Knowledge's, Identities and Everyday Practices

No knowledge is objective. The ways in which we come to know and write the world are products of and reproduce particular power relations, and this in turn shapes understandings of different identities and everyday practices.

In this context, we are interested in questioning the ways in which we, as geographers, come to know the world in relation to the methodologies we use and the theories we draw on to interpret the world. We explore the ways in which people create knowledge about the world they live in, and the practices that stem from this knowledge. Our research intersects with ideas about citizenship, identity and agency, and the ways in which particular spaces and places are implicated in knowledge production.

Research projects and publications in the cluster which contribute to this theme include:

  • Environmental knowledges and sustainable practices (Riley); Critical environmental and medical humanities (Smith)
  • Political ecology, race, and slow violence (Gahman)
  • Conceptions of the ‘economic’, including rethinking conceptions of entrepreneurship, and solidarity-based economics, and the relations between money, society and economics (North)
  • Challenging the colonial legacies of academic knowledge production (Davies, Burrell, Gahman, Smith, Mallick, Dasgupta)
  • Medical power/knowledges in relation to lived experiences of obesity/fatness (Evans) and chronic illness (Evans and Rose)
  • Urban vocabularies and their everyday politics (Dasgupta)
  • Critical psychology and Science and Technology Studies (Smith)
  • Creative walking methods (Rose, Riley), and how pedestrian experiences enable critical engagement, community building and affective remapping of urban environments (Rose)
  • Creative participatory methods: film, visual art, photovoice, podcasting, and community participation (Smith, Gahman, Rose)
  • Anti-corporate open access publishing, collective/shared authorship, community-driven definitions of research ethics, relevance, and reciprocity (Gahman)
  • Everyday sexisms, street harassment and the loss of public space (Rose), Everywhere Islamophobia (Najib)
  • The everyday practices and products of social reproduction, patriarchal gender relations, and colonial-classist respectability politics (Gahman)
  • Marxist anti-colonial, post-colonial, and anti-capitalist challenges and alternatives to Eurocentric knowledge production (Mallick).

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