Course Update #2

Having reached the end of the second term of my Masters at Queen Mary, I’m confronted with a mixture of scary and exciting thoughts.

- All of my seminars have now finished.
- My dissertation idea is now well-developed, and the fieldwork will begin soon.
- No more twice-a-week commutes up to London.
- I need to work on two big pieces of coursework due at the beginning of May.
- I am already two thirds of the way through my course after only 6 months.

This Masters has really flown by, and yet I feel like I’ve managed to squeeze so many activities into the last 6 months, especially since the new year. This post will attempt to do justice to the superb experiences I’ve had this past term, both directly within my Masters course and through extracurricular opportunities.

Artistic adventures

This term has seen me take the last of my optional modules, ‘Art Performance and the City’. By exploring a wide range of works by artists and cultural practitioners taking place in cities – especially in London – the module engages with the ways that urban spaces are imagined, contested and performed.

Between the 10 seminars, assessments and associated excursions (see the next section of this post), we covered a breadth of thought-provoking and interconnected topics, including:

- Socially engaged (and site-specific) art
- Urban exploration and play
- Walking in the city
- Spirituality and ghosts
- Psychogeography
- Social housing
- Material transformations in the city

We would approach each topic not only by considering their wider theoretical background, but by focusing on particular examples of real-life artworks, interventions and performances. To help with this, we were fortunate enough to have visits from practitioners who have actively created such engagements, and thus were ‘experts’ in their particular fields.  These visitors were:

- Richard Wentworth: A well-known artist who works with sculpture and photography to explore the everyday materials and encounters that shape urban life. Richard talked candidly about his vision of cities (and London in particular) when he walks through them, and what seeing the city as an ‘archive’ can teach us about how urban life operates.
- Matt Adams: Co-founder of Blast Theory, an artist collective that uses to technology to create interactive performances and games in cities. He gave us some fantastic insights into the process and rationale behind Blast Theory’s urban interventions, and what the group ultimately aims to achieve through their work.
- David Roberts, whose performance art has taken place in social housing estates, with the purpose of creatively re-enacting their histories and building collective knowledge and experiences within the community through collaboration. In the same vein as his work, his presentation mixed together poetry, images and personal testimonies to explore the connections between people and the places they live, and raise questions about the politics of housing in London.

Aside from these visits, there were provocative activities in every single seminar, including visiting Queen Mary’s St Benet’s chapel; watching a video taken during the exploration of a hospital ruin; as well as various lively discussions and presentations about the artistic practices we were studying.

We’ve been given the chance to explore the topics that we ourselves find most interesting during the assessments. For the first assessment, we were asked to write 1,500 words about a particular cultural practice or practitioner of our choice, discussing how they might foster a critical understanding of art and urban spaces. I chose ‘psychogeography’ as my topic, wandering through its vague and meandering tradition and ultimately arguing that it is the contingency of the practice that continues its significance today, as artists, academics and others apply its concepts to both explore and creatively change urban landscapes.

The second assessment is due at the beginning of May, and involves our active participation in an artistic project of our choice to discuss in 3,500 words ‘how the geographies of cities are imagined, represented, performed and contested’ through particular cultural practices. For my essay I’m going to be looking at geocaching, which is a sort of worldwide hide-and-seek game where people hide containers with logbooks (and sometimes tradable items) in publicly accessible places, where people can find them using GPS coordinates alongside clues given by the creator. After doing a day’s fieldwork in Canterbury, I’m going to talk about geocaching in relation to psychogeography, in particular the themes of re-enchanting mundane environments and channelling the memories and emotions embedded in particular places.

In this fantastic range of activities the Art, Performance and the City module provided, I feel incredibly privileged that I’ve had the opportunity to study and experience so many works that interest and inspire me.

East End excursions

Both as part of my new module and outside my Masters course, I’ve been lucky enough this term to do a number of exciting activities around London, particularly in the East End.

In February I spent a cold, rain-soaked Saturday attending a protest outside City Hall against the privatisation of public spaces. The event was organised by Dr. Bradley Garrett –  a geographer known for his work on urban exploration – alongside a host of other speakers and figures such as Will Self, Mark Thomas, Anna Minton and Sian Berry. Despite the weather it was a great success, as we cleverly flouted the rules of this particular privately-owned public space by gathering in a group of more than 100, taking commercial photography and protesting under the guise of a ‘walking tour’.

Less than a week later I found myself staying late after my seminar at Queen Mary to go to another extracurricular event. This was a theatrical performance called ‘Re: Home’ in a small, makeshift venue in Hackney Wick, which revisited the lives of residents of the former Beaumont social housing estate in Leyton, who were interviewed for a theatre project called ‘Home’ 10 years ago.

I was offered a free ticket thanks to the generosity of a friend’s flatmate who was ill, and I’m so glad I took the opportunity to go. The script ingeniously weaved together the stories of individual residents, while the four performers gave uncanny re-enactments of the body language and testimonies of the multitude of residents that the performance covered. Shifting swiftly between contrasting personalities, whilst bouncing around the pine and corrugated steel of the former warehouse into which the theatre was crafted, it felt as though the Beaumont residents themselves were inhabiting the room with their stories. Using clever lighting and stage design, projections then imprinted these stories on the space, gradually assembling to create a sort of community mural at the end that proclaimed like an anthem to all that Beaumont represented for the people who called the estate their home.

While the protest and the performance certainly related to multiple topics within my course, twice this term I’ve found myself exploring the East End as part of the Art, Performance and the City module. The first was based in the area around Queen Mary’s Mile End campus, in which we were asked in groups to play the role of archaeologists from the future, gathering found objects in locations marked on a map we were given beforehand. The goal here was to create an ‘archive’ of the city, thinking about what material ‘things’ would best characterise the urban spaces we live in today. As well as being a fantastic opportunity to spend time in areas around campus I hadn’t thoroughly explored before, we also found a few interesting objects, including a ‘g’ page from a very old dictionary, and half of a cannabis grinder. We then discussed what we’d found in a seminar a few days later alongside Richard Wentworth, talking about how the design of the future archaeologist task itself is a clever way to get people to think about their city differently.

The old dictionary page





An area we walked through, near where we found the dictionary page.



For a different Art, Performance and the City seminar, we were asked to explore a little further from home – in the area of Leyton and Leytonstone in East London. Armed with maps, receivers and headphones, we embarked on an audiowalk called LINKED, which leads participants through the communities torn apart by the construction of the M11 link road (the A12) in the mid-1990s. Dotted around the area are radio transmitters mounted on street furniture, which the receivers automatically tune into when they are within a close enough range. What can then be heard is an evocative mixture of personal testimonies, music and sound effects that tell the stories of people whose lives were directly affected by the road’s construction, as houses were demolished, police undertook forceful evictions, and vociferous protests ensuedby residents and environmentalists. Despite doing the walk on a very cold (but sunny) February afternoon, everyone in my group thoroughly enjoyed the walk. There was a certain thrill when the sounds and echoes of the transmissions started to filter through, and listening to the stories in the locations where they took place only a couple of decades before was a very powerful experience. It allowed you to imagine the how the landscape was before – through descriptions of the buildings, the people, the events – and think about the hidden histories that lie just beneath the surface of the environments in which we live our everyday lives.

The last London-based excursion I undertook this term wasn’t part of my course, but was advertised by my course convenor and touched on one of my course’s key themes, public space. After helping out at the Masters reception evening in Queen Mary’s School of Geography, I met my friend Rosa and we headed to Bethnal Green for a talk and discussion about public space, hosted by the London Anarchist Federation. As well as contributing my own knowledge on the subject from Geography, I was intrigued to hear what an ‘anarchist’ perspective on public space might entail. As a group who opposes both the forces of capitalism and the state, the main speakers predominantly evoked the idea of the ‘commons’ – essentially the ideal of public spaces that are owned collectively and accessible to everyone. They then pointed towards the numerous examples of privatisation of public spaces in the city, and why opposing these trends is crucial for social movements such as anarchism to make their mark.  After the two talks, we then chatted in small groups about our own understandings and experiences of public spaces, before thinking more collectively about what action can be taken to establish the kinds of public spaces we want. While I can’t say that my viewpoint aligned exactly with many of the group, there was definitely plenty of fruitful crossover, and the talk definitely gave me plenty to think about.

Although it’s sad that I’m no longer going to have the fantastic adventures that my course modules have given me, I’m still hoping to have a lot of fun, exciting and interesting experiences in London and beyond in the coming months – not least through my dissertation fieldwork.

Dissertation decisions

At the beginning of this term, I was still torn between two very appealing ideas on which I could base a dissertation.

The first idea was to extend my research from my undergraduate degree on the regulation of busking, but this time looking at how it’s being regulated nationwide through Public Space Protection Orders, rather than focusing on one particular licensing scheme.

This was enticing as I’d already done a ton of relevant reading on the topic, which would have saved me a lot of time and energy. Moreover, my supervisor has some very in-depth and relevant knowledge on the regulation of urban space, and it’s a topic I knew that I loved researching.

Despite all this I opted for my second idea – something I’d been itching to research and write about for a long time, yet hadn’t had the opportunity: looking at video game environments, and how they are designed and inscribed with stories that the player can experience through (psychogeographical) exploration. Not only was this a fresh and exciting topic for me, but also for geography as a discipline too. It asks thought-provoking and current questions – on the relationship between the virtual and the embodied, what agency players can have in heavily designed and coded environments, and on how places (both virtual and corporeal) can tell stories.

A pile of books in my room that encompasses my dissertation topic pretty well!



I’ve now done a fair amount of reading and planning around this topic, which culminated in presenting my dissertation idea to staff and peers at the Masters Dissertation Conference. It was well-received, and I was happy to see so many people enthusiastic about the topic and sharing their thoughts.

Throughout April I’ll be working on my full research proposal to hand in as a piece of coursework in May, and after that it’ll be time to start my fieldwork. This will consist mostly of autoethnography, where I’ll be playing walking simulator games myself and recording my thoughts, feelings and experiences as I traverse the game environments. However, I’m excited to say that I’ll say be doing interviews with game designers too, which will help me to understand their outlook when crafting virtual worlds for the player.

Having already made several contacts in the industry during a couple of game events that I went to last week, alongside people I know through friends, I’m really looking forward to getting started.

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As you can see, this term has been an exciting and busy one for me. I’m actually quite sad that it’s over now, especially because now that my seminars have finished I won’t be spending as much time with the lovely, interesting and generally brilliant people I’ve met during my Masters course. Sharing seminars, lunchtimes and field trips has been such a pleasure that I’ve become accustomed to over the last two terms, which I’ll miss a great deal.

I’ll also generally miss learning about such captivating topics, and the teaching itself which has been excellent.

Onwards and upwards though, and I’ll be sure to do another update in the near future as I grapple with this next more independent phase of my Masters course.

MA Cities and Cultures class, 2015-16



Course Update #1

I am now getting towards the end of my first term on the Cities and Cultures masters course at Queen Mary. I’ve finished all three pieces of coursework due in this term, which is a great relief, although now I have to think about planning for two large hand-ins in January after the winter break. Lurking in the background amidst all this is the d word (that’s ‘dissertation’), which I have to be considering even at this early stage. Before I talk more about what the next steps are, though, I’ll say a bit about what I’ve been doing during the course so far.

My course is made up of 4 modules alongside the dissertation.  These are:

- Geographical Thought and Practice, a compulsory module running across the first two terms that gives a grounding in geographical theory, writing and research methods.

- Cities, Space and Power, which runs only for the current term, with the final coursework deadline in January. This module focuses on the public spaces of cities, and started off by thinking about what ‘public space’ and ‘public’ mean, and how modern Western understandings of public space arose in the 17^th century. We then looked at how public space could be understood from a non-Western perspective, using the post-colonial city of Calcutta and how it is represented in film and other art. In this last section of the module, the focus shifts to contemporary cities, and issues that arise from different uses and regulations of public spaces.

- Cultural Geography in Practice, another module only running this term with the final coursework hand-in in January. So far, we have looked at how geographers have used creative practices as a form of research and dissemination in cultural geography, particularly through collaborations with institutions such as museums and art galleries. In this second half of the term, the focus is more on the concept of ‘home’, including how this is affected by migration, and how creative projects have tried to communicate geographical ideas about the complexity of home as a space of belonging, shelter and rootedness, but also potentially detachment, loneliness and violence.

- Art, Performance and the City, a module that will be running next term. This will look at the relationship between art and the city through urban cultural practices (e.g. urban exploring and walking) and projects by artists in London.

The material for these modules is organised around a series of 2-hour seminars, that I have once a week for each module. This currently means that I only to go into university twice a week, which is incredibly useful and money-saving given that I’m living at home and commuting into London. For each of these seminars we have reading to do in advance, so that we can have an engaged discussion on the material during the 2-hour slots. Apart from coursework, this is my main consistent source of workload. This is typically what I’ll be doing at the library in Canterbury during the week when I don’t have seminars.

The seminar format itself is fantastic. At Cambridge, the Geography undergraduate course is based solely on lectures and small follow-up supervisions, which meant that there was limited opportunity to discuss issues amongst a wider group of people, and between students ourselves. In this masters course, not only is there ample opportunity to talk about our own perspectives on particular topics on the reading, but because the students taking the modules are so diverse (with some modules including people from theatre/performance studies, exchange students and those with backgrounds in a variety of subjects), the seminars are incredibly thought-provoking. I love being able to hear from such a wide range of positions.

As well as seminars, field trips have also been an important part of our modules. For Cities, Space and Power, we had a 2-hour guided walk of Edwardian London, in which we navigated today’s streets while looking at printouts of maps from the Edwardian period. This was a clever and interesting way of looking at some of the changes in public space during this historical period (such as the growth of green ‘squares’ in London), which we could see traces of both in the physical environment and on the maps. We could also see how public space had changed since the 1700s to create what we know as London today.

In Cultural Geography in Practice, we visited the Geffrye Museum of the Home in Hoxton. This museum uses display rooms to show how the interiors of homes have changed since the 1600s, and hosts other exhibitions and events that look at the concept of ‘home’ – as much more than just a ‘house’, but a place with emotional and symbolic importance. We’re fortunate enough to be taught by Professor Alison Blunt for this part of the module, who has worked closely with the Geffrye Museum and whose work on home has been path-breaking within geography.




An striking outdoor feature at the front of the Geffrye Museum called 'The Last Hug'

And finally for Geographical Thought and Practice, we visited and learnt about the Jewish cemetery on the Queen Mary campus. This is an extremely interesting site that says a lot about the migrant community of the East End of London, and the university’s relationship with it.

As I said before, I’ve had three pieces of assessed work so far, one for each of my modules this term. The first was a 1000-word definition of public space for Cities, Space and Power, which you can read more about here.

The first page of my definition of public space

For Cultural Geography in Practice, we had a 2000-word essay about the values and challenges of creative public geography work (such as exhibitions, collaborations, etc.)



Spider diagram for Cultural Geography in Practice essay

And finally for Geographical Thought and Practice, our 2500-word task was to write summaries of two of the ideas/approaches we’d looked at so far, and then write about how these can be applied to our own research interests.

As you can see, it’s been a busy but very enjoyable first term so far. It’s going to stay this way in the months ahead, starting with a 4000-word essay and a 3500-word exhibition proposal to submit after the winter break! As I mentioned before, the dissertation will also start to gradually tighten its grip on my life. This is a 15,000-word piece based on research I’ll be doing from about May onwards, which counts for a third of my overall mark. It’s very important. At this stage I’m still very torn between two ideas for what I’ll be researching, but I’ll definitely be talking more on the blog in the coming months about what I eventually decide to do.

What I can say for certain is that I really, really love this course. It couldn’t really be better matched to what I’m interested in. I’m also very impressed with both the Geography Department and the institution as a whole at Queen Mary, and I feel lucky to have met so many kind, interesting, diverse, and down-to-earth people since starting my masters here.

New Beginnings

Almost exactly three months ago today I was striding out of the Senate House in Cambridge, one hard-earned BA Geography degree in my hand.

 

Fast forward to today and I am already starting a new chapter in my academic life at Queen Mary University in London. My new course, an MA in Cities and Cultures, will consist of effectively everything I’m most interested in within Geography, with a creative scope that will give me the opportunity to satisfy my artistic urges.

 

I can’t believe how lucky I was to find such an ideal course. I’m genuinely very excited to get to grips with it all.

 

Getting to this point was a bit of a rollercoaster, though. I had to summon up some post-degree discipline and knuckle down on my application, which was quite a long process. After seemingly waiting ages for a response, and then a laborious back-and-forth with the admissions team, I finally got my unconditional offer – two weeks before the induction week and three before the start of full term!

 

I had to make an unusually large number of important decisions in these couple of weeks. Accommodation, finances, whether to defer my place for a year. It was a whirlwind of anxiety and stress, and (perhaps foolishly) something I didn’t anticipate. In a strange way my life routinely flashed before my eyes, and this panic kept descending on me that the decisions I was making would affect the rest of my life. I probably should have been more philosophical about it and recognised how even mundane choices that we make every day alter how our lives play out, and life goes on regardless. I guess the short timeframe for the decisions didn’t help, particularly as I haven’t had to make such seemingly big decisions in quite a long time.

 

I managed to end up on the other side in one piece, though, eventually concluding that I would do the course this year while living at home. When I calculated the costs it made much more sense than living in London, and I wasn’t having much luck in finding places to live there anyway, especially so close to the start of term.

 

It was a huge relief when everything finally fell into place, meaning that last week I was able to enjoy ‘Welcome Week’ at Queen Mary without worry. I’ve gotten to know the campus and the library well already, both of which are very nice, modern environments that have excellent facilities. It makes Cambridge seem very archaic. I was also really impressed by the Geography Department at their Masters Induction Day, which seems well-organised and particularly supportive. This is in contrast to Cambridge, where I felt that while individual people within the department cared about us, the department as a whole wasn’t invested as much as they should have been in making things work better for the students. After last week’s induction day I left thinking that Cambridge could definitely learn a lot from how things work at Queen Mary.

 

It was fantastic to meet the other people on my course too. It’s so interesting to hear about the diverse backgrounds that people come from, both in terms of location and previous areas of study. It’ll be great to see the different perspectives they have on the things we cover during the year.

 

You can read more about the course itself here, but I’ll say a bit about it now, as well as the individual modules I’ll be taking.

 

The course itself is a combination of urban and cultural geography, with a particular focus on the role of art/creative practices and urban politics in how the city is shaped.

 

The Cities, Space and Power module looks principally at public space – a key arena in which politics, creative expression and everyday life interact and are underwritten by relationships of power. The module uses the examples of eighteenth-century London, Calcutta and other contemporary cities to explore arguments concerning the regulation and control of public space, the division between public and private spaces, and how public space relates to a broader sphere of public life in Western and colonial/postcolonial settings. I’m especially looking forward to this module due to its relevance for my work on the regulation of busking and the politics of public space, as well as its connections to my favourite paper last year at Cambridge on discipline and social regulation.

 

Cultural Geography in Practice is a module that really breaks down the boundaries between geography and art. It essentially looks at how geographers both produce and interpret art, and how artists think geographically in their work. This is important because creative practices both represent and are performed within particular types of spaces, which affects the meanings that they consequently produce. Within this module I’m hoping to delve further into my interest in psychogeography, one of my principal interests for study, and how this idea is embodied in artworks such as video games and music. I’m also excited about the fact that one of the assessed pieces of work for this module is an exhibition proposal, which involves planning an exhibition that aims to communicate geographical ideas through the creative presentation of materials such as objects, artworks, archival materials and audio. It’s brilliant that I’ll have the opportunity to bring together my love for art and my academic interests.

 

This should also be the case for my final optional module, Art, Performance and the City. This module will involve engaging with urban spaces and practices through the eyes of artists and the cultural practices of walking and exploring. It is also rooted in London’s East End – in the locations around Queen Mary – looking at urban cultures and the work of artists in the local area. To me it seems that this module could encompass both of my primary interests in busking and psychogeography, which is exciting. But this module is taught over the second semester (from January), unlike the previous two which are taught in the first, so I’ll have to wait a while for it.

 

The course also contains one compulsory module, Geographical Thought and Practice, which gives a detailed overview of the key concepts and research methods in geography as a discipline. This is to help us with the dissertation project we must undertake during the final term and over the summer of next year, which counts for one third of the overall mark (each module counts for one sixth).

 

So this coming year is going to be a busy one for me, but also one where I’m completely satisfied that I’ll be working on things that I am truly passionate about. I’m thrilled that by next year I’ll be one step closer to where I want to be, which is the somewhat vague and idealistic goal of working both in academia as a geographer and making a difference in the world creatively through art. The great thing about this course is that it opens doors both to further PhD study and work in the creative/cultural sectors, so to me it can only be a benefit.

 

As you will have noticed by now, I’m currently writing on my new blog. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time now, but the all-consuming Cambridge lifestyle never gave me the time to get started. Taking inspiration from friends and others I know, I think it’ll be a great way for me to stay motivated and focused my work, help what I’ve learnt sink in, and allow people to see what I’ve been doing.

 

The plan is for the blog to be a bit of everything really – potentially something between a portfolio, a scrapbook and a diary. I’m certainly expecting to share what I work on during the Cities and Cultures course, which should be a nice combination of academic-y and creative projects. I’d also like to publish any arty things I do outside the course, which will probably include music-related stuff and more experimental ventures such as psychogeographical walks, experimental travel, and any visual ideas I have. Lastly, I want it to also act as a sort of journal, where I can write about my thoughts on anything and everything. For these types of posts I’m thinking about using the title ‘Some thoughts on…’ followed by the topic, so it’ll be easy to see which posts are updates on my work and which are mental ramblings put into words.

 

The posts won’t all be this long, too. I really want to try to be concise in my writing because it’s something I’ve always struggled with, and something that will also make the posts more readable. Time limitations due to my academic work should hopefully help with this. It would be good if updating the blog helps my writing and communication skills generally, but we’ll have to see about that!

 

As for how often I’ll post, I’m sure this will vary and I’m not going to be too strict about it – unlike my previous travel blog which I updated religiously every single day of my Europe trip! I’m aiming for at least a couple of posts a month, accounting for all the reading and coursework my Masters will entail.

 

I actually already have my next couple of posts finished, and another few in the pipeline. They’re going to be long (I told you I’m not good at being concise), and based on things I did over the summer. So look out for those to appear in the next couple of weeks or so – I’ll make sure to post them on social media.

 

I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes. It would be great to see you there for future posts.