Art exhibitions, installations and provocations
We are delighted to feature a number of small artistic and creative interventions at the conference. These will be located at the RGS-IBG, in the Map Room, Director's Gallery, and at the Exhibition Road entrance.
A Change in the Climate
Liz Crow, Sarah Bell and Ellen Booth
Location: Map Room, RGS-IBG, throughout conference
A Change in the Climate is a visual arts project exploring the interweave of climate change and disability, echoing the nuanced fragility and strength within disabled bodies and nature alike. Devising a body of work that raises questions about climate issues from a disability-informed lens examining connections between humanity and nature, prompting urgent questions and reflections about what it means to be human in the face of the environmental crisis.
Collaborative Interventions: insights from our Collaborative Doctoral Programme
Catriona Sharples, Shreya Khaund and Emma Yandle
Location: Ambulatory, RGS-IBG (outside Drayson Room), throughout conference
Further details to be announced.
Debt Trap Nation
Katherine Brickell (King's College London, UK) and Melanie Nowicki (Oxford Brookes University, UK)
Location: Map Room, RGS-IBG, throughout conference
Take an illustrated journey into the debt trap faced by tens of thousands of families made homeless by an economy working against them. Described by Grace Blakeley as making "an irrefutable case for change", the exhibition is based on the 2025 book Debt Trap Nation: Family Homelessness in a Failing State by Katherine Brickell and Mel Nowicki. It charts how government choices have created a debt trap that is consuming mothers, children and survivors of domestic abuse, and is now driving English local authorities to bankruptcy.
Freeing Up Geography Futures
Cynthia Anyadi and Kaila Desai
Location: Exhibition Road, RGS-IBG, throughout conference
What does equality in Geography mean to you? This year, the conference is exploring different ideas, experiences, and manifestations of inequality – but Geography as a discipline itself has a long way to go. We all have different understandings of what equality in Geography means to us, and different perspectives on how we hope to achieve it.
At the Fi Wi Road CIC stand, we’re inviting you to share your idea of equality in Geography. Feel free to drop by to add a few reflective sentences to our community vision board, and see what others have to say too. Shaping a more equitable Geography starts with you!
‘Fi Wi Road (Our Road): Freeing Up Black Futures in Geography’ is an internship for Black-heritage Geography and Geoscience undergraduate students. It is led by Fi Wi Road CIC and supported by the RGS-IBG, the Geographical Association, and the British Society for Geomorphology.
Ghosted Routes: Queer Suburbia and the Afterlives of Walking
Marc Provins (Liverpool John Moores)
Location: Digital screen, Map Room, RGS-IBG, throughout conference
This digital short presents Queer Journeys Through Suburbia, a practice-led photographic project that explores how queer encounters and digital traces shape suburban geographies. Although my background is in photography rather than geography, spatial experience and the everyday landscapes of suburbia are central to my creative practice. Through walking, documenting, and reassembling images from these peripheral environments, the work engages with geographical questions around mobility, desire, memory, and the politics of place.
By focusing on queer movement through suburban environments, spaces often coded as heterosexual, private, and culturally invisible, the project directly addresses the geographies of inequality that structure where queer lives can be safely or visibly lived. The absence of queer spaces in suburbia produces forms of spatial inequality that push intimacy, identity and encounter into peripheral or digital routes. By making these ghosted paths visible, the work contributes to conversations about what more just, more inclusive suburban geographies might look like.
The short retraces a single GPS route generated through the Grindr app, returning to the site of a past encounter. By walking this route again with a camera, I explore how suburban spaces hold traces of desire, absence and return. The project uses fragments of landscape photographs, anonymised Grindr conversations, and performative self-portraits to map these layered spatial and emotional afterlives. Through this method, the suburban environment becomes a site of spectral return: a geography where desire, orientation, and memory fold back onto the everyday.
This asynchronous, pre-recorded presentation offers a visually driven, practice-based contribution to discussions of queer suburbia, digital spatialities, and the methodological possibilities of creative geographic research.
You can also see the film as part of Film Geographies, Thursday 3 September at 6.30pm, Ondaatje Theatre
Migrants in Action
Cathy McIlwaine (King's College London, UK) and collaborators
Further details to be announced.
Directors Gallery and Map Room
Sensory Lives Playhouse Tent
Katherine Brickell and Rosalie Warnock (King's College London, UK)
Time and location: Wednesday 2 September, 4.35pm-18.15pm, Drayson Room
The Sensory Lives project aims to better understand how homeless families with neurodivergent children experience living in Temporary Accommodation. In this workshop, learn about and experience a multi-sensory playhouse tent designed to communicate children’s lived experiences of B&Bs, hotels, and other forms of Temporary Accommodation. The playhouse tent hopes to re-centre children’s perspectives in discussions of homelessness and communicate neurological difference more inclusively in research and policy.
Trucking Lives
Debbie Hopkins, Kaveri Medappa, AC Davidson, Al James and Nicky Gregson
Location: Digital screen, Map Room, RGS-IBG, throughout conference
Lorry drivers move over eighty percent of goods in the UK, yet we - the public - know little about them. Commissioned by the Trucking Lives project, this exhibition explores the work and lived experience of UK lorry drivers, bringing their stories to the foreground through photography and testimony. The portraits and voices are presented across three themes: Seen Unseen, Together Apart and (Not) Getting By, each reflecting the experiences, practices and tactics of this vital workforce. The exhibition invites you to look in to and beyond the cab, and to see the people keeping freight moving.
The full exhibition is available online.
Trucking Lives is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, ES/W0009447/1. Sponsored by the RGS-IBG Transport Geography Research Group
What does landscape mean in my research? Can it be captured in a photograph?
Further details to be announced.