a bit of biography

I’m Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford, UK, and my university home page is here.  You can find me on Twitter @ProfGillian.

I’ve also worked in departments of geography at Queen Mary, University of London, at Edinburgh University and at The Open University, and I’ve been a visiting professor at the universities of Pretoria, Karlstad and California at Berkeley.

I’m interested in all of the key terms of that the academic discipline of geography focusses on: place, landscape, space. I think all of these notions are fundamental to how people experience their lives in specific locations and times. Particular understandings of place, landscape and place can be implicit or explicit; they can be encoded in cultural texts like paintings or films or songs; they can be articulated through argument or dreams or feelings.

I’ve done some fairly abstract theorising about spatiality in particular, often drawing on Foucauldian and feminist arguments. But I’ve also worked with a lot of particular examples of people’s entanglements with place and space especially, from community arts groups working in Edinburgh in the mid-1990s, to how people visiting the centres of two medium-sized towns in the UK experienced those urban environments, to how family photographs maintain familial networks over space and across time.

I have a particular interest in how places, spaces and landscapes are represented in visual form, or through visual objects – in things like landscape paintings or documentary photographs – and in how different places invite different ways of seeing. Most recently I’ve focussed on how digital visualising technologies of many kinds – from smartphone apps to digital animation software – is changing how we experience cities especially.

Finally, I have a longstanding interest in visual research methods. My book Visual Methodologies is published by Sage and has gone through five editions since its first in 2001.