Creative Geohumanities
Drawing on geography’s humanities tradition, and generating new trans-disciplinary research agendas, the HGRG’s creative geohumanities research theme is grounded in archival inquiry, is experimental and creative in conduct, and engages with diverse communities and audiences. Our research creates geographical knowledge through differing forms of creative practice. A wide range of modes and methodologies for practice-led inquiry are employed, including site-specific studies, therapeutic interventions, place-making, audio-drifts, film-making, visual art, broadcasting, object-handling, storytelling and story-mapping. At scales ranging from the personal to the planetary, our research investigates how worlds are differently made, imagined, transformed, degraded or destroyed. Informed by geophilosophy and the environmental humanities, these geo-imaginaries consider the configuration of health and extinction, human and non-human subjects, elemental atmospheres and environmental vulnerabilities associated with the Anthropocene.
We experiment with digital technologies to document, interrogate, and visualise contrasting versions of the world, and to engage new plugged-in audiences. Our research deploys ‘smart’ technologies from drones to CRISPR editing tools, as a means to expand the repertoire of digital humanities analysis and representation, and to generate new collaborative alliances and applications that are socially and environmentally just. Our geo-histories of science, technology and medicine consider the formulation of subjects and spaces in periods spanning the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. We advance critical understanding of spaces, practices and personalities formed through the advancement of scientific and medical knowledge locally, or the pursuit of empire or industry on a global stage.