By Stefan Bouzarovski
I recently gave a plenary talk titled ‘From transition to transformation’ at the RGS-IBG mid-term postgraduate conference at the University of Birmingham. The title of the talk was a response to the theme of the conference: ‘Geographical transitions’. It highlighted, inter alia, the new relevance of integrated thinking across geography, particularly in terms of the expanding conceptual and spatial register of notions of ‘politics’ and ‘landscape’.
More broadly, the postgraduate forum was a major success – it attracted a record number of attendees from across the country, and sponsorship from a wide range of organisations. Energy was a major theme at the conference (there was an entire string of sessions dedicated to it), reflecting not only the growing popularity of this topic among early career researchers, but also the expanding potential for geographers to respond critically and productively to the contemporary crisis of capitalism, democracy and the environment.
People and Energy Collective 