The Gender and Feminist Geographies Research Group was well represented at this year’s RGS-IBG Annual International Conference. The research group sponsored sessions spanning a variety of themes in response to the overall conference theme ‘decolonising geographical knowledges’. Sessions focused on: The Costs of Decolonizing the Discipline; Transformative Stories: Trauma, Therapeutic Geographies and Hope; Home futures: towards a critical feminist geography of housing, ageing and health; Rethinking decolonial and postcolonial knowledges beyond Regions; Innovative Research within Gender & Feminist Geography; Que(e)rying Gender, Tourism and Mobilities; and Geographies of Safe Space.
These sessions attracted numerous papers and the abstracts can still be found in the online program.
The calls were popular, several had two or more sessions due to the numbers that answered the call and all pulled in full audiences. Often overrunning with conversations and discussions about challenging oppressive hegemonic practice.
We would like to take the opportunity to thank all those that participated. Everyone who ran and organised sessions, chaired sessions, presented papers and to those that came to hear our messages, stories, projects and musings! There are too many to thank individually but you all opened up some very interesting spaces to discuss and talk about the role gender plays in decolonizing knowledge and the ways in which we can progress, break down, broaden and deepen gender and feminist geographies within the academy and outside.
If you couldn’t attend the conference, you can get a sneak peek at some of the goings-on: https://storify.com/HLJeffrey/gfgrg-tweets-at-rgs-ibg
In addition to the amazing and vast research topics considered in these sessions, GFGRG was delighted to sponsor the Erin Sanders-McDonagh’s monograph launch. Erin’s book Women and Sex Tourism Landscapes works to shift essentialising conceptualisations of not just women tourists, but also sex tourism.
The group also successfully ran the Gender and Feminist Geographies Research Group mentoring and networking session for the second year running. This workshop-style session was headed up by Eveleigh Buck-Mathews, who utilised appreciative inquiry to get participants thinking through mentoring in order to identify needs, spaces and good practice to inform GFGRG’s idea and practice of mentoring in the future.
Heather Jeffrey and Eveleigh Buck-Matthews are the GFGRG’s out-going Postgraduate Representatives. The group would like to thank them for all their hard work over the past two years.