Live from the Seec in Glasgow

This was my last RGS-IBG Annual Meeting before I hand over to Alastair Bonnett. As the meeting was cocooned within the UK-IGC Meetings in Glasgow it was a rather different event. In fact, my IGC odyssey had started the week before, when I presented a paper with a colleague from the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at Birmingham to a residential conference of the IGU Commission on the Dynamics of Economic Change that was held at the University of Birmingham. The theme of that conference was ‘Service Worlds: Employment, Organizations, Technologies’. The conference was well attended, with some 35 papers being presented over a four-day period. Many of the presenters did not continue on to the Congress in Glasgow, first hand evidence that the IGC is much more than those that make it to the meeting proper. Many other Commissions held pre- and post-IGC meetings in the UK. For many of us who regularly attend the RGS-IBG Meetings this was a first encounter with the International Geographical Union. Although this was my first IGC, it was not my first experience of an International Congress; I have attended three ICSEES Congresses, the equivalent for Slavonic and East European Studies, and was therefore not surprised by the number of no shows, which is fairly typical. In fact at times the Congress Programme rather resembled a Soviet-era restaurant menu: it gave the appearance of a feast of choices, but when you delved deeper you found a much more restricted choice or no choice at all! A number of times I was asked how many people actually registered. The vast Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre seemed to swallow up the Congress with room to spare. I am informed that some 1800 delegates registered for the Congress and that there were delegates from 81 different countries. The exhibition area had 50 stands, 60 per cent representing the geographical organizations from different countries and 40 per cent commercial interests. Of the 33 IGU Commissions and Task Forces, 30 organized events at the Conference. Of the 23 RGS-IBG Research Groups, 22 participated in the Congress. In fact, 75 per cent of the RGS-IBG Research Group sessions were held jointly with Commissions. In total, there were 580 sessions over the five days of the Conference. The first timers who enjoyed the IGC experience will be interested to know that there will be an IGU regional meeting at Brisbane, Australia in 2006 and the next Congress will be in Tunisia in 2008. For UK geographers this IGC was not a representative sample, as much of the activity was linked to the RGS-IBG Meetings. The centrepiece of the RGS-IBG contribution was a series of Plenary Sessions on the Wednesday, organized and chaired by Susan Smith (Durham), that offered a day of presentations under the theme of ‘Geography: looking forward’. While I found the day stimulating, I did wonder what the non-UK geographers in the audience made of it all; the nature of the questioning suggested a frustration with the abstract nature of our concerns. If nothing else, the day served to demonstrate just how nationally specific UK Geography and its concerns are (though it must be said that not all the speakers were from the UK). There were clearly many Geographies on display in Glasgow, a fact that was highlighted because the conference badges only had information on a delegate's country of origin, rather than their institutional affiliation. Given the current fluidity of the UK job market, more than once I found myself talking to someone not quite certain of where they were now working! It is interesting how important such information is within the hierarchical confines of UK Geography. I listened to the plenary papers with added interest as it is planned to publish a selection of them as a theme issue of Area, though it will be a task for the new editor. The day contrasted many different presentation styles, from the more traditional lecture to multi-media PowerPoint performances. As I was entertained by the PowerPoint displays and their impressive graphics, I thought: yes a picture can paint a thousand words, but that entire presentation has to work in 5000 words and black and white! This is a problem I am encountering in my own work. I have concocted a number of complicated PowerPoint presentations, using photographs, graphs and maps, all in glorious colour; however, when I sit down to write up the paper on which the presentation is supposedly based, I am stumped. What wowed the audience as a 15–20 minute PowerPoint presentation does not convert easily into a written paper. And that is before you worry about permissions for the various images that you ‘downloaded’ from the Web. The reality is that it is relatively easy to put together a presentation; the written paper is another matter. One paper in particular was beautifully illustrated with abstract artwork that seemed to convey well the gist of what was being said. That will be lost in the written text, perhaps making it less easy to follow. Increasingly, it seems, we are explicitly offering performances as much as papers (for some of our better speakers that was always the case) and my suspicion is that fewer and fewer of us actually turn up to conferences with written papers or actually produce papers based on our conference performances; instead we offer copies of our PowerPoint slides and/or a project web site. I am not sure if this matters, but in the output-driven environment of UK Geography, rave reviews for being ‘good live’ are not formally recognized. On the positive side, the experience of a Russian colleague at the Congress suggests that use of PowerPoint actually seems to help the process of communication at an international congress such as the IGC. But, on the negative side, it also seems to impose certain uniformity. I now await with interest the final written versions of the plenary papers and hope that not too much is lost in translation from live performance to black and white text. Hopefully, the papers will serve as the basis for conversations about the future of Geography in our various domestic settings, be it the UK or elsewhere

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• History and philosophy of geography 2003-2004

  Open Access•Carl Withers•Progress in Human Geography•2006

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