Hah, so much for 'public' geography - far too long since I last posted anything.  In fairness, I've been mostly marking, but other exciting things have been going on as well.

Let's take things in some kind of order.  Monday last week James, Jane & I went down to the Peripatetic Practices workshop organised by  Jennie Middleton and Hannah Macpherson at UCL.  This was a really cool event with a slightly daft title - it was all about walking methods.  Met a bunch of interesting people working on similar (and entirely dissimilar) things with a walking theme.  Plus we were restricted to ten minute papers, which meant no one had a chance to be boring, the curse of any gathering of academics.  Jane got a chance to hook up with a lot of the people she'd emailed before Christmas when putting together the review paper which will be coming out in the journal Geography Compass shortly.  Stand out papers for me were: Kathryn King from Islington Council, talking about a walking guidebook they'd produced to target 20-40something professional women;  Katrina Brown from the Macauley Institute in Aberdeen talking about their work on right-to-roam in Scotland (using very cool helmet-mounted video cameras); and Andrew Clarke from Leeds, who's got even more money out of the ESRC than we have to do a really fantastic piece of ethnography using walked interviews.

Anyway, rescue geography seemed to go down pretty well, though as ever I think some of the mapping technology intimidates people a little.  On Wednesday I was at Birmingham City University (formerly UCE) which is based over in Perry Barr at the invitation of my friend Peter Larkham.  An interesting audience because they're more practice-focussed with a number of people coming at things from a planning point of view.  So there were lots of interesting questions about the potential broader applications of the technique.  A certain amount of healthy cynicism too, with the suggestion that planners wouldn't be particularly interested, although developers might well be.

On which subject, our discussions with MADE have progressed really well.  Steph and I have been playing with the Mscapes software developed down at Bristol - we'll definitely put something together with this for the end-of-project exhibition.  That exhibition is now the subject of an application to the Arts Council which we're leading, though MADE are, let's be honest, doing most of the work.  Not only is this designed to pay for a two week 'laboratory' demonstrating the techniques to stakeholder groups, but also to launch a series of commissions to artists to respond to Eastside and the rescue geography project more generally.  This would also pay for some of Dan Burwood's photographic work that has been developing alongside what we've been doing.

So exciting times of late.  James and I are off to the Association of American Geographers Conference in Boston next week - we'll spread the word to another continent!  When I get back I have to steer the Arts Council bid through our Finance Department.  The good news is that our new Head of School is keen - he does a lot of bids to bodies like the Heritage Lottery Fund as part of his role with the Lapworth Geological Museum, which is his baby in many ways.  So it's all good.  Will report on AAG when James & I get back.