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PERG Seminar Series

Sara Fregonese gave a seminar at the London Group of Historical Geographers on February 1st, titled “Destroying cosmopolis: Tales from Beirut's Ma'rakat al Fanadiq (Battle of the Hotels), 1975-6” at London’s Senate House.

Sara Fregonese gave a Lecture on 29th November for 3rd and 4th year architecture students titled : “Beirut: Urban Geopolitics & Hybrid Sovereignties” at the Lebanese American University, Byblos campus, Lebanon.

Fregonese, S. (2010) Review of “Urbicide: The Politics of Urban Destruction” by Martin Coward,  Global Discourse [Online], 1: II, available from here.

Luiza Bialasiewicz will give an opening lecture at the conference on 'Political Representations of a United Europe', organised by the Department of Sociology, University of Milano-Bicocca and sponsored by the European Parliament, November 9th. See http://www.unimib.eu/open/eventi/Rappresentazioni-politiche-dellEuropa-unita/5713446504336991067

Luiza Bialasiewicz will give a lecture on “Europe in the World: EU Geopolitics and the Management of Borders” as part of the Alexander von Humboldt Lecture Series, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, November 29th. See http://socgeo.ruhosting.nl/content/currentprogramme.html

Luiza Bialasiewicz was invited course lecturer on the Geography Graduate School Intensive Course on the 'Political, Social and Cultural Geographies of Europeanization', held at the Universities of Turku and Helsinki, Finland, October 4th-5th.

Sara Fregonese gave an invited talk at the "Perspectives on Terrorism, Resistance and Radicalisation" 2-day workshop in Doha, Qatar on 26-27 September 2010. The workshop was organised by Al Jazeera Centre For Studies, Economic and Social Research Council UK, and Muslim Research Centre, Exeter University. Sara disseminated the findings of the project “The urban environment: mirror and mediator of radicalisation?” on which she collaborated between January 2008 and June 2009 at the Manchester Architecture Research Centre of the University of Manchester, of which she remains a Honorary Fellow.

Sara Fregonese has been invited to speak in the roundtable of the “Division and Connection in Contested Space” seminar, on October 8th, 2010. The seminar is organised by the  Sponsored by the Durham Palestine Educational Trust and Co-organised by IBRU (International Boundaries Research Unit), ‘Politics, State, Space’ and ‘Urban Worlds’ Research Clusters Department of Geography (Durham University).

Alasdair Pinkerton is organising a workshop to be held on 8 December that will explore our increasing interest in aerial / vertical dimensions of geography and concepts of territory and sovereignty. Further details and a Call for Papers can be found here.

Between October and December 2010, Sara Fregonese will conduct fieldwork in Beirut for her British Academy post-doctoral fellowship “The urbicide of Beirut: geographical perspectives on war and cities”. She uses interviews, archive search and photography to explore the connections between sovereignty, conflict, peace and urban infrastructure during the urban clashes of May 2008 which brought Lebanon on the brink of another civil war. She focuses in particular on the dynamics that prevented conflict from developing further across the city.

Luiza Bialasiewicz delivered a presentation as part of the Open University’s ‘Open Space’ Seminar Series on May 19th entitled “Borders, border-work and the distinct aesthetics of European power”. The event will shortly be available as a podcast on Open Space Research Centre’s web-site:
http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchcentres/osrc/events/openspace-seminar-series
 
Luiza Bialasiewicz co-organised an international workshop entitled ‘Mediterraneanism’ together with colleagues at New York University’s Remarque Institute. The event is being held on May 24th-25th at NYU’s Florence campus, Villa La Pietra: http://www.nyu.edu/global/lapietra/

Luiza Bialasiewicz will be visiting the Department of Geography at Osaka City University this June as a Visiting Researcher, giving a seminar on EU border management in the Mediterranean:

Alex Loftus is co-organising a conference on the Right to Water with Farhana Sultana to be held at Syracuse University on March 29 and 30, 2010. The event will explore how universal calls for the right to water articulate with local historical and geographical contexts. It will engage an interdisciplinary network of scholars and practitioners and highlight key debates via keynote lectures and papers presented by leading figures from the academic, policy and activist communities. Further details are available at: http://www1.maxwell.syr.edu/waterconference.aspx

PERG members are part of the new London Political Geography Network: http://lpgn.wordpress.com/ 

Klaus Dodds will be giving a lecture on ‘Rising powers, the USA and the geopolitics of international order' at the Geographical Association’s Annual Conference on 9th April 2010. Further details available at: http://www.geography.org.uk/cpdevents/annualconference

Sara Fregonese will be speaking at the opening conference “Fratricide and Fraternite’” of the John E. Sawyer Seminar Series 2009-2010 /Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, held at the  School of Advanced Studies, University of London on Friday 26th February. The title of her paper is: “The Urbicide of Beirut: Political Violence, Geopolitical Discourse, and Built Environment during the Two Years' War (1975-76)” see  http://www.sas.ac.uk/709.html for details

Klaus Dodds has been appointed the Editor of The Geographical Journal for a term of five years from 1st January 2010. Alasdair Pinkerton has also been appointed as the inaugural Web Editor of The Geographical Journal. Klaus and Al plan to launch a host of online resources to accompany each issue of the journal, including contributor interviews, photographic essays and podcasts from relevant events in the Academic Geography calendar. 

Alasdair Pinkerton will be delivering a Departmental Seminar in the Geography Department at Royal Holloway on Thursday 4th February. The seminar will be held at 13.00 hrs and is entitled: Broadcasting, listening and the long Cold War.

Klaus Dodds and Richard Powell (University of Liverpool) have been awarded an ESRC Seminar series award (January 2010-July 2011) for the following topic - ‘Knowledges, resources and legal regimes: the new geopolitics of the Polar Regions’. Further information is available here.

Klaus Dodds has been invited to edit a new book series on Critical Geopolitics for Ashgate Publishers. He will be working with Alan Ingram (UCL) and Merje Kuus (University of British Columbia). Further details at: www.ashgate.com/authors

Sara Fregonese joins the group after securing a prestigious British Academy Post-Doctoral fellowship. The title of her project is 'City, War and geopolitics: political violence and Beirut's built environment in the Lebanese civil war'.

Claudio Sesto will be joining PERG as a Guest Researcher from September 2009 until March 2010. Claudio is currently completing his PhD in the Department of Geography at the University of Rome, ‘La Sapienza’. His doctoral research project on “Meridionalism and the Mediterranean” seeks to provide a critical geopolitical reading of the debates surrounding the ‘peripheral’ status of Southern Italy, as well as of representations of the Mediterranean ‘South’ more broadly. While at Royal Holloway, Claudio will be working in collaboration with Dr. Luiza Bialasiewicz and Prof. Klaus Dodds.