Critical and Creative Geographies

The Critical and Creative Geographies research group draws together social science, geohumanities and critical GIS research at Leicester. The group is organised around three overlapping research themes: Environmental Governance and Social Justice; Planetary Urban and Rural Transformations; and Everyday Geopolitical Lives.

The School has a long tradition of critical research which questions established understandings by offering a contrapuntal perspective, looking at the world outside conventional frames of reference. This work addresses substantive research questions in many different sub-disciplines of geography, but what unites it is this critical perspective and an application of innovative and creative methodologies.

We have an excellent track record of securing research funding (see the research themes for details) from UK research councils, major charities, government departments, the European Union, international trusts and foundations, and a wide variety of other external sources.

The group is very active: we are editors of journals (Geoforum; Geography Compass; Social and Cultural Geography); we sit on editorial boards (Emotion, Space and Society; Geography Compass; Transactions in GIS); and we sit on the ESRC Peer Review College (Lees; Phillips). Staff and postgraduates in the group are active in several Royal Geographical Society research groups. In particular, we play a key role in leading the RACE Working Group of the RGS (Byron and Last).

Collaborators

Our research is supported by a state-of-the-art Creative Research Methods Lab, a Virtual Reality Theatre, and the Pete Fisher Unit for GIScience.