The International Conference of Critical Geographers takes place every three years and its location pushes us to think critically about geography. The organising committee, though including many geographers from American and Britain, have committed to not holding the event in the territory of the Anglo-American heartland of the English language, which increasingly dominates the international landscape of bibliometrics, and is the heartland of so many recent (neo)imperial endeavours. Past conferences have taken place in Mexico, Mumbai and Frankfurt; this year it took place in Ramallah, in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank. The idea, and reality, of the conference was that getting to the host venue would teach you as much about critical geography as any paper or presentation.
There were also a series of brilliant keynotes, focusing on the experience of women in the occupied territories, but also seeking broader parallels, with First Nation North American “Indian” populations, and through panels addressing queer, critical race, and gender studies. Through a recurrent focus was on the connections between occupation, settlement, and colonialism. This chimed perfectly with my research interests on interwar India. My paper was in a panel on anti-imperialism, drawing together presentations on radical Punjabi politics, resistance to early colonial Caribbean colonialism, anti-imperial struggles in South America, and my paper on connections between Communist and Congress activists in 1930-40s Delhi. This feeds into the book I will be writing during my British Academy Fellowship over the following year entitled Spaces of Anti-Colonialism.
Dr Stephen Legg, School of Geography
Posted on Tuesday 25th August 2015