Geography as a shared project: Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Medals and Awards ceremony 2012

Geography as a shared project:Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Medals

and Awards ceremony 2012geoj_477 279..286

MICHAEL PALIN*, ALASTAIR FOTHERGILL, CHARLES WITHERS, GILLIAN ROSE,STUART LANE AND CLAUDIO VITA-FINZI

*Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), 1 Kensington Gore, London SW7 2ARE-mail: [email protected]

The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) annual Medals andAwards recognise achievements in researching, communicating and teaching a wide range ofgeographical knowledge. The speeches and citations are a record of the ceremony of 2012. Withcomments by the BBC’s Alastair Fothergill, and Professors Charles Withers, Gillian Rose, Stuart Laneand Claudio Vita-Finzi, the speeches encompass historical geography, inspiring audiences, domesticvisual culture, flood hazards and climate change. President Michael Palin introduces the ceremony,emphasising the breadth and relevance of geographical research.

KEY WORDS: disseminating research, impact, physical geography, human geography, teaching andlearning, methodology

President’s introduction

M ichael Palin: I’d like to welcome all of you tothis highlight of the Society’s year, the pre-sentation of the Society’s Awards and

Medals for 2012. It has been one of my most enjoy-able tasks as President of the Society to be able tohand out these awards. On the principle that it isbetter to give than to receive, I must say it makes upfor all those years spent in the audience at schoolwatching a stream of swots and goody-goodies troop-ing up to the stage for prizes you know you reallycould have won yourself if you’d only been a bitbrighter.

One of my very few experiences as recipient ratherthan donor of awards was winning the GeneralKnowledge Cup at Birkdale School in Sheffield, anoccasion somewhat compromised by the eccentricityof our headmaster, Mr Heeley. The General Knowl-edge Cup was the largest of the trophies and the last tobe awarded. After my headmaster read each citationhe would just scrumple up the paper and drop it in theGeneral Knowledge Cup, so by the time I stepped upfor my moment of glory I received a silver cup full ofwaste paper.

A similar occasion took place in my gap yearbetween school and university. Gap years were not inthose days a chance to visit Rajasthan or do socialwork in Samoa. I spent most of my gap year about four

and a half miles from where I lived but I threw myselfinto Amateur Dramatics and was rewarded with anappearance at the West Yorkshire Cooperative Societ-ies Drama Festival in Bradford. Myself and DoreenBarraclough played tortured guerrilla fighters awaitingexecution and almost entirely on the strength of ourhideously realistic make-up were awarded the top twoacting prizes. As I proudly collected my shield fromthe Director of the Festival, he leaned across to meand whispered, ‘Can you bring it back afterwards;they’ve sent us footballers.’ And indeed looking downI could see that instead of the masks of comedy andtragedy there was, on my shield, a pair of danglingfootball boots.

What pleases me most about today’s ceremony isthat it shows what a wide range of issues and activitiesare covered under the heading of geography. We shallbe honouring among other things, cultural geography,wildlife photography, mapping and remote sensing ofland use, the gender geography of a reception class-room, the preservation of Antarctic exploration sites,and the producers and presenters who bring thehuman and natural world so effectively to life, on ourtelevision screens.

Geography is the most lively of subjects, and theseawards reflect that. Geography is for everybodybecause it is about everybody. An understanding ofgeography illuminates every corner of our daily life,from the moment we wake up in the morning. Where

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The Geographical Journal, Vol. 178, No. 3, September 2012, pp. 279–286, doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2012.00477.x

The Geographical Journal Vol. 178 No. 3, pp. 279–286, 2012 © 2012 The Authors. The Geographical Journal © 2012 Royal Geographical Society(with the Institute of British Geographers)

we live, why our houses are built the way they are,why we’re eating what we’re eating for breakfast.Mundane but vital elements of life such as our trans-port needs, our energy needs, our weather, our watersupply, our choice of holiday break, are all things thatto a geographer would be a source of curiosity insteadof a source of bewilderment. Geographers, I alwaysthink, have that much more control of their lives.

Geography is the study of the surface of the planet onwhich we live. Not knowing something of how ourplanet functions, is like living in a house and notknowing where the fuse box is. Not absolutely essentialuntil there’s a problem. Today we are celebratingproblem solvers. People who have risen to the chal-lenge of doing something better than it’s been donebefore. Of finding new ways to answer questions ofhow geographical knowledge is gained, assimilatedand communicated.There is still so much that we don’tunderstand, and it is very fitting that today, here at theSociety, we can pay tribute to those whose work ispushing the frontiers of our knowledge a little furtherback, and raising the bar for all those who come after.

And these awards today are not, mercifully, a matterof points scored. This is no Eurovision Song Contest –though you could make out a case for Eurovisionas teaching us some relevant lessons. The Greeks’maximum points for the Cypriot entry and the Cypri-ots’ maximum votes for the Greek entry being farmore to do with geography than musical quality.

This evening the winner is the quality of work,much of which depends on not just one but manypeople working in inter-connected fields of research,nurturing and fostering an interest and understandingof the discipline which brings us all here today.

As I pass the baton on to the next President I hopethat I can say that we have been, and always will be,a Society which will continue to offer the best supportwe can for all those working for the better understand-ing of the science of geography. On my way here I sawa sign outside a hardware shop which I thought weshould put up outside our door: ‘If We Don’t Have it,You Don’t Need It’.

I hope all of you here today, those coming up toreceive their awards and those who have simply cometo celebrate the achievements that are being recogn-ised, will always see the Royal Geographical Society(with IBG) as their home; and that we may return theinspiration that you have brought us today.

Her Majesty the Queen has approved the awardsof our two highest honours – the two Gold Medalsof equal standing. This year the Founder’s Medalis awarded to Professor Charles Withers and thePatron’s Medal to Alastair Fothergill.

Founder’s Medal

First the Founder’s Medal: Professor Charles Withersis a world-leading historical geographer. He combinestwo qualities – the highest level of academic scholar-

ship and a commitment to the discipline – both arevital to the sustenance and continuing development ofgeography.

The eight distinguished books Charlie has writtenindicate the very substantial contributions he hasmade to the expansion of geographical knowledge.His earliest work, on the cultural geography of theGaelic language in Scotland, is widely recognisedas the leading account of the age. Subsequently, hehas been instrumental in developing the historicalgeography of scientific knowledge and our under-standing of the Enlightenment. His innovative workhas brought to the fore the importance of bringinggeographical thinking to issues previously not consid-ered in this way.

Alongside his intellectual contributions Charlie hasalso been a model academic citizen: promoting thediscipline locally, nationally and internationally. Notsurprisingly, Charlie has been recognised on manyoccasions for his contributions. Of particular note, heis an elected Fellow of the British Academy, the RoyalSociety of Edinburgh, and the Academia Europea,and he was awarded the Royal Scottish GeographicalSociety’s Centenary Research Medal. ProfessorWithers is recognised as a special member of thegeographical community with the award of theFounder’s Medal for the encouragement and develop-ment of historical and cultural geography.

Professor Charles Withers’ acceptance speech

President, Director, ladies and gentlemen, it is a verygreat privilege as well as a great pleasure to be herethis evening as the recipient of the Founder’s Medalfor 2012.

I would like to thank the Royal GeographicalSociety (with IBG) for the great honour which they dome. I take this to be an honour too for the geographyI do – ‘for the encouragement of historical and culturalgeography’: I like that phrase. My geography is mostlyindividual scholarship. I would point out, however,that I do do collaborative work – it’s just that most ofmy collaborators are dead!

I would like also to thank my wife, Anne, for herencouragement and enduring patience as I’vereturned over the years from libraries and archivesexcited with tales of geographies and geographerspast and always found lively enthusiasm and encour-agement in her. I would like to thank colleagues andfriends in the geographical community – the geo-graphical family – and those teachers and studentswho have enthused me at various times, instilledin me the importance and excitement of doinggeography.

And I would like to thank the Founders of theSociety without whom none of us would be here, notleast for their terrific idea of a medal without which Icertainly would not be here today. One consequenceof the sort of geography that I do is that, to an extent,

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I know the work of several of the Founders and theearly medallists perhaps better than some of my morerecent and distinguished contemporaries who havereceived this Medal.

One such was Sir Alexander Burnes, a Scot, andrecipient of the Founder’s Medal in 1835 for, as theSociety’s records have it, ‘his remarkable and impor-tant journeys through Persia’. And they really wereremarkable and extraordinarily important. Burnes wasone of a number of men, including his fellow ScotMountstuart Elphinstone (one of the founders of theSociety), engaged in mapping and exploring the geog-raphy of Central Asia. The dangers of his journeysthere and in Afghanistan meant that Burnes travelledalways in disguise: all went well for the sun-burntBurnes until, at one point in his travels, he almost(literally) revealed his identity when, in changing hisclothes to cross into a different territory, he forgot thathis lower legs remained un-tanned and were still theirnatural, pale Scottish pallor! On a further occasion,Burnes undertook charting by subterfuge on the IndusRiver as he ferried four shire horses on a raft, a presentfrom King George IV for the Shah.

My work is not like that of Burnes’ nor is it likemany of those whose names read as an illustriousrecord of outstanding geographical enquiry in theoutdoors. My work is resolutely bookish, stronglymappish, and almost pathologically archivalish. Mywork centres upon the meaning of places, the signifi-cance of space and place, and the importance ofdoing geography and thinking geographically, mostcommonly in historical context. I bring no gift horses.And, I can assure you, my shins are the same colour asthe rest of me – ‘Archive Pale’. But like Burnes andthose many others who have been so recognised, I amproud beyond measure to call myself ‘geographer’.Thank you again for this very great honour.

Patron’s Medal

Michael Palin: Alastair Fothergill, a world-renownedproducer and documentary film maker of naturalhistory programmes for television and cinema, is rec-ognised today with the award of the Society’s Patron’sMedal for his contribution in advancing geographicalscience with public audiences worldwide.

A member of the BBC’s Natural History Unit sincethe early 1980s, Alastair worked on the awardwinning children’s natural history series The ReallyWild Show, followed by Wildlife on One and SirDavid Attenborough’s The Trials of Life. He wasappointed Head of the Natural History Unit in 1992,and during his tenure produced the award-winningseries Life in the Freezer. He then stood down fromthat post to become Executive Producer on threemulti-award winning series for the BBC – The BluePlanet (2001), Planet Earth (2006) and The FrozenPlanet (2011).

Working in every habitat on Earth, often in extremeand remote locations, he and his production crewshave used innovative film techniques, advanced tech-nology and cutting edge scientific research to captureand portray the beauty and complexity of the world’senvironments and its creatures, some of which arenew to science. The resulting documentaries havecontributed greatly to public knowledge and under-standing of the Earth and its natural history – inspiring,educating and engaging many millions of peoplearound the world of all ages and all backgrounds.Planet Earth alone has been viewed by more than 500million people in over 180 countries.

Today, Alastair Fothergill is recognised by theSociety for promoting globally the understanding ofthe world’s environments with the award of thePatron’s Medal.

Alastair Fothergill’s acceptance speech

President, Director, ladies and gentlemen, thank youvery much indeed to the Society for awarding mewith the 2012 Patron’s Medal. I feel extremelyhumbled and honoured to be even considered along-side the famous geographers and explorers who havereceived these awards in the past.

In many ways it was actually this Society that set meoff on what has been a very happy and satisfyingjourney as a wildlife filmmaker. Back in the earlyeighties, when I was still at university, the BBC and theRoyal Geographical Society jointly ran a competitionfor amateur explorers called the Mick Burke Award. Itwas in memory of an amazing cameraman who diedon the southwest face of Everest on Chris Bonington’sfamous expedition. Six expeditions were chosen in arather terrifying interview process that took place hereat the Society. Those six teams were given a hecticweek’s training at the BBC and a super eight camera.My team set off to the Okavango swamps in Botswanain search of the elusive pink-backed pelican. We spenta wonderful two months floating down the wholelength of the Okavango in dug-out canoes, followinglions on foot and never seeing another soul.

We never did find the pink-backed pelicans and, tobe honest, we made a pretty awful film. However itwas still a very useful calling card when I started toknock on the door of BBC’s Natural History Unit inBristol. They gave me a job as a researcher soon afterI graduated and I have been there ever since. I willalways be grateful to the Society for this initial kickstart to my career and it has been a great privilegeto come back to lecture in this fantastic auditoriumafter each of my major landmark series have beencompleted.

To be honest I feel a little bit of a fraud receiving thisprestigious medal today. I was never any good atgeography and my real passion has always been theflora and fauna. I suppose in a sense I could be con-sidered a modern day explorer. I have been lucky

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enough to work in every habitat on the planet andvisited over a hundred countries. I have dived threemiles down to the bottom of the ocean and stood atboth Poles. And in all these places, I have had theenormous privilege of spending time – and often agood deal of time – with some of the most fascinating,beautiful and charismatic creatures on our planet. Thereal joy of my job is the fact that it combines thescience of natural history and geography with the artof filmmaking. It is all about telling stories and sharingmy own passion for the natural world with as manypeople as possible. When it works it really can deliver.Planet Earth for instance has so far broadcast in over180 countries worldwide and been seen by over 500million people. These are wonderful numbers, butwhat really satisfies me more than anything else iswhen a mother or father comes up to me and says – asthey often do – your programmes have really made adifference to our children’s lives.

Thank you to the RGS-IBG for helping me on myjourney, thank you to my wife Melinda who has beena fantastic support and thank you very much indeedfor this generous award. I feel very honoured toreceive it both for myself and on behalf of all thefantastic television production teams I have had theprivilege to work with over the years.

Medals awarded by the Society’s Council

Michael Palin: We now turn to the Victoria Medal,Busk Medal and Cherry Kearton Medal and Award,presented by the Society’s Council.

Victoria Medal

Professor Stuart Lane is this year’s recipient of theVictoria Medal for research in physical geographyand hydrological modelling. An internationally rec-ognised expert, he has made fundamental contribu-tions to our understanding of flood hazards, riskassessment and management, and innovative floodscience. All well exemplified in his lecture to theSociety last November.

Stuart’s CV is stellar. He is author of five books andover 120 papers and has been lead investigator ongrants from numerous funding agencies, including theLeverhulme Trust funded programme Tipping Points.Much of his work is collaborative and he is highlyregarded by experts from a host of other disciplines.

Stuart has also served the profession generouslyand exceptionally well. He is Editor of the leadingjournal Earth Surface Processes and Landforms andwas Chair of the Society’s Annual Conference in2009. Through all he has done, Stuart has broughtgreat distinction to British geography and geographi-cal science.

Professor Stuart Lane’s acceptance speech Mr Presi-dent, Director, Council and members of the audi-

ence, thank you very much indeed for this honour. Iwould like to begin by noting that my presence here,this evening, is a great mistake; for two reasons. Thefirst is the decision of the Council of the Royal Geo-graphical Society (with IBG), which has given me thehonour of receiving this medal. I must express mysincere gratitude. When I look at the richness of bothgeography as it is to today and also my own sub-discipline of physical geography, I can think of manyothers who very much deserve this medal, in equalmeasure if not more so.

The second mistake though is perhaps a bit morefundamental. When I was an undergraduate, I wasgiven the opportunity to sign up for summer field-work, at either the Haut Glacier d’Arolla in Switzer-land or in an informal settlement in Mexico City. Isigned the wrong list – instead of going to Mexico, Ispent a summer up a mountain in Switzerland withMartin Sharp and Keith Richards. Not only was thatpersonally formative – I met my wife out there and Inow live and work there – it was also intellectuallycritical as a formative experience. It led to my sub-stantive and fundamental interest in the hydrologyand fluvial geomorphology of mountain environ-ments. It was also equally formative in conceptualterms. One of the things that fieldwork enables us todo as geographers is confront those things that wemay take for granted, including that which we havebeen taught. It gives us an opportunity to experiencethings ourselves and in so doing to actually put fleshon the kinds of important geographical ideas that areotherwise left as abstract at best, untested at worst.In turn, these substantive and conceptual experi-ences identify what still motivates me: understandingthe interaction between water and the land surface,and the kinds of implications that this has for howwe, both people and organisms, learn to live withrivers and catchments.

It would be insidious of me to single out individualcolleagues for special thanks, and particularly fromthe suite of outstanding graduate students and post-doctoral research assistants with whom I haveworked. But, there are some who have been funda-mental in terms of how they have made me thinkdifferently and I would like to thank them publiclytoday. My PhD supervisors, Keith Richards and JimChandler, between them, gave me a rare training inboth thinking and doing. Working with Jim Best, RobFerguson and Louise Heathwaite has enabled me todevelop avenues of research otherwise closed. I havehad the unusual privilege of working closely with ahuman geographer, Sarah Whatmore, over the last fewyears, something that has reaffirmed my faith in physi-cal geography as a project that should be centred ingeography as a discipline. That is not something that Ithink all physical geographers might say today. Finally,I should thank my family for their continued accep-tance of the implications of being both an academicand a field researcher.



Busk Medal

Michael Palin: Professor Claudio Vita-Finzi is recogn-ised with the Busk Medal for fieldwork on Mediterra-nean landscape change. A world-renowned scholar,Claudio has successfully illuminated our understand-ing of landscape evolution, especially in the Mediter-ranean and along coasts worldwide. He has brought tothe fore the effects of earth movements (neotectonics)and the effect of the sun (the influence of solar activitythrough climate change) on landscape development.He has also made seminal contributions in developingand applying radiocarbon dating to analyse recent andhistorical Earth environments as a route to solvingarchaeological and geological problems.

His research has always been highly original, beau-tifully crafted and written, always challenging, andoften deliberately controversial – crossing disciplinaryboundaries and challenging currently accepted views.As a teacher and a mentor he is widely recognised asinspiring and provocative, and a much respected andsought after colleague.

Professor Vita-Finzi’s acceptance speech Thank youfor this totally undeserved award. I thought I wouldillustrate how the thrust of the Mediterranean field-work was influenced by circumstances in the field.The original intention was to assess the relative impor-tance of human activity as opposed to climaticchanges and tectonics in promoting erosion. The workwas never finished because the equation is not asimple one: in some places humans and their animalsare destructive, climate dominates in others, and inany case the record is always incomplete. But thefieldwork spawned all sorts of incidental research onthe basis of the sediments that we thought would solvethe original problem.

In 1980, at El Asnam in Algeria, the deposits inquestion helped to demonstrate that individual earth-quakes can produce folding over reverse faults by asmuch as 4 m, a finding which has led to the recogni-tion of ‘blind’ thrusts as potential sources of majorearthquakes in California, Iran and elsewhere.

The second accidental product of this work mate-rialised on a field project initiated by the Society. Ontwo successive expeditions, the equivalent deposits inOman allowed us to document subsidence of theMusandam peninsula at 7 mm/year as opening of theRed Sea drives Arabia beneath Iran at the Straits ofHormuz. This provided a direct test of plate tectonicmodels by demonstrating that sea floor spreading atthe Red Sea is transmitted directly by a rigid ArabianPlate.

Our current research is on the solar factor: in theNorth Atlantic region the same river deposits help toshow that shifts in the location of the depression tracksare linked to fluctuations in UV radiation from thesun, as shown by comparison between storm intensityat solar maximum and solar minimum.

Such findings are the products of the kind of open-minded exploration long championed by the RGS-IBG. The Society has sponsored research expeditionsthroughout the world, and it has honoured the firsthumans to land on the moon. I feel that the Societyhas already embraced the entire solar system and Ilook forward to the launch of its Solar Medal.

Cherry Kearton Medal and Award

Michael Palin: The Cherry Kearton Medal and Awardrecognises the study or practice of natural history andphotography. This year it is awarded to Andy Rouse fornature and wildlife photography around the world.

Andy is one of the UK’s foremost wildlife photog-raphers whose stunning images have won numerousprestigious awards. He is the only British wildlife pho-tographer to have been commended with nine awardsin the past seven years in the well respected and muchcoveted BBC and now Veolia Wildlife Photographer ofthe Year. He has also won the Gerald Durrell Awardfor Endangered Wildlife for his striking head-on imageof a Bengal Tiger. Andy worked in temperatures up to37°C in India’s Ranthambore National Park to beat40 000 other entries in the category.

Andy is passionate about natural history and con-servation. Photography for him is a tool to show othersthe natural beauty of the world. A regular lectureraround the world, Andy’s direct and engaging talkshave inspired thousands of amateur photographers toseek out new and innovative ways to capture imagesof life in the wild.

Awards of the Society as recommended bythe Council

We now come to the Awards of the Society as recom-mended by the Society’s Council. The MurchisonAward will be presented towards the end as the recipi-ent of this Award will respond on behalf of all thoserecognised today. We start with the scholarly Awards.

Scholarly Awards

The Back Award is presented to Professor Simon Hayfor research contributing to public health policy.Simon was one of the first scientists to use remotesensing and geographic information system tech-niques to map the distribution of mosquito-borne dis-eases. He is also a pioneer in releasing spatial data tothe public. His Malaria Atlas Project uses geographi-cal modelling to create malaria maps that are freelyand widely available to the public and of direct use topublic health organisations.

He is a frequent member of expert advisory panelsand has given innumerable plenary lectures to rel-evant international organisations – such as the Depart-ment for International Development, the World Bank,



and the World Health Organisation Roll Back MalariaPartnership. His research has been enormously influ-ential, predicting the patterns of malaria epidemic riskthrough time, and the distribution of vector bornedisease.

The Cuthbert Peek Award is awarded to ProfessorGiles Foody for innovation in the remote sensing ofland cover change. Giles is a leading internationalauthority on the remote sensing of land use. He is bestknown for pioneering work on the techniques of mapproduction; in particular fuzzy mapping methods, theuse of neural networks and machine learning algo-rithms. These techniques allow mapping at a scalefiner than the source image being used. Giles hasapplied these methods to document tropical defores-tation, land degradation, urban and land coverchange.

Giles’ passion for the subject of geography, and inparticular the development of remote sensingmethods to address societal needs, is evident through-out his work and to all those he works with.

The Gill Memorial Award for great potential andachievement for those in the earlier stages of theircareers is awarded to Dr Mustafa Dikeç for researchon space, politics and urban geography. Mustafa iswidely recognised and respected for his work inurban-political geography. Author of two influentialbooks, Badlands of the republic and Extending hospi-tality: giving space, taking time, his work on urbanpolitics and urban social movements, particularly inFrance, is at the cutting edge of contemporary urbangeography. Of particular note, his research on thestigmatised ‘banlieues’ of French cities has shownhow French urban politics have amplified and aggra-vated class and ethnic divisions in French society. Hehas offered convincing thoughts on how inclusiveurban politics can be redeveloped. Mustafa is an influ-ential geographical scholar already, one who at a veryearly stage has achieved as much as many mid-careerscholars.

The Society’s journal Area awards the annual AreaPrize in association with its publishing partner, Wiley-Blackwell, for the best article in the journal by a newresearcher. The 2011 Prize is awarded to KarinSchwiter, University of Zurich, for her paper, ‘Antici-pating the transition to parenthood: the contributionof Foucaultian discourse analysis to understandinglife-course patterns’.

Awards for teaching and engaging the public

Now to our celebration of excellence in teaching, inengaging the public and in serving the internationalcommunity. I would like to invite Dr VanessaLawrence, Director General and Chief Executive ofthe Ordnance Survey, to present this year’s two Ord-nance Survey Awards.

Vanessa Lawrence: Mr President, Director, ladiesand gentlemen, the two Ordnance Survey Awards are

presented to Paul Cornish and Lydia Williams forexcellence in teaching geography at secondary level.

Paul Cornish is the Head of Geography at CoopersCompany and Coborn School, Upminster, Essex. He iswidely regarded as a visionary subject leader and aninspiration to the geography teaching community.Head of a high performing department, with outstand-ing results, Paul is also the Geography Teacher Leaderfor the Prince’s Trust; he has independently organisedand led expeditions – and this summer he is taking 34pupils and four staff to Madagascar on a project thatwill help to build a school – and he is the author of awide range of teaching resources, including the Geo-graphical Association’s ‘Geography Toolkit Publica-tion’. Like the very best of teachers, he is a geographerwho is passionate about getting his students to expe-rience geography.

Lydia Williams is Head of Geography at the JewishFree School in Kingsbury, London. This is one of asmall number of schools in England that is a humani-ties specialist school with geography as the leadsubject. A driving force for improving teaching andlearning practices, Lydia inspires her colleagues aswell as her students. Passionate about fieldwork andexperiences outside the classroom, she has greatlyenhanced the provision of opportunities for studentsat all levels – developing a series of enrichment activi-ties that range from a travel club to visits to theOlympic site. Today, Lydia is recognised for beingpassionate and exceptional as a teacher, capable ofmotivating pupils of all abilities.

Michael Palin: The Taylor and Francis Award ispresented to Professor Kenneth Foote for excellencein teaching and learning in geography in higher edu-cation. An eminent US-based geographer, with influ-ence in Britain and around the world, Ken is one ofthe world’s leading advocates for the promotion andadvancement of the teaching of geography in highereducation. His scholarship and teaching in carto-graphy, mapping, geographic information systemsand visualisation is world-leading. He pioneered theVirtual Geography Department project, an innovativeapproach to embed technologically enhanced teach-ing in geography. He was also instrumental in creatingthe Faculty Development Alliance in the US to mentornew staff early in their careers. Past President ofboth the US National Council for Geographic Educa-tion and the Association of American Geographers, hebrought teaching and learning to the fore of bothorganisations.

The Ness Award is presented this year to SimonReeve for popularising geography through televisiontravel documentaries and writing. Simon is anextremely talented, entertaining and popular TV pre-senter, travel writer and journalist. Combining astutejournalistic skills with inspirational film footage andgeographical knowledge, he has reported from morethan 100 countries, showcasing a rich tapestry ofpeople in their environments.



Travelling multiple times around the world for BBCseries that include Equator, Tropic of Capricorn,Tropic of Cancer and most recently Indian Ocean, hehas revealed many special, but also difficult, con-tested and inhospitable places. With programmes andbooks that reach out across the generations, he is akeen and infectious geographer. Particularly effectivewith younger audiences, he encourages them toengage with the world in which they live and toacknowledge and appreciate global issues which areinstrumental to all our futures.

The recipient of the Alfred Steers Dissertation Prizefor the undergraduate geography dissertation judgedto be the best in 2011 is Sophie Devall, from theUniversity of Birmingham, for her dissertation ‘I ain’tgoin in there. Everyone’ll think I am a girl! A study ofthe gendered geographies of a reception classroom’.This was recognised by the assessors as a very insight-ful geographic approach to a problem intimatelylinked with current debates about the under-performance of boys in school.

The Geographical Award is made to the UnitedKingdom Antarctic Heritage Trust for furthering learn-ing through historical Antarctic expeditions. This is inrecognition of its work to conserve Antarctic buildingsand artefacts, and to promote and encourage the pub-lic’s interest in UK Antarctic heritage. The Trust looksafter historic sites and monuments relating to BritishAntarctic expeditions, and works with the Foreign andCommonwealth Office and the British AntarcticSurvey to conserve and protect these sites. The Trust’sflagship project is looking after the hut at Port Lockroyon the Antarctic peninsula, which welcomes morethan 15 000 visitors every summer. The Trust also runseducational programmes for young people to stimu-late interest in the future of Antarctica through learn-ing about earlier British Antarctic endeavours. In thelead up to the Scott Centenary commemorations, theTrust was instrumental in the coordination andsupport of a wide-ranging and diverse programme ofevents around the UK.

The last of the Society’s Awards to be presented is theMurchison Award for scholarly publications judged tocontribute most to geographical science. It is one of themost senior Awards and the recipient will respond witha speech on behalf of all the Award winners.This year’srecipient of the Murchison Award is Professor GillianRose for publications on visual culture and geographi-cal methodology. Gillian’s research has been particu-larly influential in two broad fields – geographicaltheory and the study of visual culture – and today she isrecognised for her publications in both.

Gillian’s work is distinguished by a combinationof theoretical ambition, interdisciplinary reach andempirical depth. Geography and feminism, a bookshe published in 1993, has forever altered the wayin which the history of geographic thought and thediscipline is understood, resetting the course ofsubsequent scholarship and teaching.

Her later, celebrated book Visual methodologies,originally published in 2001, presents a distinctiveargument about the practice and theory of visualresearch. The text has become a standard in researchtraining at both undergraduate and postgraduate levelbut it is no simple toolkit; it presents a distinctiveargument about the practice and theory of visualresearch. Now in its third edition, it too has left apermanent legacy in geography, and has had a majorimpact on a generation of researchers across thesocial sciences.

Professor Gillian Rose’s acceptance speech Mr Presi-dent, Director, ladies, gentlemen, friends and family,on behalf of this year’s remaining Award holders I amdelighted to accept the various honours which theCouncil of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)have so kindly afforded us.

And I feel particularly honoured to be speaking onbehalf of a group of such talented fellow geographers,who have created and communicated their geographi-cal knowledge in such a wide variety of fields ofpractice. So our group includes teachers, photogra-phers, theorists, academics at all stages of theircareers, explorers, television presenters, podcasters,conservationists (of animals and of buildings), critics,technicians, bloggers, writers – and if you’re not surewhich of those labels applies to which of us, thenthat’s exactly the point I am trying to make. I think oneof geography’s greatest strengths – one of its greatestpleasures – as a discipline, is the way that it gatherstogether very different talents and skills, and puts themto work together in the task of understanding theworld we all share.

Like any group of geographers, then, we haveapproached that task in very different ways. SophieDuvall uses close-up, careful ethnographic observa-tion of school classrooms and playgrounds to showhow boys and girls use those spaces differently.Mustafa Dikeç uses urban theory in finessed andinsightful ways to focus on urban spaces in France andtheir inhabitants, to show how class and racialiseddivisions are embedded in those urban spaces. Thenthere’s my own explorations of family photographsand how they’re displayed in domestic and publiclocations, which is closer to a form of cultural criti-cism, but is also interested in power and spatialorganisation. Meanwhile, Giles Foody puts his ener-gies into mapping, mapping important environmentalproperties of significant human impacts on the planetusing satellite remote sensor data. So, very differentmethods, but a shared project.

Some of us take our work very directly to state andnon-governmental organisations, trying to shapepolicy. Andy Rouse not only creates beautiful photo-graphs of endangered animals like the Bengal tiger,but also campaigns to preserve endangered animals.Simon Hay has made internationally recognised con-tributions to policy at the interface of geography and



public health, using remote sensing, among othermethods, to help understand the ecology of malaria.

And we are all committed in our different ways tosharing those diverse understandings, and to sharingthe skills that will allow other people to create theirown kinds of geographical knowledge. Part of mywork, for example, is a textbook for university stu-dents about research methods for working with visualmaterials like photographs and film. We are alsorightly honouring this evening the importance ofteaching geography in schools – through the Ord-nance Survey Awards to Paul Cornish and Lydia Wil-liams – and also in universities – with our recognitionof Kenneth Foote’s work with university teachers. Andsome of us also take our geography out into the widermedia and here the work of Simon Reeve is particu-larly important among our group.

And of course, as well as exploring and interpretingthe world around us, geographers are also fully part ofthat world. We all work in organisations and institu-tions and with people that support us; indeed, thisyear the Geographical Award has been given to aninstitution, the United Kingdom Antarctic HeritageTrust, for its support in conserving Antarctic buildingsand artefacts and widening public understanding ofthat heritage.

In a moment when many of those organisations, andtheir members, are experiencing a sense of profounduncertainty about the future, it really is wonderful to behere as Award winners, generously nominated by ourpeers, to celebrate what has been achieved, and byimplication to look forward with hope to what is still toemerge in future geographical explorations.

So, Mr President, can I recognise all those that havebeen involved in the making of these Awards this yearand ask you to pass on the heartfelt thanks of us all.

Special Awards

Last, but by no means least, we have the Society’sspecial Awards – an Honorary Fellowship and twoRegional Anniversary Awards.

Honorary Fellowship recognises those who havecontributed in large measure to supporting the Soci-ety’s work. In recent years few people have givenmore commitment, thought, expertise, enthusiasmand energy as a volunteer than David Lyon, who isrecognised for outstanding commitment to the Soci-ety’s work. His longstanding and unstinting work forthe Society spans some 15 years, including six asHonorary Treasurer (2002–2008). In this period heoversaw and guided the Society’s finances throughone of the largest building programmes in ourhistory and a period of substantial development inour activities. His clear long-term view stood theSociety in very good stead. His passion for theSociety, its work for both professionals and amateurs– among which he classified himself as an avid trav-eller – and for its staff, shone through all that he did.Since retiring as Honorary Treasurer, David contin-ued to contribute on the Society’s Enterprise Boarduntil November 2011.

In recognition of the 20th Anniversary of the Soci-ety’s regional programme, the Society’s Councilapproved a number of Regional Anniversary Awards,over three years. 2012 is the last year. The Awardsrecognise the distinguished and hard-working effortsof the regional committees in creating a programmethat has grown from some 10 events in the first year toclose to 100 events in 2012. We know these resultfrom a team effort involving all local volunteer com-mittee members, but nevertheless there are somepeople who have gone above and beyond in sustain-ing, supporting and developing the regional activitiesover most, if not all, of the past 20 years. This evening,we recognise two people, nominated by their com-mittees to receive Regional Anniversary Awards:Brigadier John Hemsley from the West of England andSouth Wales region and Stuart Hepburn from theNorth West region, for longstanding services to theSociety’s regional activities.

I would like to add final congratulations to all therecipients of the RGS-IBG Medals and Awards for2012.



Geography as a shared project: Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Medals and Awards ceremony 2012

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