I have initiated two major collaborative initiatives during my PhD: an online symposium on ‘fast geologies and dynamic coasts’ and a double-session at the RGS-IGB Annual International conference on ‘the political geographies of ecologies in translation’ (details below). I have also organised the School of Geographical & Earth Sciences annual postgraduate conference and other research exchange activities for the postgraduate research community. During my MSc at the University of Oxford, I also co-organised a 2-day international conference on ‘Chinese techno-futures’ (details below also). For this, I achieved funding from three different research groups at the School of Geography and the Environment (University of Oxford), nominated and invited our keynote speaker Professor Susan Greenhalgh (Harvard University) and developed the themes used as topics for our different panel sessions.
2023 Convenor and Co-Chair, “Fast geologies and dynamic coasts: A research exchange between the University of Glasgow and the University of Hong Kong” (2-day online symposium), Online/University of Glasgow (15-16 August).
This online exchange aims to facilitate dialogue between researchers and practitioners from the two universities with interests in the intersections of urban, lithic, coastal, and marine environments, prompted by what we propose to call ‘fast geologies’ and ‘dynamic coasts’.
Fast geologies points to the rapid accumulations of materials produced, modified, extracted, and transported by humans, and their eventual insertion into the stratigraphic record;
Dynamic coasts points to the changing landforms and seascapes of coastal environments under conditions of urban and anthropogenic pressure.
In both respects, we aim to respond to anthropogenically-induced crises – whether of toxic waste, marine pollution, climate change, or sea level rise – that are unequal and uneven in both their origin and their impacts, and what we see as an urgent need, in turn, to respond to a crisis of imagination concerning these.
In view of this aim, we wish to share, and cultivate, ways in which fast geologies and dynamic coasts can be perceived and engaged. The workshop therefore invites an exchange of artistic, archival, curatorial, engagement, pedagogical, and research approaches between architects, artists, earth scientists, geologists, geographers, and marine scientists, and provides a platform for discussion and dialogue.
2022 Convenor and Co-Chair, “The political geographies of ecologies in translation” (double session), RGS-IBG Annual International Conference (31 August).
As ecological concepts are translated across different languages, including through the efforts of a translational ecology (Schlesinger, 2010), certain notions of ecology have also become foundational to the study of translation (Lynes, 2012). Such appeals to ecology can often be seen as appeals to specificity and concrete action amidst the universalising tendencies of the Anthropocene. Anna Tsing’s borrowing of ecologies ‘patch’ concept to label “acts of translation across varied social and political spaces” (Tsing, 2015: 62), for example, finds expression in her subsequent proposal for a ‘patchy Anthropocene’ (Tsing et al., 2019) intended as a reflexive framework for thinking across site and planetary scales. In translation studies, Michael Cronin’s recent proposal for an ‘eco-translation’ (2017) relies on a political ecology of translation intended to foreground the means rather than the ends of translation, which builds on and engages with his previous use of the term ‘translation ecologies’ (Cronin, 2003) and its uptake among Chinese scholars interested in using largely scientific concepts of ecology to analyse the field of translation studies (e.g. Xu, 2009). For Cronin, overcoming the “tyranny of ends over means” in translation by foregrounding the place, resilience and relatedness of translation is to resist its implication in extractive circulations that conceal the exploitation of human and nonhuman entities sustaining colonial and capitalist formations, and to identify the ways in which translation can function as a ‘renewable’ form of exchange (Cronin, 2017: 3).
Notwithstanding their affordances, the circulation of ecologies as the basis for translation thinking and practice visible in such approaches raises once more the question of how translation works as a complex, deeply political mode of knowledge production. That is, what are the ecologies animating, and animated by, translation?
We invite papers that focus on the translation of ecologies (however these terms are defined), in any region or time period, their political geographies, and/or the possibilities for ‘geographies beyond recovery’ that they inspire. We also encourage submissions that reflect on the history and politics of the mobilisation of political, post-humanist, scientific or other ecologies as foundations for thinking about translation. Papers may choose alternative framings through which to approach the topic of the translation of ecologies, whether drawing on notions of transformation (Benjamin, 1997; Lefevere, 2016), transfiguration (Gaonkar and Povinelli, 2003), transculturation (Pratt, 2007), or anything else.
2019 Co-organizer, “Chinese techno-futures” (2-day conference), China Health, Environment and Welfare network, University of Oxford (31 May-1 June).
Keynote addresses from Professor Susan Greenhalgh (Harvard University) and Professor Biao Xiang (University of Oxford) will address the role of artificial intelligence in new forms of techno-scientific governance, and the phenomenon of migrations of reproduction in China. Panels will focus on environmental governance, the role of technology in health and welfare, urban futures, and rural transitions, and feature a broad range of scholars from China, Europe, and the UK.