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SCG Overview

The Social and Cultural Geography group (SCG) includes the following full-time academic staff: Professor Philip Crang (Director), Professor Tim Cresswell, Dr Mustafa Dikeç, Professor Felix Driver, Professor David Gilbert, Dr David Lambert and Professor Claudio Minca (primary affiliation with SCG); and Dr Luiza Bialasiewicz, Dr Mary Dengler, Professor Clive Gamble, Dr Alex Loftus and Dr Katie Willis (secondary affiliation with SCG). Research staff are Dr Fiona Coward, Dr Elaine Ho, Dr Hannah Macpherson, Ms Jennie Middleton and Dr Helen Scalway.  Denis Cosgrove (Humboldt Professor of Geography at UCLA) is a Visiting Professor in the Department, and is actively involved in the research and teaching of the Group. Also active in the Group are Honorary Research Associates Dr Pamela Shurmer-Smith and Dr Karen Till.

Social and Cultural Geography emphasises the cultural politics of place, space and landscape. Within SCG, these concerns are being explored through a wide range of conceptual and substantive lenses, including:

• colonial and postcolonial geographies
• cultures of mobility and travel
•  diaspora culture and transnationality
• cities, identities, and urban politics
• geography's visual and material culture
• consumer and commodity cultures
• the politics of geographical knowledge
• cultures of landscape and environment

Methodologically, group members have expertise in a range of research practices, especially interpretative methods, ethnographic research, archival work and other forms of qualitative social research.

On average, approximately twenty-five PhD students are being supervised within the Group at any one time. The majority of 'home' students are funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) or Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC); indicatively, seven Research Council awards were made to SCG postgraduate students beginning their studies in 2005-6, six in 2006-7. 'Overseas' students receive funding from a range of sources including ORS, Royal Holloway studentships, and home country research councils. We also welcome visiting students from overseas. Notably, too, the Group has gained a number of ESRC Post-Doctoral Research Fellowships for completed doctoral students.

The Group teaches the MA in Cultural Geography (Research) which is the Department's postgraduate research training programme for students in social and cultural geography. This programme is fully recognised by ESRC for '1+3' research training and by AHRC for 'research preparation'. Nearly sixty percent of the programme's graduates have continued to PhD research at Royal Holloway and elsewhere.

The Group convenes regular internal events, including its fortnightly 'landscape surgery' (a PhD focused gathering of students and staff) and termly 'day of culture' as well as a staff reading group. The group has productive relationships with other disciplines at Royal Holloway, including through the Royal Holloway Postcolonial Research Group and recent collaborative projects with the Departments of Drama & Theatre and Music. The Group's staff and students have access to the unparalleled library facilities of London, research and teaching space in the Department at Egham and in Royal Holloway's central London buildings in Bloomsbury, and the Department's new Qualitative Methods Laboratory. There are also excellent links with a number of overseas universities, notably UCLA, the Sorbonne, Minnesota and the National University of Singapore.