storytelling, and that zines do different kinds of “work” around positioning, narrating, and responding to ecological problems.

Through the idea of zine ecologies, we examine the entanglements between zines and zineing, environmentalism, environmental politics, literature, art, activism and protest, and more. The idea of zine ecologies has a dual existence in this article. We use this idea both as the provocation for a minizine that accompanies this article, but also to scaffold discussion of the quiet politics and activisms of student zine projects responding to, for example, an environmental writer, a piece of activist writing, or an environmental issue or scenario. 
 
Laura Smith, Catherine Cartwright, Georgina Brennan-Lister, Emily Brooks, Ffion Collins, Sophie Colson, Eleanor Cook, & Ciara Munnery (2024) Zine Ecologies: Creative Environmentalisms & Literary Activisms. Geohumanities 10(1), 18-41

Abstract:

Climate-linked disasters result when natural hazards meet socioeconomic precarity. Recognizing this, scholarship in recent years has emphasized how the precarity that turns climate-linked hazards into disasters is produced within the same global political economy that enables climate change.

Nevertheless, despite growing interest in the ways in which the dynamics of global economic history shapes contemporary hazard vulnerability, less attention has been directed toward the dynamism of the contemporary global economy and particularly the ways in which global material flows shape environmental risk.

From this standpoint, this article argues, first, the need to account for the economic dynamics of global trade in shaping the factors that intensify disaster risk, and second, the role of multiscalar agency. Exemplifying this issue through a case study of international brick imports from South Asia to the United Kingdom, the article provides a heuristic example of how contemporary globalized flows of goods link local vulnerabilities to economic processes originating thousands of miles away. In an increasingly globalized world, it thus foregrounds a dynamic, global perspective on the genus of climate precarity. 
 
Laurie Parsons, Ricardo Safra de Campos, Alice Moncaster, Ian Cook, Tasneem Siddiqui, Chethika Abenayake, Amila Buddhika Jayasinghe, Pratik Mishra, Long Ly Vouch & Tamim Billah (2024): Globalized Climate Precarity: Environmental Degradation, Disasters, & the International Brick Trade. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 114(3), 520-535

Extract:

This chapter focuses on the radio spectrum, part of the electromagnetic spectrum (3KHz–300GHz), and is situated in the context of 5G technology, the fifth generation of wireless network. 5G’s rollout is useful to examine as it draws attention to and (re)focuses a range of debates and practices surrounding the radio spectrum.

The radio spectrum is a natural phenomenon which can be understood as infrastructure because a variety of technologies depend on it; however, its imperceptibility raises questions and research challenges. For digital geographies, the role of the radio spectrum as infrastructure, how and why it is configured as infrastructure, and its associated practices and tensions represent important lines of enquiry.
 
Daisy Curtis (2023) The radio spectrum: an imperceptible infrastructure? in Tess Osborne & Phil Jones (eds) A research Agenda For Digital Geographies. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 53-68

Abstract:

This paper is concerned with the lure of redemption in contemporary academic and accounts of exhaustion, endurance, and biopolitical life. Drawing on, and contributing to recent work on negativity in cultural geography, the paper analyses how optimism and redemption find their way in to academic writing on the contemporary condition.

It interrogates the optimism in these literatures, paying attention to the genealogical roots of the propensity to redeem accounts of slow and attritional violence and biopolitical subjectivity. In particular, the paper charts the implicit politics and ethics at play in the invocation of the Deleuzian ‘otherwise’ which haunts many accounts of the transformatory potential of exhaustion, and the remnants of dialectical historicism and Christian morality at the heart of redemption narratives in accounts of endurance.

The paper ends by questioning the motives behind such hopeful readings, and asks what it might entail to refuse to redeem tales of violence with optimistic glimmers of an as-yet unspecified world.
 
Leila Dawney & Thomas Ellis (2024) Endurance, exhaustion & the lure of redemption. Cultural Geographies 31(2), 153-166

Abstract:

This thesis offers a contribution to ongoing attempts to rethink human inhabitation of the earth in light of the Anthropocene. Adopting an autoethnographic approach to research as a process, the thesis takes its reader on a journey that begins with a recognition that we’re living on a damaged planet and ends with the idea of scarred landscapes.

Through a 3-day field encounter with Ithaca, Greece, I reflect on the problematic idea of landscape as a wellspring for identity, arguing that understanding landscape as a site of existential inhabitation offers an impossible promise of a recovery of a primordial self. I find the experience dissatisfying and question the role of sentimentality in landscape research.

I use this field encounter as a springboard to build the scarred landscapes concept from three ingredients: (i) rupture, (ii) suture, and (iii) scar. I argue that research interested in embodied landscape practices must consider the question - how do you find direction when no direction makes sense?

Drawing on my fieldwork training in aerial arts for 5 months, I consider ideas of verticality and embodiment as one response to this question. I argue that the practice of intentional falling provides insights into how to survive moments of crisis. Thinking through ideas of lines and holes, I show how we might move-with and through descent and how we might learn to co-exist with decline, precarity and the challenge of not knowing.
 
Lizzie Hobson (2023) Scarred Landscapes. PhD thesis: University of Exeter

Abstract:

In this paper I explore the subtle regulation of cultural practice in Argentina’s Parque de la Memoria. I interpret the Parque de la Memoria, or memory park, as a spatial threshold. When family members of the desaparecidos enter the park they enter the memory of the spatial threshold as what remains (of what remained) of the violent attempt by the Argentine military regime to spatialise political order. The desaparecidos, or disappeared, were to be captured and performatively constituted in the space of exception as the embodiment of a terrorist subversion that threatened Argentina’s re-founding as a Western, Christian civilisation.

To resist the temptation to leave a flower at the monument as the memory of the spatial threshold between the sacred and profane, life and death, the city and the river, is to hold open the possibility for an alternative politics by maintaining potentiality’s link to impotentiality as the ability to not-mourn. It is in this potentiality, not-yet-actualised and thus not exhausted, that space is opened for a post-dictatorship politics in Argentina that would reach beyond the exhausted notions of the need for reconciliation with, or the redemption of, the disappearances of the disappeared.
 
Daniel James (2023) Mourners who can not mourn: Argentina’s Parque de la Memoria as a spatial threshold of memory. Political Geography 105

Abstract:

This paper reflects on the status of ‘negativity’ in contemporary social and geographical thought. Based on a panel discussion held at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting 2021, each contributor discusses what negativity means to them, and considers its various legacies and potential future trajectories.

Along the way, the contributors offer ways of attending to negative spaces (voids, abysses, absences), affects (vulnerabilities, sad passions, incapacities, mortality) and politics (impasses, refusals, irreparabilities).

However, rather than defining negativity narrowly, the paper stays with the diversity of work on negativity being undertaken by geographers and other scholars, discussing how varying perspectives expand or dismantle particular elements within spatial theory.

Collectively, the contributors argue for paying attention to negativity as the faltering, failure or impossibility of relations between body and world, thus situating it in conversation with relational thought, vitalist philosophies and affirmative ethics.
 
Thomas Dekeyser, Anna Secor, Mitch Rose, David Bissell, Vickie Zhang & Jose Luis Romanillos (2022) Negativity: space, politics & affects. Cultural Geographies 29(1), 5-21

Abstract:

The yips – a phenomenon whereby skilled practitioners suddenly and inexplicably struggle with their performance – has been observed in many sports. With no consensus as to the origins of the yips, it is, for many, a chronic condition bringing an end to careers and hobbies alike.

This paper turns its attention to ‘target panic’, a sport-specific instantiation of the yips found amongst archers. By bringing empirical encounters with target panic into conversation with geographical literature on skill, this paper seeks to invite reconsideration as to how and where the yips manifest.

Rather than focusing on whether the yips is psychological or physical in origin, ecological approaches to skill allow for us to understand the yips as stemming from the disruption of the more-than-human communicative links on which skilled ecologies are founded.

The concept of disruption is used to understand how this breakdown operates. Disruption is seen to be a boundary-creating or boundary-affirming process which impedes the ability for different actors to attune to one another. By re-interpreting the yips as a result of disruption and locating it between actors, rather than within them, this paper contributes to ongoing discussions about what it means to be (de)skilled in a disrupted world and presents new possibilities for methods to prevent and treat the yips.
 
Eliott Rooke (2022) Target panic: Disrupted ecologies of skill in archery. Area 55(3), 315-446

Abstract:

Craft Communities addresses the social groups 'in real life' and online which have developed around craft production and consumption, exploring the social and cultural impact of contemporary practices of making.

Addressing a wide range of crafting practice, from yarnbombs to Shetland shawls, in a variety of regional and national contexts, the contributors consider how social media has emerged as a key driver of the 'Third Wave' of craft. From Etsy to Instagram, Twitter to Pinterest, these online communities of the handmade are changing the way people buy and sell, make and meet.
 
Susan Luckman & Nicola Thomas (ads) (2023) Craft communities. London: Bloomsbury 

Abstract:

In this chapter I prod my misgivings, and subject some of the ideas I’ve been developing to critical scrutiny. I draw on Lauren Berlant’s concept of ‘cruel optimism’ to try to understand how a body of work I’ve invested so much in is making me increasingly uneasy (2011).

I go on to consider some of the unruly heritage already being generated by accelerated environmental change and then use a story about a Montana court case to explore what an engaged heritage practice might look like in the current historical moment. I bring in Gerald Vizenor’s concept of ‘survivance’ to suggest a reorientation to verbs over nouns (2008), and end by imagining a heritage practice that pivots from a focus on structures and sites to instead prioritise support for the connections and practices — and the political capacities — that they sustain.
 
Caitlin DeSilvey (2024) Heritage Lost and Found: Cruel Optimism & Climate Futures. in Bjørnar Julius Olsen, Stein Farstadvoll & Geneviève Godin (eds) Unruly Heritage: Archaeologies of the Anthropocene. London: Bloomsbury, 75-90

Abstract:

This paper aims to stimulate debate around the development of a place-based research review methodology. We present place-based reviews as a potential source of support for wellbeing-related local policymaking.

Our introductory discussions highlight an ever-growing need for insights about specific localities and a lack in resources - including time - for local policymakers to engage with research. Additionally, increasing demands for local insights have been driven by devolution shifts, which redistribute policymaking responsibilities to local authorities.

Hence, we explore the challenges and opportunities that arise when places are considered in reviewing research relevant to wellbeing. We build a case study around two related places of different scale: Truro, a small cathedral city in the United Kingdom's South West; and Cornwall, the regional county that contains Truro. We use these places as search terms in combination with terms concerning health and social care (HSC) services. HSC services are included as a component of our case study, as the topic is a consistent concern for wellbeing-related policies.

In our findings, we report a lack of papers on our smaller scale of place (Truro). One might expect this outcome. Nonetheless, we reflect on current research practices and processes that might have further limited our ability to generate insights about Truro. Encouragingly, our findings on Cornwall demonstrate the potential of place-based reviews in supporting local policymaking more broadly.

We make initial judgements around knowledge gaps—including the exclusion of perspectives from certain groups and identities—and topological insights, that is, those that are relevant to Cornwall as a whole. Our discussions also consider how place-based reviews can be enhanced via the retrieval and inclusion of non-academic studies. Finally, key questions to induce debate on this subject are posed in the conclusion.
 
Shukru Esmene, Michael Leyshon, Petra de Braal, Hans de Bruin & Catherine Leyshon (2024) ‘Where’ is the evidence? A starting point for the development of place‐based research reviews and their implications for wellbeing‐related policymaking. The Geographical Journal 190(4)

Abstract:

This commentary paper welcomes calls for widening participation amongst ethnic minorities in research that aims to understand well-being. However, we demonstrate how a history of exclusion in the daily routines of communities render such calls limited in their ability to address inclusion fully.

The absence of ethnic minorities from spaces and dialogues that define what constitutes good well-being is highlighted. We use life-courses that align with Western norms as an example to develop our arguments. Overall, exclusion is rooted in colonial histories and the discrimination experienced by ethnic minorities during day-to-day, routine living. Additionally, relational ontologies of well-being are overwhelmed by individualised constructs.

We outline how the suppression of marginalised values in everyday spaces and activities has limited meaning-making in relation to well-being amongst ethnic minority individuals and groups. We characterise this marginalisation as an epistemic injustice in defining well-being.

In our conclusions, we call for dialogues and developments in critical race theory (CRT) to be considered in research commissioning processes. Spaces and dialogues that are owned and shaped by ethnic minorities should be supported before we can widen participation in well-being research meaningfully. Values that are practised and developed in such spaces can then contribute to how communities define well-being and the appropriate ways in which it can be studied.

It should be acknowledged that we use the term ethnic minority throughout this paper for brevity. The diverse experiences and perspectives that this term covers should be engaged with when considering the recommendations that we make.
 
Shukru Esmene, Michael Leyshon & Catherine Leyshon (2024) Ethnic Minority Inclusion in Well-Being Research: Beyond Widening Participation. International Journal of Community Well-Being 7, 587-596