Chair's theme
The Chair's theme for the 2025 Annual International Conference is Geographies of Creativity/Creative Geographies.
The Chair's theme has been selected by the Chair of Conference, Professor Patricia Noxolo (University of Birmingham, UK), in conversation with the Society's Research Groups and with the Research and Higher Education Committee.
Geographies of Creativity/Creative Geographies
Whether it’s the capacity to create new places out of old, or new spatial relations where none existed before, or to create beautiful things – artworks, writing, architecture, music, dance – in places and across spaces, creativity seems almost too fundamental to focus on.
But what are the spatialities of creativity? The geographies of creative practice – how artwork sustains globalised flows of money for example, or how music reshapes buildings and bodies, or how creative writing nurtures geopolitics – are sometimes hard to theorise and bear witness to. Yet creative practice is crucial both to physical processes and to human experiences: we need to understand it.
More fundamentally, if there sometimes seems to be too little creativity in our habitually over-consuming world, how do geographers become more creative? Is 21st century Geography a truly creative discipline? At a time when our world really needs a creative vision, to deal with new challenges in new ways, this conference theme asks for nothing less than a creative re-visioning of our discipline.
Patricia Noxolo, University of Birmingham, UK.
