Political Geography Research Group

Postgraduate Members,

Hello and welcome to the postgraduate section of the Political Geography Research Group (PolGRG) of the RGS-IBG. My name is Drew Foxall and I am your postgraduate representative on the PolGRG Committee.

Alan Ingram’s efforts in creating this website give us a great opportunity to extend the reach of PolGRG to its postgraduate members. One way to do this is to create a list of postgraduates and their research interests to display in this section of the PolGRG website (click here). This will provide postgraduates with an arena in which to highlight their own research interests, to meet others with interests similar to their own, and in which to share contacts. To facilitate this, over the coming weeks I will contact Alan to get hold of the contact details of our postgraduate members; I will then email you all asking you if you would like to be included on the list and enclosing a form for you to complete if you would. Once I start receiving completed forms, I will begin to post a list of postgraduates in this section.

Once the list is up and running I would like to organise several broadly themed ‘study days’ for postgraduates next calendar year (2009). These would be more informal than conferences and would give postgraduates the chance to present work (in-progress or completed) beyond the limits of a 15-minute conference paper. It may also be possible to invite a senior academic to give an introduction to the theme of the study day. This idea is only in the planning stages yet and I depend on your input. If people can get in touch with me with their research interests then I can decide on themes that are relevant to as many people as possible. As the list may take a while to get up and running I would hope that the first study day would take place in spring 2009, most probably in Oxford. Closer to the date I will be looking for one or two co-organisers from different universities to assist me in organising this event. As my research falls squarely within Russian geopolitics, co-organisers with other interests are particularly welcome.

I would also like to use this section of the PolGRG website to announce forthcoming conferences – with their so-called ‘Call for Papers’ – which may be relevant to our postgraduate members, and to highlight academic journals which are particularly welcoming to submissions from postgraduates (click here) . If any of you know of forthcoming conferences or any such journals then please get in touch.

Overall, my role is to facilitate contact and exchange between postgraduates in political geography and to make sure your concerns get heard by PolGRG. So if there is anything you would like to raise, or if you have an idea you’d like to circulate, please let me know.

I look forward to hearing from you,

drew