Political Worlds Research Cluster Events

Call for Papers - Writing Workshops: Defiant Scholarship in Africa

Yaoundé, Cameroon, Workshop Dates: 18-20 June 2024

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Workshop Dates: 7-9 October 2024

Deadline for Yaoundé Applications: 10 March 2024

We invite early career scholars working on topics connected to and practices grounded in ‘defiant scholarship in Africa’ to apply for writing workshops in Yaoundé, Cameroon and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Reading Group

Indigenous Epistemologies Reading Group

The Indigenous Epistemologies Reading Group brings together researchers and students from across the University departments interested in engaging with indigenous perspectives and epistemologies in their work and research. This reading group is a weekly gathering in which we critically explore the mechanisms and methods of knowledge production that we engage in our own research through the lens of indigenous methods of world-knowing and world-making. We share and discuss indigenous scholarship, its intersection with the "Western" academy, national politics, and corporate interests. We explore questions of sovereignty, epistemic oppression, relational worldviews and performative knowledge-making.

Interested in joining the reading group? Please contact:

• Anya Gleizer
• Christopher Frattina Della Frattina

Screening of Film on Decolonising Research Methodologies, "Keeping the Fire"

26 May 2022

Department of Education, University of Oxford Co-sponsored with Political Worlds Research Cluster, SoGE, Oxford

We are pleased to announce the release of a 30-minute film based on a postgraduate course they collaboratively taught in Trinity Term 2021. The film is titled, "Keeping the Fire: Oxford-UNISA Decolonising Research Methodologies".

The trailer for the film is available on SoGE's YouTube Channel.

Description of film:

• The film follows the experience of educators and students over a 7-week period, when they came together during a postgraduate online course, Decolonising Research Methodologies. The experimental course was co-taught by Dr Amber Murrey (Geography, Oxford), Dr Steve Puttick (Education, Oxford) and Dr Nokuthula Hlabangane (Anthropology, UNISA).
• Educators sought to foster an interactive and collaborative digital space to build, challenge, and practice ways of knowing offered by the rich scholarship on decolonising research methods in the social sciences. Recognising the significance of trust within collectives thinking against coloniality and colonial violence, guided and immersive sessions helped the group work towards the creation of a different kind of digital classroom. Educators emphasised the importance of the cultivation of collective commitments, including our shared responsibility to 'keep the fire', as encouraged by Mmatshilo Motsei, during the healing circle she facilitated during the course. Community leaders and scholar-activists facilitated interactive, embodied, and decolonising pedagogies. Oxford Geography Professors Patricia Daley and Sneha Krishnan lead discussions on the violence of discovery in Western science and understanding the coloniality of methods.
• The course was funded by an Oxford's Teaching Development & Enhancement Project Award.

This is a hybrid event.

In-person attendance: Seminar B (Department of Education, 15 Norham Gardens), Department of Education, University of Oxford Co-sponsored with Political Worlds Research Cluster, SoGE, Oxford.

On-line attendance: To join through Teams, please contact Dr Steve Puttick at steven.puttick@education.ox.ac.uk

For further information, please contact Dr Amber Murrey at amber.murrey-ndewa@ouce.ox.ac.uk

Political Worlds and Economy & Society Writing Retreat

12 May 2022

• Academic staff and postgraduate students came together for a productive and enjoyable writing retreat at Mansfield College on 12 May. The day-long event included intensive writing sessions, time for networking/debriefing, and tools for structuring effective and efficient academic writing. The event was co-organised by the Political Worlds and Economy & Society Research Clusters.

War in Ukraine: A Political Geography Roundtable Discussion

6 May 2022

This was a hybrid event; our in-person location was the Lecture Theatre of the Dyson Perrins / School of Geography and the Environment Building.

• Rationalising the irrational? Grappling with the Russo-Ukrainian War, Phase One (20 February 2014 - 23 February 2022), Dr Vlad Mykhnenko

  Since the early 2014, many human geographers and social scientists at-large have been grappling with the causes and consequences of the Russian de facto annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and the subsequent war in the Ukrainian Donbas. What have we learnt over the past eight years, what we should try to remember, and what baggage we can now leave behind?

• Reflections from a Political Geographer on Why 'We' Got it Wrong, Professor Judith Pallot

  Why did the academic community and political commentators miss the signs of the invasion of Ukraine? Professor Judith Pallot will reflect on the devastating impacts on Russian and East European Area Studies (including the discipline of geography in the region, and intellectual freedom, more generally) if the Russian aggression succeeds.

• On the politics of historicising the war in Ukraine. Dr Ian Klinke

  Unlike what some political realists, the far-right, the pro-Assad left [or just some commentators??] and the Kremlin itself would like us to believe, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was not provoked by the West. But to what extent can the steady deterioration of three decades of NATO-Russia relations help us understand how we ended up where we are? I will reflect on this highly politicised question by shedding some light on the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation's geopolitical culture.

Criminal Repair and Postcolonial Sovereignty in the Jamaican Lotto Scam

18 February 2022

Dr Jovan Scott Lewis, University of California, Berkeley

Histories of Geography in Africa: South African geographers and apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s

14 May 2021

Dr Ruth Craggs, Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Historical Geography, King's College London.

Racial capitalism and care under COVID

5 March 2021

Dr Patricia Lopez, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, Dartmouth College

Tourism Troubles: Feminist political ecologies of land and body in the making of residential tourism space in Panama

19 February 2021

Dr Sharlene Mollett, Associate Professor, Human Geography and International Development Studies, University of Toronto

Discussant: Dr Negar Behzadi, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol

Further details: https://shar.es/aowZhV

(Anti)Blackness and Dual Power: Thinking from Durban, South Africa

22 January 2021

Dr Yousuf Al-Bulushi, Assistant Professor, Department of Global and International Studies, University of California, Irvine

Discussant: Dr Adam Elliott-Cooper, University of Greenwich

Covid-19 & mobilities in understanding the lived reality and framing of diasporic Blackness

All School Seminar, 21 January 2021

Dr Lioba Hirsch, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Decolonial Queering Aesthesis: Unsettling Spaces of Zionist Sensuality

5 February 2020

Dr Walaa Alqaisiya, LSE Fellow of Gender, Conflict and Sexuality, Department for Gender Studies, London School of Economics

Discussant: Hashem Abushama, DPhil Candidate, School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford.

Book Panel: 'Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Territory, and the Future on India's Northern Threshold' by Sara Smith (Rutgers University Press, 2020)

7 September 2020

In Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Territory, and the Future on India's Northern Threshold' (Rutgers University Press, 2020), Sara Smith asks how love and marriage are bound up with global and regional geopolitical processes that make territory. Focusing on Ladakh, a region located on India's Northern frontier, the book asks how territory is made every day in marriage and birth ceremonies, in the kitchen, in the rearing of babies, and in everyday experiences of childhood, youth and religious life. Organised by Sneha Krishnan.

South Asia from Afar: Conversations on Research in the Region

Online Seminar Series, June - September 2020

This series seeks to draw attention to the complex power dynamics at play in studying the South Asian region in this moment, when the COVID-19 Pandemic and ongoing struggles against increasingly right-wing states in the region have all complicated the terms on which research can be done. The title 'South Asia from Afar' references the panic that overtook the many institutions for South Asian Studies research in Europe, the UK and North America where a significant part of the research on this region is done, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. However the Pandemic has also made distances within South Asia larger as scholars increasingly rely on remote modes of research instead of in-person fieldwork in this moment. Address this convergence of many crisis points, we ask our speakers to consider how research on the region might be reimagined. The series is co-organised by Sneha Krishnan and Nayanika Mathur.

Co-sponsored by the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme.

Digitising Critical Pedagogies Amidst COVID-19

An Online Roundtable Discussion, 6 May 2020

The global pandemic of COVID-19 has exposed vulnerabilities in our in-person teaching models and pressed us to quickly move content online. Yet, thoughtful efforts must be made to ensure that rapid digitisations do not reify long-standing educational and knowledge inequalities. In this webinar, we consider how scholars are engaging with critical pedagogies, including anti-racist and anti-imperialist approaches, in the time of COVID-19. Panellists joining the discussion:

• Derek Ford (Education, DePauw)
• Holly Oberle (Political Science, Wenzhou-Kean University)
• Farhana Sultana (Geography, Syracuse)
• Sayan Dey (English, Royal University of Bhutan)
• Lesley Nelson-Addy (Education, Oxford)

The event is co-organised by Dr Amber Murrey, Associate Professor of Human Geography at Oxford (amber.murrey-ndewa@ouce.ox.ac.uk) and Dr Steven Puttick, Associate Professor of Education at Oxford (steven.puttick@education.ox.ac.uk). To register, please contact Amber.