Session organisers

Short bios (in alphabetical order)

Suze Adams

Dr Suze Adams is an independent research artist based in the UK. She is an Associate Lecturer in Visual Culture at UWE Bristol, an active associate of PLaCE International Research Centre and founder member of Space Place Practice. www.suzeadams.co.uk

Daniel Allen
Columnist for Small Furry Pets magazine: http://www.smallfurrypets.co.uk/
New Book: 'Animal Obsessions. True Stories from a Pet-Loving Nation': http://www.facebook.com/AnimalObsessions
Affiliations: Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Affiliate Member of the IUCN SSC Otter Specialist Group. Founder of the Animal Geography Research Network

Kye Askins

Kye Askins is a critical geographer with research interests focusing on identity, citizenship, emotions and everyday geographies of agency and resistance. She works from postcolonial and participatory paradigms, with a central aim of actively engaged research that, both theoretically and methodologically, challenges dominant discourses and foregrounds participants as co-producers of knowledge. She is committed to matters of social and environmental justice, to policy engagement and research that is transformative for participants, communities, students and a range of ‘publics’.

Ajay Bailey

Ajay Bailey is an Assistant Professor at the Population Research Centre, Faculty of Spatial Sciences, University of Groningen , The Netherlands. He is an anthropologist and a cultural demographer by training. He is also the India research & training coordinator for the Faculty of Spatial Sciences. His main research interests include migration, culture, access to health care, place-meaning and mixed methods. His current research projects focus on ageing in migrant households in India, highly-skilled  migration between India and The Netherlands, exchange of social and cultural remittances and care giving. http://www.rug.nl/staff/a.bailey/index

Matthew Barac

Matthew Barac is senior lecturer in the history and theory of architecture at London South Bank University, where he is a member of the Medical Architecture Research Unit (MARU), and an internationally registered architect. Professional activities include practice-led research as co-author of the UK government report Housing our Ageing Population: Panel for Innovation (2009). He writes for academic as well as mainstream publications, including a monthly column as pedagogy correspondent for the Architectural Review. His PhD won the RIBA President's Award for Research: best doctoral dissertation (2007) and the International Bauhaus Prize (2004). He chairs the board of UK charity Architecture Sans Frontières.

Justin Beaumont
Justin Beaumont is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spatial Planning & Environment at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. He has developed new enquires on social interventions within postsecular cities, as well as faith-based organizations and social justice in urban areas. Justin is currently undertaking research on problems of the postsecular and the ethical turn in urban theory.
He is co-editor of Exploring the Postsecular: the religious, the political and the urban (with Arie L. Molendijk and Christoph Jedan, 2010, Brill), Postsecular Cities: space, theory and practice (with Chris Baker, 2011, Continuum) and Faith-based Organizations and Exclusion in European Cities (with Paul Cloke, 2012). Forthcoming titles are Spaces of Contention: spatialities of social movements (with Walter Nicholls and Byron Miller, 2012, Ashgate) and Working Faith: faith-based organizations and urban social justice (with Paul Cloke and Andrew Williams, 2013, Paternoster).
Justin has guest edited special issues and also had published articles on similar topics at Progress in Human Geography, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Environment and Planning A, Urban Studies and the TESG.

Katy Bennett

Dr. Katy Bennett is a lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Leicester.  Her research interests are in social and cultural geography with particular focus on issues of identity, emotion, home and community.Much of her research has examined how economic restructuring, regeneration and transformed landscapes impact on people’s lives and her research practices are underpinned by growing lines of engagement between the social sciences and psychotherapeutic techniques.Her work on emotion has been published in a range of journals and in the collection Emotion, Place and Culture (Ashgate 2009).

Matej Blazek
Matej Blazek is a Lecturer in Human Geography at Loughborough University, UK. His research concentrates on children's agency and children's services, particularly in the context of social exclusion. His interest is in how children's activities and capacities can become pivotal in the development of marginalized communities, and in spaces of engagements and knowledge exchange between various stakeholders. His recent research activities also include the focus on migration, vulnerability and agency.  

Liz Bondi

Liz Bondi is Professor of Social Geography at the University of Edinburgh, where she also contributes to postgraduate education in counselling and psychotherapy. She is founding editor of Emotion, Space and Society.

Fernando Bosco

Fernando J. Bosco is Associate Professor of Geography at San Diego State University, California, USA. He works at the intersection of urban, political and cultural geographies, with an overarching interest in social change in the context of Latin America and the United States. His research areas include analyses of the geographic dimensions of social movements and collective action, and of children, families and their communities. He has published articles and book chapters on the emotions of social movements, the connections between place, memory and activism, and the political geographies of children and young people. He is currently a co-principal investigator on a National Science Foundation project analyzing food practices, family relations, and place-making.

Martin Bouwman

Martin Bouwman is researcher at Architecture in Health at HAN University of Applied Sciences. He studied architecture at Eindhoven University of Technology and graduated on research by design on the spatial organization of the typology of nursing homes in relation to the domestic function of the typology. His research with AiH focuses on the manner social encounters between residents of care facilities can be influenced by the design of interior space. Furthermore, Martin is involved in research on the topic of housing desires of people with care demands, especially active older adults.

Maria Brandén

Maria Brandén is a PhD student at the Stockholm University Demography Unit, at the Department of Sociology. In her dissertation work she examines couples’ regional mobility and gender equality in mobility decisions. Other research interests include proximity to grandparents and its impact on the division of childcare; couples’ sharing of attitudes and relationship satisfaction, as well as couples’ gender roles and subsequent demographic behaviour.

Aleid Brouwer

Aleid Brouwer is assistant professor at the Faculty of Spatial Sciences, Department of Economic Geography at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Aleid has done extensive research on firm location from both the behavioural approach as well as from the viewpoint of the Organizational Ecology, using both qualitative as well as qualitative methodology. Her specific interests are: firm demography, international firm (re)location and entrepreneurship as a chance for older adults. http://www.rug.nl/staff/a.e.brouwer/index

Anna Cieslik
Anna Cieslik is an Assistant Professor at New Jersey City University and a Research Fellow at Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. She is an urban geographer with an interest in gender, immigration and diversity in urban context. She received her PhD from Clark University (2011) where she worked on Polish migration to London and migrants’ perceptions of urban environments.  Her current book project investigates the social and spatial patterns that arise under conditions of superdiversity in Astoria, NY.

Annie Clarke
Anne (Annie) Clarke is a senior lecturer in Archaeology and Heritage Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research interests and writing cover a wide range of areas including the archaeology of cross-cultural interactions, community archaeology, heritage and interpretation, the archaeology of ethnographic museum collections, narratives in archaeology and rock art and representation. She is the lead investigator on a large inter-disciplinary Australian Research Council Linkage grant (2012-2015) ‘The Archaeology and History of Quarantine’ centred on the North Head Quarantine Station Manly. Her most recent volume is Unpacking the Collection. Networks of Material and Social Agency in the Museum (2011, Springer) co-edited with Sarah Byrne, Rodney Harrison and Robin Torrence. A second volume on ethnographic collections Reassembling the Collection: Ethnographic Museums and Indigenous Agency. (eds Rodney Harrison, Sarah Byrne, and Anne Clarke, SAR Press) is due out early 2013.

Rachel Colls

Rachel Colls is a lecturer in Geography at Durham University. Her  research interests are orientated around 'the body' which she has developed through conducting a range of empirical research projects and through sustained engagements with feminist post-structualist theory including the work on Elisabeth Grosz, Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray.  She has published  on women's clothing consumption and body size, the materiality of female bodies, weighing and measuring children in schools, anti-obesity policy and size acceptance. She is currently working on a co-authored monograph with Dr Bethan Evans, University of Liverpool, which seeks to develop a critical geographical account of fatness.

Nina Conkova

Nina Conkova is a social demographer with particular interest in depopulation and ageing. She obtained her Masters degree in Population Studies from the Graduate School of Social Sciences at the University of Groningen in 2012. In the past three years, Nina conducted research on rural depopulation and the experience of ageing in the depopulating village of Bania in South-central Bulgaria. Currently, Nina is working as a freelancer for Population Europe / Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.

John Cromby

John Cromby is in the Psychology Division, SSEHS, Loughborough University. His research is concerned with the ways in which bodies and social influence come together to co-constitute the psychological, and includes engagement with topics such as emotion, affect and feeling; mental ill health; and methods of jointly analysing textual data and embodied experiences.

Anindita Datta

Anindita Datta teaches at the Department of Geography, Delhi School of Economics.Apart from introducing two new courses in the area of the Geography of Gender, Anindita teaches postgraduate courses on Geographical Thought and Social Geography. She has published consistently in internationally known peer reviewed journals with an interdisciplinary perspective and is on the international editorial board for Gender Place and Culture. She has recently joined the steering committee of the International Geographical Union’s commission for Gender and Geography and also been elected into the society for Women Geographers, USA. Her current work is on visibilising indigenous feminisms in the Indian/Asian contexts as well as finding postcolonial alternatives to articulating the city. When not driving off the beaten track to explore new spaces she can be contacted at anindita.dse gmail.com

Nora Davis

Nora Davis completed an MSc in Environmental Psychology at the University of Surrey in 2008 and is now a PhD student at the University of California, Irvine, in Social Ecology. She has worked extensively on motivators of environmental behavior and uses both quantitative and qualitative analysis in her research. Her specific area of interest is the exploration of transcendent experiences in different physical environments and their potential pro-environmental and social impacts. See more information here: http://socialecology.uci.edu/students/grad/ncdavis

Valerie De Craene
Valerie De Craene studied geography at the University of Ghent, specializing in socio-economic geography in her masters. After teaching geography at a secondary school and some smaller research projects, she started a PhD at the Geography Division of the University of Leuven (Belgium). She focuses on non-heteronormative heterosexualities and the influence of sexual norms on one’s daily behaviour and its use of space.

Karolina Doughty
Karolina is a research fellow in the School of Applied Social Science at the University of Brighton. Her main research interests lie across the broad fields of cultural and health geographies, with a particular focus on therapeutic landscapes and practices, everyday mobilities, rhythmanalysis and urban soundscapes. Her doctoral research was on group walking and wellbeing, attending to the relational production of therapeutic spaces and practices.  She has been working with Maja Lagerqvist for the past year on research into street music and its role in emotional encounters, affective management and the creation of convivial urban spaces.

Martijn Duineveld

Martijn Duineveld (1976) holds a position as Assistant Professor at the Cultural Geography chair group at Wageningen University. He is especially interested in the dynamics of power, people and places. His current research is particularly inspired and influenced by Michel Foucault and more generally by anthropology, and cultural and political geography. His research activities mainly focus on the contentious nature of place and the various ways citizens, planners and landscape architects use their power to influence the landscape. He teaches  Human Geography, and he is active in both academic and societal debates on citizenship, spatial planning and democratization. (see: http://www.geo.wur.nl/UK/Staff/Staff_Duineveld/

Thea Dukes  

Thea Dukes (masters in Psychology and Human Geography, PhD in Social and Behavioural Sciences) is assistant professor at the Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies (GPIO) at the University of Amsterdam. Her main research interests lie within the field of Urban and Political geography, covering topics like: (area based) urban policy and policy discourses; diversity, identity & social cohesion; sense of belonging, senses and city life; multi-level governance and the ‘Europeanization’ of Dutch cities.

Darren Ellis

Darren Ellis is a Senior Lecturer of Psychosocial Studies in the School of Law and Social Sciences at the University of East London. Darren's research focuses on psychosocial theorisation of affect related experiences. Recently Darren has been involved in a surveillance studies project looking at 'everyday experiences of surveillance', through which he explored the affective atmospheres that surveilled spaces produce. Darren is presently writing a book for Sage Publications entitled The Social Psychology of Emotion.

Sophie Edwards  

https://queensu.academia.edu/SophieEdwards  

Rhys Evans

Dr Rhys Evans is an Associate Professor of Rural Development at HLB – the Norwegian University College of Agriculture and Rural Development in the region of Rogaland, Norway ( www.hlb.no ).  Here he is responsible for research into various social and cultural aspects of rural development in Norway, Scandinavia and Europe, plus teaching on HLB’s Bachelor in Rural Development degree programme. A cultural geographer by training, for the past five years, Dr Evans has been pursuing research interests in the human-horse relationship.  The convenor of the Equine Research Network (EqRN) – www.eqrn.net – he has undertaken research on native breed horses, equine tourism and on the role of horses in farm diversification, publishing on this and the human-horse relationship.

Alexandra Fanghanel

Alexandra Fanghanel is a Research Associate at University College London, UK. Her research examines gender and the fear of crime, embodied sexual practice in public space, and kin and non-kin support networks of care in older age. She works with Jason Lim on questions of embodiment and politics in the SlutWalk movement in UK. She is also preparing a monograph based on her doctoral work on the sexualisation of security in public space.

Lewis Goodings

Lewis Goodings is a Lecturer in Social Psychology at Roehampton University. Lewis' research is dedicated to the area of new social media. He uses a constructionist approach to study new forms of online communication and focuses on classic notions of identity, community and the self. This includes looking at intersections of the body and technology. Lewis is always looking
to explore the broader social dynamics of technology, discourse and organisation.

Karen Haandrikman

Karen Haandrikman is a researcher at the Department of Human Geography at Stockholm University. Karen is a demographer and geographer, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Her research is mostly related to migration and marriage/ partner choice; current projects include topics such as binational marriages in Sweden, Thai-Swedish couples, the role of geographical distance on the partner market, internal migration and union formation, and international migrants in rural areas.

Tialda Haartsen

Tialda Haartsen is assistant professor at the Faculty of Spatial Sciences, Department of Cultural Geography at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Her research focusses on rural areas. Tialda has done research into representations of the rural, rural in-migration, rural youth culture(s), and senses of identity and belonging in rural coastal regions. Currently, she is specifically interested in population decline and how people ‘who stay’ experience living in depopulating areas and how they (re)organize village life. http://www.rug.nl/staff/t.haartsen/index

Ariel Handel

Ariel Handel is a postdoctoral fellow at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a research fellow at the Minerva Humanities Center, Tel Aviv University. His research interests are human movement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, mapping and spatial representations, and the political philosophy of geography. He is the head of the "Space and Power: A Political Lexicon" research group at the Minerva Humanities Center. His publications include Protest: A Political Lexicon (co-ed, 2012), Geographies of Occupation (forthcoming) and several journal papers and book chapters.

Gentry Hanks

https://queensu.academia.edu/GentryHanks

Katie Hemsworth
Katie Hemsworth is a PhD candidate in Geography at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada, with a focus on cultural geographies of everyday life. Her research interests include sonic and musical geographies, aural methodologies, digital media in urban environments, and embodiment. Her current research projects include: 1) the politics of sound, music, and acoustic space in Canadian prisons and 2) the role of Internet technologies for people on the autism spectrum (with Joyce Davidson, Sophie Edwards, and Gentry Hanks).

Anna Hjälm
Anna Hjälm is a researcher at the Centre for Population Studies and Ageing and Living Conditions Programme at Umeå University, Sweden. She is a geographer with a special interest in population geography and ageing populations. In previous research her focus has been mainly on family landscape, intergenerational geographical proximity and distance, and the meaning of living close. In recent studies Anna has focused on life-long staying among seniors in an urban setting and the social and practical conditions that has shaped, and continuous to shape, their lives as stayers.

Bettina van Hoven

Bettina van Hoven is Associate Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Groningen. Bettina's interests largely fall under the umbrella of belonging and identities. She is specifically interested in how and why different (groups of) people form attachments to places and includes the role of non-human actors in her research. She is a keen experimenter with various qualitative methods. Her current work is on geographies of older adults. She also keeps rather busy with the organisation of the Emotional Geographies conference .

Paulus P.P. Huigen

http://www.rug.nl/staff/p.p.p.huigen/index

Victoria Hunter

Dr Victoria Hunter is a Practitioner-Researcher and Lecturer in Dance at the University of Surrey, U.K. She completed a PhD in site-specific dance performance exploring the relationship between the site and the creative process in December 2009. Her research is practice-based, productions include Beneath (2004) situated in the basement of the Bretton Hall mansion building, The Library Dances (2006) situated in the Leeds Central Library building, Project 3 a durational dance installation performed at Bretton Hall (July 2007) x3 (May 2010) a site-specific dance film, and Wingbeats, a dance exploration of South Landing beach, Flamborough North Yorkshire.

Maarten Jacobs
Maarten Jacobs is assistant professor at the Cultural Geography department of Wageningen University, The Netherlands. He applies social science theories and methods to the study of human relationships with landscape, nature, and wildlife. His landscape related research focuses on the perception, evaluation and meaning people assign to places. His nature related research encompasses notions amongst various social groups and the meaning of nature within the context of leisure and tourism. His wildlife related research concerns values and norms assigned to wildlife, as well as emotions evoked by wildlife. Across these domains, his theoretical interest goes to the psychological mechanisms that bring about cognitions and emotions pertaining to landscape, nature, and wildlife, including the ways innate dispositions and culturally acquired dispositions influence these cognitions and emotions.

Lucy Jackson
Lucy Jackson is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Geography, University of Sheffield. Lucy recently completed a PhD in Human Geography at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (January 2012). Lucy’s primary research interest lies within the field of feminist geopolitics, with specific interest in everyday practises and performances of identity, the emotional formation of community, and negotiations of identity differences. Her PhD research project, entitled ‘Alternative sites of citizenship: emotions, performance and belonging for female migrants’ focused upon ideas of citizenship as a relational practise recognising its ever more social and cultural nature. Since completing her PhD, Lucy has worked a teaching fellow in Human Geography before recently joining the LIVEDIFFERENCE project at the University of Sheffield (October 2012). Here, her research explores debates around abortion and pro-life/pro-choice activism in contemporary British society. This research hopes to understand how people occupying a range of positions feel about these issues, how they negotiate public spaces and sites of activism, and the influence of the media within these debates.

Christoph Jedan
Christoph Jedan, Associate Professor of Ethics, Department Christianity, Philosophy and Culture, Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Groningen. Currently working on the history and continuing relevance of argumentative consolation across theology and philosophy. Together with Eric Venbrux (see below), he is founder of the thematic group Death and Consolation in the Netherlands School for Advanced Studies in Religion. Most recent monograph: Stoic virtues: Chrysippus and the religious character of Stoic ethics, London/New York 2009.

Helen Jarvis

Helen Jarvis, PhD, is Reader in Urban Social Geography at Newcastle University, UK. Her research considers common dilemmas of work-life reconciliation viewed through the prism of time-space coordination and ‘soft’ infrastructures of daily life. Current research shifts attention to the community and alternative paradigms of ‘de-growth’ through experiments and innovations in collaborative housing and intentional community.For recent publications see: www.ncl.ac.uk/gps/staff/profile/helen.jarvis

Pascale Joassart-Marcelli  

Pascale Joassart-Marcelli is Associate Professor of Geography at San Diego State University. Her research focuses on the role of place and space in shaping immigrant integration, informal and multiple economies, and migrant civil society. One of her most recent projects, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, focuses on understanding how food and food practices can be sources of civic participation, cultural engagement, place-making and belonging. She is particularly interested in the everyday food practices of immigrant children and families and the emotional relationships surrounding these.

Owain Jones
Dr. Owain Jones is Reader in cultural geography: landscape, place and environment at the  Countryside & Community Research Institute. Owain specialises in nature-society relations, place and landscape, community and resilience, the role of memory, nonhuman agencies, and temporalities of landscape.  He is currently researching into tidal landscapes, and community, memory, flooding and resilience in Arts and Humanities Research Council and Economic and Social Research Council projects. He has an arts background and collaborates with artists frequently.  He has published a number of peer reviewed papers on the above subjects, and has a new edited book entitled “Geography and Memory: Identity, Place and Belonging” being published in their Memory Studies Series in 2012. He has been recently elected onto the AHRC peer-review College, and also reviews grant applications for the ESRC. He was nominated by his academic peers to take part in the  international benchmarking review of UK Human Geography which the Economic and Social Research Council has commissioned in partnership with the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He is currently supervising 3 Phds.

Brett Joseph

With degrees in international law and humanistic psychology, and certificates in civil mediation, socially-engaged spirituality, permaculture design, green building and environmental education, Brett Joseph serves his native Cleveland-area communities as an ecological landscape and social systems design consultant, researcher and educator. Mr. Joseph is founding director of the Center for Ecological Culture, Inc., co-director of the Cleveland Educators for Sustainability, Inc., member of the sustainability workgroup of the Great Lakes Biomimicry Collaborative and adjunct faculty member in the Sustainable Agriculture Division at Lorain County Community College. Brett’s published writings focus on innovation, culture and whole systems approaches to fostering human and ecological health. His professional background reflects a life-long inquiry into ways to foster innovation, community revitalization, public health and organizational learning by harmonizing the relationship between human and natural systems.

Eleanor Jupp

Dr Eleanor Jupp is a researcher in the Faculty of Health and Social Care at the Open University.  She has a PhD in Geography and is interested in the spatialities and emotional dynamics of urban and social policy, especially in 'disadvantaged' neighbourhoods.  Current projects focus on parenting interventions and community activism.  She is also convening a seminar series on 'the home' within social policy, funded by ESRC.

Peter Kraftl  

Peter Kraftl is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Leicester, UK. He has written extensively about the geographies of children and young people, formal and alternative education, and architecture. Much of his work has drawn upon nonrepresentational theories of affect, emotion and everydayness. Recent books include 'Critical Geographies of Childhood and Youth' (Policy Press, 2012) and 'Geographies of Alternative Education' (Policy Press, 2013). He is an Editor of the journal Children's Geographies.

Eleanor Jupp
http://hsc-people.open.ac.uk/e.jupp

Bodo Kubartz

Bodo Kubartz is an independent consultant and expert in the fragrance and cosmetics industry with a background in Economic Geography. In his dissertation (University of Oklahoma, 2009) he examined geographies of knowledge in the international fragrance industry. He is interested in the following topics: the sense of smell and the production of fragrances, perfume, and cosmetics; brands and branding; socioeconomic geographies of knowledge, learning and innovation; and spaces of creativity. He published in several academic journals, industry magazines and the general press and recently co-authored (with Frank J. Schnitzler) Das grosse Buch vom Parfum (Collection Rolf Heyne, 2011). www.kubartz.de

Maja Lagerqvist  

Maja Lagerqvist is a cultural and historical geographer at the Department of Human Geography at Stockholm University. Her doctoral research elaborated on the integration of material and immaterial dimensions in processes of place construction through a study of the transformations of Swedish rural small holdings into second homes during the 20th century. At present she is working on research concerning the use and values of heritage in relation to the global economic crisis, as well as on a research project with Karolina Doughty on street music and its role in emotional encounters, affective management and the creation of urban spaces.

Iulian Barba Lata, Michael Marchman, and Lauren Wagner

Iulian, Michael and Lauren are members of the Cultural Geography Group at Wageningen University. Their individual research interests include, with some overlaps and some divergences: tourism economies, creative industries and innovation, interactional methods, labor geographies and social movements, diasporic aftereffects of migration, and material semiotics.

Jason Lim

Jason Lim is a Visiting Research Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, UK. His research addresses the interplay of embodiment, affect, everyday practice, race, ethnicity, sexualities and gender. He is co-editor of Geographies of Sexualities: Theories, Practices and Politics and Secretary of the Space, Sexualities and Queer Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers). He has published papers in Gender, Place and Culture, Environment and Planning A, Sociological Research Online and Journal of Social Policy. His current research projects address (i) representation and embodiment in SlutWalk and (ii) gendered and sexualised norms in UK counter-extremism policy.

Michael Marchman, Iulian Barba Lata and Lauren Wagner
Michael, Iulian and Lauren are members of the Cultural Geography Group at Wageningen University. Their individual research interests include, with some overlaps and some divergences: tourism economies, creative industries and innovation, interactional methods, labor geographies and social movements, diasporic aftereffects of migration, and material semiotics.

Abi McNiven  

Abi McNiven is a 3rd year PhD student in the Department of Geography and Centre for Medical Humanities at Durham University. Her PhD research is looking at the recollection of experiences of pregnancy loss, with a particular focus on how aspects of 'bodies'/the 'bodily' are drawn upon. She is currently writing up her thesis, drawing on qualitative interviews and a range of theoretical frameworks, and is co-researching on a project looking at the methodological implications of utilising the art of Frida Kahlo in academic social research.

Magdalena Nowicka
Magdalena Nowicka is research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen. She holds a summa cum laude doctoral degree in Sociology from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich (2005). She is the author of a number of scholarly articles and book chapters on mobility, cosmopolitanism, spatial relations and European integration. Her newest publication is The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism (2011).  Dr. Nowicka´s current interests include Polish migration to Germany and the UK, mobility of professionals and educational migrants, social inequality in a transnational perspective, entrepreneurship of migrants, sociology of space, sociology of modernization and globalization, issues of ethnicity and identity, European integration and qualitative methodology in social sciences.

Louise Meijering
Louise Meijering is assistant professor at the Population Research Centre (PRC) at the Faculty of Spatial Sciences, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Louise’s main research focus is on research on older adults, and the relation between their experienced well-being and attachment to place. In her research, she typically applied a qualitative methodology, with methods such as in-depth interviews, go-along-interviews and observation. Louise is particularly interested in a participatory research in ageing and health. Further research interests are community, stroke patients and migration experiences. For more information, see: http://www.rug.nl/staff/l.b.meijering/index

Masi Mohammadi

Masi Mohammadi is professor of Architecture in Health at HAN University of Applied Sciences and assistant professor at Eindhoven University of Technology, in the Netherlands. The focus of her research is on Smart and Healthy Living Environment, a research into new architectural and technological means and methods for enabling aging-in-place and the acceptance of smart (care) applications, as well as applying need-based technology in the homes. She performs (empirical) studies on the breakthrough of smart care technologies and the residential needs and the attitude of users in regards to advanced technological innovations. She has been operating as a senior researcher and project manager in different nationwide projects based in this field.

Alison Mountz

Alison Mountz is Associate Professor of Geography and Canada Research Chair in Global Migration at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and Wilfrid Laurier University. Her work examines Border enforcement, asylum, and detention. Mountz published Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border (University of Minnesota). She directs the island detentions project, which involves research on facilities off the shores of North America, Europe, and Australia where migrants are detained en route to sovereign territory.

Inge Noback

Inge Noback is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Spatial Sciences, Department of Economic Geography at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. She has done research on decision-making processes, social capital and social integration as well as a wide range of labour market related topics. http://www.rug.nl/staff/i.noback/index

Neil Nunn  

Neil Nunn is a social geographer whose research explores masculinity and knowledge production. In particular, he is fascinated by how an emotional and affective lens offers a nuanced register to think about knowledge production. Neil is a researcher with the Centre for Social, Spatial and Economic Justice and is currently working towards a Ph.D.

Marguerite Perret
http://www.washburn.edu/our-faculty/marguerite-perret

Jessica Pykett
Jessica Pykett is a lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Birmingham. She is a social and political geographer with research interests in citizenship, the practices of governing, geographies of education, and the formation of neurological and psychological citizen-subjectivities. Her most recent research has examined the rise of libertarian paternalist forms of governance in the UK and the politics and ethics of policies aimed at behaviour change. Books include Changing Behaviours (Edward Elgar, forthcoming) and Governing Through Pedagogy (Routledge, 2012). http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/gees/pykett-jessica.aspx

Beate M.W. Ratter
Beate M.W. Ratter is professor of Integrative Geography and Coastal Research at the University of Hamburg and jointly holds the position as head of the Department Human Dimensions of Coastal Areas Institute of Costal Research, at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht, Germany. Her academic work focuses the analysis of resource and environmental management strategies including environmental and nature perception in different regional cultures especially in coastal areas and on small islands. Special emphasis lies on the awareness of nature/culture interaction and intercultural differences as well as the importance of public participation approaches in the development and adaptation of environmental management strategies and sustainable development. The theory of complexity and its paradigms of emergence, uncertainty and jumps of systems? trajectories are used as general theoretical concepts. Current research interests focus on climate proofing of a sustainable development on coastal areas and small islands as well the risk perception and its impact on adaptation strategies in the context of global climate change.

Dallas Rogers  

Dallas Rogers, PhD, is Post-doctoral Fellow at Urban Research Centre within the School of Social Sciences and Psychology at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. He is an urban policy academic with expertise in housing policy evaluation. His current research interests focus on the intersection between democracy, neoliberalism, and state intervention. For recent publications see: http://uws.academia.edu/DallasRogers

Julia Rössel
Julia Rössel is a teaching assistant and PhD student in the fourth year at the Department of Geography at the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz. In her dissertation project she explores the process of in-migration to the Uckermark, a peripheral rural area in north-eastern Germany. For the analysis she combines a theoretical perspective of the good life with the ideas of the production of space by Henri Lefebvre and develops a concept of the production of spaces of good life.

Tony Sampson

Tony D. Sampson is a London-based academic and writer currently lecturing at the University of East London. A former musician, he studied computer technology and cultural theory before receiving a PhD in sociology from the University of Essex. His ongoing interest in contagion theory is reflected in his recent publications, including The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture (2009), which he coedited with Jussi Parikka. His new book, Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks was published by the University of Minnesota Press in June 2012. Sampson's next project explores the intersection between culture, politics and the neurosciences.

Marcella Schmidt di Friedberg
Marcella Schmidt di Friedberg is Associate Professor of Geography, in the Department of Human Sciences for Education “Riccardo Massa” of the University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy). Her research interests concerns Cultural Geography, Gender Geography and History of the Geographical Thought: she has been working especially on the relations between nature, culture, memory and landscape in different contexts, from the Mediterranean, to Japan.  She is member of the Editorial Board of ACME and of the IGU commission on Gender and Geography. Her publications include L’arca di Noè. Conservazionismo tra natura e cultura (2004), Elisée Reclus. Natura e educazione (2007), Cos’è il mondo? E’ un globo di cartone (2010)  Lo spazio della differenza (with Rachele Borghi). Recently, she is working on the project:  I’m not here: Geographies of Disorientation, examining the dynamics of orientation/disorientation across a broad diversity of contexts (forest, city, labyrinth, virtual environments, illness).

Veronique Schutjens  

Veronique Schutjens is associate professor at the Faculty of Geosciences, Department of Human Geography and Planning at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Her research activities have focussed on spatial variations in entrepreneurship, new firm growth and survival, development of (spatial) strategies during the firm life course and the interdependence between local entrepreneurs and their neighbourhood. http://www.geo.uu.nl/phpscripts/staffpages/personal/personal.php?id=Schut108  

Jayne Sellick
Jayne Sellick is a PhD Researcher in the Geography Department, Durham University, UK. Her research interests lie in social and cultural geography and focus on issues relating to disability, health, illness and identity. Using participatory methodologies with groups and individuals this has produced in-depth qualitative research with a small number of people, exploring the various ways in which time and temporality are (re)produced as part of disabled people’s identities. Topics include the temporalities of emotional and affective life; the ‘disabled body’ and rhythms; ‘walking’ in everyday life; and memories and forgetting.

Frans Sijtsma

Frans Sijtsma is Assistant Professor Faculty of Spatial Sciences at the University of Groningen. Dr. Sijtsma is an expert at economic geography, real estate and green, evaluation of ecology versus economy, cost-benefit analysis and multi-criteria analysis.  

Fiona Smith
http://www.dundee.ac.uk/geography/staff/fionasmith/

Dort Spierings

Dort Spierings is senior researcher at Architecture in Health at HAN University of Applied Sciences and PhD candidate at Radboud University of Nijmegen, in the Netherlands. The focus of his social geographic PhD research is on the impact of scale on the social quality of housing in assisted living facilities in the Netherlands. Being an urban planner and architect, he studies the influences of the urban scale as well as the scale of a building. His main focus in care is the active older adults and the impact of the built environment on the social quality of housing.

Wendy Steele  

Wendy Steele, PhD, is an Australian Research Council (DECRA) Fellow co-located in the Urban Research Program and Griffith Climate Change Response Program at Griffith University, Australia. Her current research focuses on urban governance, cross-border planning and climate justice, resilience and security in cities. Current research draws attention to the idea of the ‘climate just’ city and the possibility of a ‘slow housing’ movement. For recent publications see: http://www.griffith.edu.au/environment-planning-architecture/urban-research-program/staff/dr-wendy-steele

Dirk Strijker
Dirk Strijker is holds a professorship in Rural Development at Faculty Spatial sciences of Groningen University. He is interested in the role of non-farmers in rural development. He has publishes on many aspects of rural life and rural development (http://www.rug.nl/staff/d.strijker/research).

Deborah Thien

Deborah Thien is Associate Professor of Geography and Affiliated Faculty of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at California State University, Long Beach. Her research interests are in emotional and mental health, gender, and feminist theory. She is currently writing a book manuscript that explores a feminist and geographic analysis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Rowman and Littlefield).

Mary Thomas

Mary Thomas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Ohio State University. Her book, Multicultural Girlhood: Racism, Sexuality, and the Conflicted Spaces of American Education, was published by Temple University Press in 2011. She also co-edited The Companion to Social Geography (Blackwell Press, 2011).

Divya P. Tolia–Kelly
Divya P. Tolia–Kelly is a Reader in Geography at the University of Durham, UK. Divya was born in Nairobi, Kenya and has lived in Britain since 1973 after her family were expelled from Kenya along with many other East African Asians from the former British colonies. After working in the public sector for nearly 10 years in London including working at the Single Homeless Project, Divya completed her first degree in Geography in 1997 as a mature student. Her degree at the Nottingham School of Geography, inspired her research interests on landscape, visual and material culture and race. Divya completed a PhD in 2001 at UCL. Her training at UCL consolidated her commitment to consider postcolonial environmental values and ‘ecologies of identity’, visually and materially, through public engagement, participatory methodologies and grounded theory. She has been a member of faculty at Durham since 2004. During her time at Durham she has directed the Lived and Material Cultures Research Cluster (2005-10), been an active member of the Institute for Advance Study, and was awarded a Beacon for Public Engagement (2010) thus, recognizing her commitment to public engagement. Divya is one of the keynote speakers for this conference.

Ian Tucker

Dr Ian Tucker is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of East London, UK. His research activity straddles the areas of social  psychology, psychosocial studies, and science and technology studies. Ian's work is concerned with developing  innovative ways of exploring the complex inter-connections between  psychological and social phenomena, in the form of 'spatial' approaches  to the study of digital technologies, mental health and affect.  He is currently working on a project on topology and social media.

Gill Valentine
Gill Valentine is a Professor of Geography and Pro Vice Chancellor for the Faculty of Social Science at University of Sheffield. Her research interests are in the fields of social identities and belonging, childhood and family life and urban cultures of consumption. Her work has been supported by the award of UK research council and European grants and she has published 15 (co)authored/edited books and over 170 articles/chapters.

Eric Venbrux
Eric Venbrux, Professor of Anthropology of Religion, at Radboud University Nijmegen. He is director of its Centre for Thanatology. Eric Venbrux has researched widely on ritual change, in particular the transformation of rituals surrounding death in the Netherlands. Among his numerous publications is also the co-edited volume Rituele creativiteit: Actuele veranderingen in de uitvaart- en rouwcultuur in Nederland [Ritual creativity: Recent transformations in the burial and bereavement culture in the Netherlands], Zoetermeer 2008.

Lauren Wagner, Michael Marchman and Iulian Barba Lata
Lauren, Michael and Iulian are members of the Cultural Geography Group at Wageningen University. Their individual research interests include, with some overlaps and some divergences: tourism economies, creative industries and innovation, interactional methods, labor geographies and social movements, diasporic aftereffects of migration, and material semiotics.

Emma Waterton

Emma Waterton is based at the University of Western Sydney in the Institute for Culture and Society. Her interests include unpacking the discursive constructions of ‘heritage’; community involvement in the management of heritage; the divisions implied between tangible and intangible heritage; and the role played by visual media. Publications include Politics, Policy and the Discourses of Heritage in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan 2010), the co-authored volume (with Laurajane Smith) Heritage, Communities and Archaeology (Duckworth 2009) and the co-edited volumes (with Steve Watson) Culture, Heritage and Representations (Ashgate 2010), Heritage and Community Engagement (Routledge 2011), and (with Laurajane Smith and Steve Watson) The Cultural Moment in Tourism (Routledge 2012). She currently holds an Australian Research Council Discovery for Early Career Researchers Grant (2012–2015), Photos of the Past: The negotiation of identity and belonging at Australian tourism sites.  

Steve Watson

Steve Watson is Principal Lecturer in the Business School at York St John University, where he teaches on a variety of modules concerning consumer culture, tourism and heritage. His research interests are in the areas of cultural and heritage tourism and travel writing and he has delivered invited lectures and seminars on these topics around the UK, and in Australia, Spain and the United States. His current focus of interest is in the theorisation of heritage and heritage tourism, and the representation of Spain in travel literature. He is a non-executive director of Visit York, which keeps him engaged with the operational realities of tourism as well as its more academic dimensions. He also convenes the annual Tourism Futures conference at York, which brings academics and practitioners together in a collaborative exchange of knowledge and experience. Recent publications include the co-edited volume (with Emma Waterton) Culture, Heritage and Representation: Perspectives on Visuality and the Past (Ashgate 2010).

Nichola Wood

Nichola Wood is a Lecturer in Critical Human Geography at the University of Leeds. Her research interests bridge social, cultural, political and emotional geographies in an attempt to study the role that emotions play in the formation and lived experience of social, cultural and political identities. More specifically, she is interested in exploring the social and political significance of the relationships between cultural practices, processes of identity formation, encounters with difference and people's emotional attachments to particular communities. She is currently working on an ERC funded research programme called LIVEDIFFERENCE, led by Professor Gill Valentine. http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/n.wood

Martin Zebracki  

Dr. Martin Zebracki (1984) is a cultural geographer with a particular interest in art in urban public space. His general research interests revolve around space and place, art, representation, identity, power, gender, sexuality and embodiment, and he has published papers in Environment and Planning A, Geoforum, GeoJournal, Journal of Economic and Social Geography, and Social and Cultural Geography. Zebracki is currently a Lecturer and Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Cultural Geography Group at Wageningen University and Academic Advisor at University College Utrecht, the international undergraduate honours college of Utrecht University. Personal website:  www.zebracki.org