It's not quite true to say that I'm just back from Boston as I got into Heathrow at 5am on Monday, but today is certainly the first day where I've had
a) some free time
b) sufficient freedom from jetlag/a cold
to actually sit and update the blog.

The annual conference of the Association of American Geographers is quite a big deal in the academic geography scene, about five thousand or so people herded into a large hotel (or three hotels in this year's case) for four days.  There are papers being presented from 8am to 6pm every day, with keynote talks going on 'til 9pm.  If you actually tried to go to all of this you'd go totally stir crazy, so the longer you've been doing the job, the more time to spend hooking up with people, having informal meetings and drinking a lot (a lot) of coffee.

James & I were giving two papers - he presented our 'rhythm' film, which comes from another project, and I talked about rescue geography.  My paper was part of Chris Perkins' Subversive Cartographies session, which ran for most of Thursday afternoon.  Loads of really great papers and a packed room - loads of people having to stand/sit on the floor in the first session.  Stand outs for me: Denis Wood's 'Lynch Debord' (biggest 'in' joke of the conference); Bill Cartwright doing stuff on Web 2.0 mapping as part of environmental protests in Australia, where he came out against the lack of emotion shown in the end products as compared with hand drawn materials; James Craine & Stuart Aitken talking about their project to undermine the corporatisation of universities through a dis-orientation map for freshers. 

Rescue Geog went down well, bunch of really supportive comments/questions afterwards.  Interesting chat with Chris Perkins, session organiser and colleague of James at Manchester, which made me feel a bit less guilty about using Google maps - apparently the Open Street Map people have started working with the Ordnance Survey on some things, so even the most subversive sometimes get sucked in by 'the man' it seems.  (I'm sure OSM people would heavily take me to task on this.)  We were also asked whether we'd be interested in contributing to a special issue of a journal as a result of the session - basically a bunch of people working on the same kind of topic all write articles which come out at the same time in an academic magazine.  This would be quite a nice way of establishing rescue geog within the broader community of cartographers - something which would be new to myself and James as neither of us really consider ourselves to be map scholars by trade.

But, anyway, a good time was had by all.  I guess I should probably stop here and upload the latest interview track Jane has produced, cos she was busy working while James & I were swanning around Boston.

Oh and the Arts Council application with MADE is almost ready to go - Julia is doing last minute tweaks to the budget then we can send it off.  Exciting times, even if I have been a bit distracted this week by helping a PhD applicant finish off his application for funds from the ESRC.  He wants to use walking interviews (surprise, surprise given that I'm involved) to explore spaces of exclusion in the city, using 18-29 year old Muslim men as his case study.  This would be a really cool project and fits into the broader rescue geog philosophy, so fingers crossed he gets the funds.