1. Session title: Art and Geographical Thought: The Different Forms of the Geographer’s Art?
Session conveners: Toshiyuki Shimazu (Wakayama University) shimazu@wakayama-u.ac.jp
Tamami Fukuda (Osaka Metropolitan University) tamamif@omu.ac.jp

Geography and art have long been seen as intertwined since the era of Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter. John Fraser Hart affirmed in his presidential address at the 1981 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers that “The highest form of the geographer’s art is producing good regional geography.” However, art is a multifaceted thing and we should not confine the significance of art to the description of the earth’s differentiated surface. Art, especially visual arts have played a significant role as research tools and materials in geography. The ways to approach the visual are on great variety and evolving in the history of geographical thought. Some scholars make an emphasis on the concepts including visuality, materiality and affect in their geographical research. Not only image itself and its production but also its circulation and audience are extensively studied. Other scholars speak of geography’s “creative (re)turn” which deploys artistic or creative practices as research methods. Geography itself
includes a variety of thoughts and practices concerning the ways we understand and represent our world. In this session, with the Congress’s theme “Celebrating a World of Difference” in mind, we aim at addressing the diverse and complex relationships between art and geographical thought. We especially seek contributions on, but not limited to:
– the place of art in different geographical thoughts and practices
– the mutual construction of geography and art
– geographical and geopolitical thoughts in art
– art in spaces, places, landscapes
– art and geographical imaginations

2 Session title: Institutions in the Histories of Geography
Session organisers: Mariana Lamego (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro), Liz Baigent (University of
Oxford), Federico Ferretti (Università di Bologna), Heike Jöns (Loughborough University),
André Reyes Novaes (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro), Marcella Schmidt di Friedberg
(Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca)

The geographies of institutions constitute a fascinating but highly contradictory world of sameness and difference, homogeneity and diversity, standardisation and multiplicity, freedom and control, harmony and conflict, empowerment and discrimination. Historians of geography have critically examined the role of formal and informal institutions, understood in the broadest
possible sense as norms, rules, and organisations, with a great variety of epistemic and political interests. Some researched how institutions that played an important role in the history of geography were created, changed, and undermined by professional geographers and other people (e.g., Bell and McEwan 1996; Keighren 2017; Ferretti 2019; Schelhaas et al. 2020). Others
studied how such institutions shaped individual and collective biographies and impacted on a range of institutions, territories, and networks, geographical imaginations and visions, as well as national, international, and imperial disciplinary traditions, thereby creating contested geographical knowledges as well as sociocultural inclusions and exclusions across different axes
of sociocultural difference (e.g., Livingstone 1992; Blunt 1994; Driver 2001; Maddrell 2009; Withers 2010; Morin 2011; Monk 2017; Georg and Wardenga 2020; Davies 2022). Two years after the IGU Centenary Congress 2022 in Paris, which encouraged continuing
examinations of the history of the International Geographical Union itself (e.g., IGU Commission on History of Geographical Thought 1972; Robic et al. 1996; Roche 2019; Kolosov et al. 2022), we aim to bring together geographers from different countries, who research the role of institutions in the history of geography, to discuss more varied multicultural and multilingual
perspectives than the selective yet exemplary English-language works cited in our call for papers
can provide. We are interested in critical interrogations that may address but are not limited to
the following broader themes:

• The role of geographers, including women geographers and other minority contributors,
for creating, changing, undermining, circumventing, and abolishing geographical
institutions, including related interests, debates, and conflicts;
• Negotiations of membership debates along intersectional axes of sociocultural
difference, such as gender, LGBTQIA+ identities, sexuality, and diverse ethnicities;
• Support of and opposition against initiatives of sociocultural equality, diversity, and
inclusion in the context of geographical institutions;
• The biography of institutions in geography and associated fields;
• Geographical institutions and Indigenous cultures;
• The professional, social, and affective experiences offered by geographical institutions;
• The wider impacts of geographical institutions on academic and other practices in
different disciplines, countries, and world regions;
• The construction of geographical discourses, knowledges, and imaginations through
geographical institutions;
• The material and technological constitution and impacts of geographical institutions;
• More-than-representational and more-than-human histories of geographical institutions;
• Mobilities, encounters, and performances within and of geographical institutions;
• Visionary, utopian, and planned-but-not-implemented geographical institutions;
• The biography, networks, and collaborations of learned societies in geography and
associated fields;
• The contributions of kindergartens, schools, universities and other types of organisations
to the history of geography and vice versa;
• The linkages between informal norms, rules, and organisations and the history of
geography, including collaborative, social, and activist networks;
• The processes by which geographical institutions have succeeded, struggled, or failed to
change economic, geopolitical, and sociocultural contexts;
• Critical perspectives on the role of colonial, decolonising, and postcolonial geographical
institutions for (re)producing global inequalities;
• Nationalism, internationalism, and the geopolitics of geographical institutions, including
their role in starting, shaping, and ending territorial conflicts;
• The relationships between geographical institutions, other disciplines, and the wider
public.

Please send suggestions for conference session papers to Mariana Lamego
(mariana.lamego@uerj.br) by 15 December 2023. For details on the proposal of a paper title and
abstract, please see https://igc2024dublin.org/call-for-papers/.

References
Bell, Morag and McEwan, Cheryl (1996). The admission of women fellows to the Royal
Geographical Society, 1892–1914: the controversy and the outcome. Geographical Journal 162:
295–312.
Blunt, Alison (1994). Travel, Gender and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa. London:
Guilford Press.
Davies, Archie (2022). A World Without Hunger: Josué De Castro and the History of
Geography. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Driver, Felix (2001). Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration in the Age of Empire. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Ferretti, Federico (2019). Anarchy and Geography: Reclus and Kropotkin in the UK. New York:
Routledge.
Georg, Maximillian and Wardenga, Ute (2020). “Our field Is the world”: geographical societies
in international comparison, 1821–1914. In: Schelhaas, Bruno, Ferretti, Federico, Novaes, André
Reyes, Schmidt di Friedberg, Marcella (eds) Decolonising and Internationalising Geography.
Cham: Springer, pp. 67–79.
IGU Commission on History of Geographical Thought (eds) (1972). Geography Through a
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Keighren, Innes M. (2017). ‘A Royal Geographical Society for ladies’: the Lyceum Club and
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Kolosov et al. (2022). A Geographical Century: Essays for the Centenary of the International
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Livingstone, David N. (1992). The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a
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Maddrell, Avril (2009). Complex Locations: Women’s Geographical Work in the UK, 1850–
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