Events

The RACE Working Group is putting on regular events, and members also participate in academic and public fora.

Dr Azeezat Johnson Annual Workshop

One annual event is the RGS-IBG pre-conference workshop in late August/early September, which was renamed in honour of Dr Azeezat Johnson. Past themes have included:

Race in the Curriculum/Challenging Exclusionary Spaces (2016) RGS-IBG London
‘Beyond the talk’ – Decolonising Teaching and Research in Geography (2017) King’s College London
Stories of Butetown: Linking Spaces (2018) University of Cardiff
Resources For Black-Focused Research In The UK (2019) Black Cultural Archives London
(Post)COVID-19 Online Learning Opportunities & Dangers for Black Students & Staff (2020) online
Creating real opportunities for Black futures in Geography/Problem discussion for undergraduate and postgraduate students (2021) online
Geographies Beyond Recovery (2022) online
Black Feminist and Muslim Geographies/Celebrating Dr Azeezat Johnson’s Legacy (2023/2024) at QMUL with GEM
Beyond the leaky pipeline: student experiences, careers and community activism/Conversations and Networking/RACE Futures (2025)

Other RACE Workshop have included

Decolonising Methodologies in Global Translation: Post graduate student Workshop (2024) University of Leicester

Geographies of creativity/creative geographies

In 2025, Patricia Noxolo is chairing the RGS-IBG Annual Conference in Birmingham, UK. The theme for the conference is Geographies of creativivity/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.”

We will be posting more about the events surrounding the conference, soon.

Examples of other events