science unbound geography space discipline

#Science unbound geography space discipline series

The event itself will take the shape of an extended Q&A session with the audience.A week before the event, each panellist will post a short video intervention on the event's page, for the audience to watch and ponder at their leisure.If you’d like to attend, please register on the individual event page and make sure to subscribe to our mailing list by writing to will meet virtually once a week to discuss one key conference theme, centered around the interventions of three scholars.

#Science unbound geography space discipline series

'South Asia Unbound' will therefore take the shape of a series of online events from late February to early April 2021. At NIHSA, we see this as an opportunity to reshape our “conferencing culture” to make it more sustainable environmentally to invite the lay public to join in our conversations and to be more inclusive towards scholars who, for financial, personal or geopolitical reasons-starting with our peers in the Global South-are too often shut out from events traditionally set halfway across the world, in expensive locations. Organised by NIHSA - the New International Histories of South Asia network (namely Dr Bérénice Guyot-Réchard (King's College London) and Dr Elisabeth Leake (Leeds), with the assistance of Nairn Brown), this series of workshops gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars from across the world to investigate states, institutions, networks, communities and individuals as agents of South Asian global engagement at the local, regional, national and supra-national levels, spanning the time before and after independence and indeed going back to pre-colonial times.Ĭovid19 forces us to think creatively about organising academic events. Understanding its past entanglements with the world is crucial given the region’s increasing global importance - including for post-Brexit Britain, which seeks to deepen its ties with South Asia while answering the needs of its multicultural population.

Geography Unbound presents an insightful portrait of a crucial period in the development of modern geography, whose unstable disciplinary status is still very much an issue today.Whose international matters, and why? How are geographic regions constructed? What are the channels of engagement between a place, its people, its institutions, and the world? How do we understand the non-West’s influence in contemporary global interactions?įrom humanitarianism and activism to diplomacy and institutional networks, South Asia has been a crucial place for the elaboration of international politics, even before the twentieth century. She tells her story partly through the lives and careers of individuals, from the deposed cabinet geographer Cassini IV to Volney, von Humboldt, and Letronne (innovators in human, physical, and historical geography), and partly through the institutions with which they were associated such as the Encyclopédie and the Jesuit and military colleges. Though they had previously been ranked among the most highly regarded scientists in Europe, they suddenly found themselves directionless and disrespected because they were unable to adapt their descriptive focus easily to the new emphasis on theory and explanation sweeping through other disciplines.Īnne Godlewska examines this crisis, the often conservative reactions of geographers to it, and the work of researchers at the margins of the field who helped chart its future course.

At the end of the eighteenth century, French geographers faced a crisis.