This year’s 54th Conference of Irish Geographers marks a break with tradition in taking the conference outside of our traditional academic and urban spaces to a new venue, Wexford Town. A change in location and venue brings with it opportunities for the conference and for our discipline.

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Our theme for this year’s conference is ‘Resilience’. In recent years, researchers across geography’s subdisciplines have embraced opportunities to showcase the ability of geographical research to help build resilience in myriad ways at a range of scales, from the local to the international, highlighting the central role that Geography can play in addressing key global challenges. At the same time, Geography as an academic discipline has faced its own challenges which have required us to build resilience into our own disciplinary frameworks and practices – embracing new technologies, techniques, philosophies and conceptual underpinnings while also arguing for the continued importance of geographical knowledges and approaches in our education system. In embracing interdisciplinary research, geographers have found new opportunities to highlight Geography’s ability to be the key integrative discipline, encouraging ever greater links between human, environmental and physical geographers, strengthening our discipline from within while engaging a range of new external stakeholders.

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We hope to make community engagement a key element of the 2023 conference, showcasing the best of what Geography has to offer not just to each other, but also to the wider public in the South East of Ireland. We hope you will join us in sharing your own research explorations through our traditional conference sessions with paper presentations, roundtable discussions and poster displays. We are planning one public facing event supported by local outreach and local media engagement during the conference and we welcome proposals for sessions that offer opportunities for other forms of public engagement. We look forward to hosting you in Wexford!

 

Arlene Crampsie & Gerald Mills

Conference Co-Chairs
UCD School of Geography