Conferences – Tilburg, Netherlands

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Teaching Controversial Issues Workshop

Sign up for the Teaching Controversial Issues Workshop by registering and paying for the conference. There are a number of €100 grants available to participate in the workshop (to be claimed after attendance) . Find out more

Keynote speakers

Prof. Dr. Virginie Mamadouh – University of Amsterdam

Geographical literacy and geopolitical disorder

It might be a common to experience current times as ‘interesting’, both chaotic and anxiogenic because of the uncertainties we perceive, compared to past experiences we know through well-crafted narratives. There is however much to argue that the times in which we live are particularly interesting. Like the French philosopher Edgar Morin, some claim we live through a polycrisis, a set of multiple, distinct (economic, environmental, geopolitical, social, or technological) crises that interact and reinforce each other. Without doubt, geographers have a lot of knowledge and  insights to offer to study and to understand these crises and geographical literacy is key for both individuals and groups to navigate them.

This lecture focuses on geopolitical crises, the acute sense of geopolitical disorder created by dramatic changes in foreign policies and military interventions,  as well as how other crises, especially those link to global warming and digitalization, are interrelated.  Political geographers have developed distinct geopolitical perspectives to analyze the relation between power and space and more specifically international and global politics. These approaches range from the traditional geopolitics centered on physical geographical features of states’ territories and their influence on their foreign policy, through critical geopolitical and popular geopolitics focused on geographical imaginations and geopolitical representations and their impact in political discourses deployed to justify (foreign) policies and mobilize the public, and feminist geopolitics recentering human security and embodied experiences, to materialist geopolitics foregrounding the geopower of matter and more-than-human assemblages.

These perspectives provide different but complementary insights to advance a geographical literacy that is much needed to navigate the rapidly changing geopolitical and geographical contexts (the Russian war in Ukraine, the Belt and Road Initiative, climate change, sea level rises, droughts and fires…).  The lecture reviews key transformations undermining familiar geographical imaginations and geopolitical representations pertaining to the position of the West in global politics, the rise of powerful and ambitious states in the Global South, divisions among challengers, and rearrangements and divisions among Western states. As a result, it calls for more attention to enhance geographical literacy regarding temporalities, scales, and power, as well as the omnipresence of augmented and fake geographies.

Prof. Dr. Eric Lambin –UCLouvain and Stanford University

Designing effective interventions for sustainable land use

Human-environment interactions on land have profoundly transformed landscapes, with multiple biophysical and social implications. Among all land system changes, tropical deforestation has the greatest impact on the Earth system. Multiple policies attempt to promote a more sustainable land use at local to global scales. They range from public, command-and-control interventions, such as land use zoning, to market-based mechanisms and supply chain initiatives, such as voluntary sustainability standards. I will summarize recent studies we have conducted on tropical agricultural-forest frontiers to evaluate the effectiveness of various land use policies. These studies combine remote sensing data, surveys of land managers, and impact evaluation methods. They have been conducted across tropical regions. I will discuss selection bias, negative spillovers, policy mixes and the influence of geographic context. Results highlight the importance of adopting a system’s perspective on land use.

Prof. Dr. Tine Béneker – Utrecht University

A curriculum for school geography in flux

After a long period, the national curricula for school geography in the Netherlands are undergoing significant changes. These new curricula will have to last for quite some time in a shifting world order, far-reaching digitization, and the context of the Anthropocene. In preparation for a contemporary and future-proof curriculum, academic geographers emphasised the importance of a holistic perspective when studying current and future social challenges, whereby an integrative approach to human and physical geography is important, as is attention to power relations and historical developments. In addition, they pointed out the importance of paying attention to knowledge issues in order to evaluate facts and assess knowledge claims. The academic geographers also called for a connection to be made with the daily lives of young people and for geography to be practised in an activating and investigative manner. In a time of flux, it may also be good to pause occasionally and look not only forward, but also backward. With current debates among (international) geography education researchers about powerful knowledge, an F3 curriculum of engagement with knowledge and the emancipation of the students in mind, we will take the perspective of more than 50 years of curriculum developments in Dutch geography education.

Program at a glance (Link to be added)

Detailed program of the conference with sessions (Link to be added)