The Presentation and more Ideas to consider...

So, my presentation is done. The session was in a huge lecture theater on the Imperial College campus (see pictures). I got there early so I got some shots of the large empty room. It wasn't ever filled to capacity, but there were quite a few people there and it went well. Although the session was entitled "The Geographies of Youth", the other presenters and I decided that it would have been more appropriate to have entitled it "Discourses of Exclusion and Space". We all focused on the intertwined notions of discursive space and how it defines and it, in turn, defined by physical space (here's a copy of my presentation, if you're interested). I looked at the discourse of disability/normality, Dan from Edinburgh discussed the racialized discourse of post-Apartheid South Africa, and Wael from Cairo discussed the deconstruction and redefining of physical space through virtual discourse. It was all very fascinating and introduced me to some new ideas and people. I am especially fascinated by Wael's notion of "heterotopia's" and the distinction between the heterogeneous space where individuation is acceptable under certain socially defined norms, versus the traditional concept of utopia where all subscribe to similar beliefs, ideals, and modes of interaction.

So, now that's done with I have to chair a session and then I have the day free. I imagine I'll head down to Westminster to see the seat of Anglo-Saxon cultural hegemony, and to appreciate the history of the area in a less politicized way. I imagine that Marx isn't the most politically appropriate draw for an American tourist, so I'll try to play the part of the ogling and awestruck American more appropriately today. I'll try and post more pictures this evening.

As an update on my luggage: I made the daily call to BA this morning. They still have no idea where my bag is. I'm going to try and get by on what I have but it's not easy, nor is it convenient. But this is all part of the adventure....right?

Tired, Luggageless, and Loving It...

So, here's some new pics from today. I'll update you with the details of the hilarity of the day later...needless to say I've had to spend a bit of time shopping to keep myself looking decent, smelling civil, and generally comfortable. My initial foray into shopping in London has taught me two things: first, I have no style, or at least no Euro-style, and couldn't wear the clothes they wear here; second, this place is terribly expensive. I initially went to Harrod's, the closest clothing store, and immediately recognized that I was WAY out of my element. The clothes were flimsy, polyester, and skin tight; all things that I do not values in my clothing...especially the skin tight part. I'm sure that most others would also prefer to not see me in skin tight polyester pants, so I guess I'm doing the public a service by not adapting the London "style". Even the jeans here are worn skin tight...really tight...which would likely explain the declining birth rate in England. I eventually bought a pair of pants, a shirt, and underwear at the Gap and it cost 130 pounds...that's $260! The same ensemble in the States would probably have been $100 at the most.

After attending sessions at the RGS conference this morning and shopping during lunch, I decided to take this afternoon and head out to Highgate Cemetery to see the grave of Karl Marx. Of course, if you know me, it shouldn't be a surprise that this was a "must see" of this trip. I ended up getting there as they were closing the cemetery gates and had to bribe the guard to let me in. So 2 pounds bought me 5 minutes at Karl's grave. There were also a bunch of Chinese tourists admiring Karl's monument and I blew their minds when I asked them if they'd take my picture in Chinese. You'd have thought they just saw a ghost...I guess they don't hear a lot of tall Westerners speak Mandarin. I'm glad they understood me, because I could barely understand them. They had really thick Shantung accents.

Well, they want to kick me out of here. I'm writing this under an original map made by Captain Cook and another map made my a Dutch explorer in 1050! The earliest known, relatively accurate, map of the world. This place is amazing. So here's some pics of today's adventures...

The Albert Monument...Queen Victoria's monument to the love of her life.
Another one...look at the little guy at the bottom. This thing is huge.

The Royal Geographic Society Buildings

"Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

Shackleton, the man

The classic double decker bus (for my kids!)

A workhouse in Highgate. This one was built in 1722. This is where they'd send society's "undesirables" to be "rehabilitated" through slave labor. Surprisingly, the poor, sick, disabled, elderly and others didn't respond to treatment...what a shock!

A nice residential area in Kentish Town

The Road to Marx's Tomb (that sounds like the title to a book...perhaps I should write it)

Me and Marx!

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Day One: The Journey and Not the Destination

Well, I'm here in London....finally. I'm sitting in the first session of the Royal Geographic Society conference and in awe of my surroundings. I've walked down these hallowed corridors past pictures and statues of Darwin, Livingstone, Stanley, Shackleton, Scott, Peary, Cook , Amundsen, Hillary, and more. Me, an educator and amateur adventurer, prowling these corridors that have helped map and define our modern world and the frontiers of our knowledge. It's almost laughable...how can this, the oldest scholarly society in the world, have an interest in my research? I'm still amazed that I'm here and in this building...but, after my travel experience yesterday, perhaps not....

Although I'd like to say that my journey was uneventful, I'm afraid to say that it wasn't. So, I'm trying to keep in mind the sage advice that it's important to enjoy the adventure and process of the journey rather than see the destination as an end in, and of, itself. Let me explain...

Yesterday in Spokane I debated about whether I should check my bag. In the interest of keeping light, I went ahead and let them take it; although I did throw some medicine and a change of clothes into my carry-on backpack. Well, I made it to Seattle uneventfully and then made it on the British Air flight with time to spare. After we had boarded the BA flight in Seattle we ended up sitting on the tarmack for 1.5 hours while they reconciled a "baggage discrepancy". At the moment they made the announcement I thought: "Wouldn't it be funny if they lost my bag?" Ha, ha, ha....they did!

After arriving at Heathrow after a brutally long 10 hour flight, I was relieved to get off the plane and was looking forward to getting on the Tube, getting to my accommodations and taking a rest. Instead I ended up waiting in lines to file baggage claims, sorting through mountains of lost bags, and generally getting more and more frustrated with BA. I spent four hours in the bowels of Heathrow trying to track down my luggage and, after officially registering my dissatisfaction with their service, I headed for Imperial College, where I am staying.

The Tube ride was long and crowded. I had a brutally vicious headache from exhaustion and frustration and felt like I was going to be sick. It took an hour to reach Kensington and then another 30 minutes of negotiating the various interconnected tunnels, entrances, and exits before I found where I was supposed to go. As I walked down Prince's Consort Way toward Beit Hall at the Imperial College, I passed Royal Albert Hall and the Royal College of Music which are right next to my accommodations. There was music coming out of all the windows at the Royal College of Music and I was serenaded on my way by a cacophony of divine operatic sound.

I checked into the dorms which are like...well, they're like dorms. I have a room the size of a walk in closet, a bed that is 5 feet long (which is a problem since I'm 6'2") and a small bathroom. All of this luxury for 65 pounds a night, that's $120 in U.S. dollars! Unreal! Still, it's nice enough and right next to Hyde Park and the RGS, so I guess I'm paying for convenience. Here's a couple pics of my room and environs...the first is of Trinity Church and Beit Hall where I am staying. Then there's a pic of my room and then the Royal Albert Hall which is on the other side of Beit Hall.


I walked out last night to get dinner, buy a phone card to call home, and to get some basic toiletries. I took some pics of the neighborhood I'm in and will post them here.

So, I need to wrap up for now, but needless to say I'm wearing the same clothes I traveled in today. I washed my underwear last night, so that's clean, but otherwise I'm pretty grungy. I'm unshaven, uncombed, and generally feel pretty scummy. BA said this morning that they have no idea where my luggage is. The last time it was scanned was when it came into Seattle, so it may still be in Seattle or in some BA netherworld. They say that I probably won't get it for a couple days...unfortunately I'm only here for 5 days and need to look decent for my presentation tomorrow. They said that I can go out and buy any essentials, including clothes, toiletries, etc., save the receipts, and then send the receipts to them for reimbursement, so I imagine that I will have to do that at some point today. I wanted to spend my time at the conference and seeing few sights, not shopping. I'm not a good shopper and find no joy in buying clothing...especially in a foreign country where they don't have my style of clothing...canvas, denim, and flannel. Everything here is so urban and dressy that I stick out like a sore thumb...perhaps I should try to blend in. Buy a nice suit and charge it to BA. What do you think?

Okay, so here's some pics...more to come...

Belated Update

It's been a month since I've updated things here, but my life's been a flurry of chaos since mid-July. Between travels to Boise for the DD Council, camping with the family, getting courses prepared and online, finishing papers and presentations...not the least of which is my presentation to the Royal Geographic Society this Thursday. I am currently sitting in the international terminal of the Seattle airport waiting to board British Air flight 48 to London's Heathrow airport. I have a 12 hour flight ahead of me...and I'm a little nervous about that...I'm not a good sitter, I need to move. I hope there is space to spread out and move...

Besides presenting at the RGS, I've been asked to chair a session so that should be interesting. The session I'm chairing has presenters from Egypt, South Africa, Hong Kong, and Scotland. It promises to be an exciting and multicultural experience while I'm there. I just hope I can find my accommodations...I'm going to try and take the Tube from Heathrow instead of paying $80 for the cab ride. The Tube only costs $8, so in the interest of saving money I'm going to take a chance...

The paper for the RGS conference is coming together nicely. I'm finishing edits and references now. The last section has been a challenge and needs more space, but that paper is already at 35 pages and I'm loath to let it grow anymore. It's probably unpublishable at it's current length, so I'll have to cut it back anyway. Kathryn has been a great help in editing and firming up a lot of the ideas. I think that this paper will form a good outline for the book on the same topic that we're working on. Once this is done and the paper off for publication , we can turn our attention to the book in earnest. Part of the problem with getting some real substantive work done on the book however, is both of our teaching loads this semester. We're both teaching new classes that we haven't taught in the past, so it requires more time and effort than courses which we have taught and refined in the past.

Speaking of which, I'm loving my new classes. The students seem to be engaged and interested in learning, so that's always a good sign. Now the instructor just needs to keep the momentum up and enthusiasm high so learning can take place...no problem, right? It really is fun to teach these undergraduate seminar type courses because they are flexible and allow for more creativity.

Okay, I need to get dinner before I get on the plane. BA is notorious for their crappy food and exploding microwaves, so I'm going to grab my last burger for the week and head to the gate. Here's a quick taste of the paper I'll be presenting....let me know what you think....

Within the past decade there has been increasing interest in examining the geography of disability and the “barriered and bounded lives” of people with disabilities (Imrie, 2001). However, a large portion of this recent work has merely focused on the interaction between the individual with a disability and, so-called, “disabling space” that defines and reinforces individuals with disabilities’ outsider status. As Gregson points out so astutely: “Conceptually, what this means is that such research ends up reinstating the very oppositions which it seeks to challenge, and that ‘the excluded’ are defined by, and remain trapped within, their representation as specific instances of exclusion” (Gregson, 2003). This approach to analyzing the inhabited space of those considered “disabled” fails to address the continuing oppression and inequality that defines the day to day life of individuals with disabilities by couching analyses in the rhetoric of difference rather than addressing the role of geography in perpetuating inequality. Indeed there is a further need to look beyond the geography of lived experience and to shift the focus to organizations and discursive systems that produce the spaces that define our perceptions of reality, ability, and inequality (Jackson, 2003). We must look at the material and discursive systems of power that perpetuate the societal tendency to look at individuals with disabilities and say: “We are here; we are this happy breed of men. They are there; they are not fully human and they live in that place” (Tuan, 1977, p. 50).

This paper shifts the unit of analysis from the geographic space that defines the existence of individuals with disabilities to looking at the “materialized discursive” (Gregson, 2003) of teacher education. This paper examines how discursive power works through colleges of education and how the built environment in these colleges work together to perpetuate attitudes, structures, and spaces that continue to reinforce the unequal status of individuals with disabilities in society. This paper considers how the material space exemplified in teacher education buildings and the separate discursive space exemplified in inclusion literature and in programmatic structures reinforces the separation of general and special education and introduces constraints in achieving effective training on inclusive educational practice and reifies categorical notions of disability and typicality. Separation is so naturalized that the segregated nature of the built environment of teacher education is seldom questioned. The following sections provides data that illustrate how underlying material structures and processes function to (re)construct disability as separate from “typicality” or “normality” in teacher education programs in the U.S.

I'm going to try and regularly post things here this week so friends and family can stay up to date...we'll see how internet access is in London. Peace and Good Happiness Stuff....Matt

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