Staff Profile
Dr James Riding
NU Academic Track Fellow (NUAcT)
- Email: james.riding@ncl.ac.uk
- Address: School of Geography Politics and Sociology
Rm 3.29, Henry Daysh Building
Newcastle University
Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK
NE1 7RU
I am a Book Review Editor at the journal, Dialogues in Human Geography.
Reimagining Landscape
Landscape remains a key concept in human geography. Human life and practices have always occurred through engagements with the landscape. New landscape research in human geography has returned to landscape representations and landscape-objects, focused on the more-than-human and practices, materialities, and ecologies in landscape, and has explored landscape creatively and experimentally in a variety of media, incorporating new technologies. This long-term project seeks to create alternative histories of the day-to-day making of living and working landscapes with local communities and relates to contemporary changes in thinking and writing landscape following concurrent creative and material returns in the discipline.
Reimaging landscape has been funded via a NUAcT Fellowship (2019–2024) and a Leverhulme Trust ECF [ECF2013-638] (2013–2016) and has led to a number of key academic outputs (see Publications).
Places Where Memories Reside
Memory produces, shapes, and reshapes pasts, presents, and futures after war. Yet where does memory reside? In the individual body and mind? In texts and recorded interviews of survivors? In public memorials and architecture? In places in which events occurred? In personal objects and photographs? In art created during and in the aftermath of conflict?
Funded through an RGS-IBG Small Research Grant [SRG06.22] (2022–2023) this project focuses on cultural memory and places of memory—les lieux de mémoire—and takes place in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) thirty years after the war in Bosnia (1992–1995) examining the processes of remembering and forgetting in a divided society. It explores how we traditionally remember as societies, and examines alternative ways of remembering in places where mass atrocities occurred.
The Former State Project
What remains of a former state? To answer this question, a geographer, filmmaker and poet loosely follow the route of a six-week ethnographic journey taken in 1937 by British author Rebecca West (1892–1983) through Yugoslavia. This project arrives at a time when Yugoslavia remains within living memory and it captures small details and intimate memories of the former state before they are lost. Employing a multi-media approach in the region, it performs a novel yet critical engagement with the new mobilities paradigm.
This project is funded via a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant through the Elisabeth Barker Fund [SRG1920\101002] (2019–2022). To complement this grant, we received a GeoHumanities Variations on Mobility Creative Commission (2019–2020) to create a short film about journeys to Yugoslav monuments built after WWII documenting their form through poetry. An internal grant through the Geography Impact Catalyst Fund in the School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology at Newcastle University has also been used to complete a feature length documentary called I Remember When I Was A Window made on location in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Undergraduate Teaching
GEO1015 Contemporary Human Geographies of the UK
GEO2043 Key Methods in Human Geography
GEO2235 Bosnia and Herzegovina Field Course (Module Leader)
PhD Supervision
Haris Husarić
Emma Bloodgood
- Riding J. Montage space: Borderlands, micronations, terra nullius, and the imperialism of the geographical imagination. Dialogues in Human Geography 2022, 12(2), 278-301.
- Gill N, Riding J, Kallio KP, Bagelman J. Geographies of welcome: Engagements with 'ordinary' hospitality. Hospitality and Society 2022, 12(2), 123-143.
- Riding J. Landscape after genocide. Cultural Geographies 2020, 27(2), 237-259.
- Riding J. The Geopolitics of Memory: A Journey to Bosnia. Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2019.
- Riding J. A new regional geography of a revolution: Bosnia's plenum movement. Territory, Politics, Governance 2018, 6(1), 16-41.
- Riding J, Jones M, ed. Reanimating Regions: Culture, Politics, and Performance. London: Routledge, 2017.
- Riding J. Writing place after conflict: exhausting a square in Sarajevo. GeoHumanities 2017, 3(2), 431-450.
- Riding J, Wake-Walker J. Towards a cultural geopolitics: on the making of a documentary-poetry film about a post-conflict place. Fennia 2017, 195(1), 61-84.
- Riding J. Landscape, memory, and the shifting regional geographies of northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina. GeoHumanities 2015, 1(2), 378-397.
- Riding J. A geographical biography of a nature writer. Cultural Geographies 2016, 23(3), 387-389.
- Riding J. Land Writings: Excursions in the Footprints of Edward Thomas. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017.
- Riding J. Geographical testimony: a short history of a Yugoslav family. Journal of Cultural Geography 2017, 34(2), 250-267.
- Riding J. For montage. Dialogues in Human Geography 2021, 11(1), 143-146.
- Riding J. Representing a divided place: the artistic-military practice of Mladen Miljanović. Cultural Geographies 2017, 24(1), 171-180.
- Kallio K-P, Riding J. Open policies, open practices - open attitudes?. Fennia 2019, 197(1), 1-7.
- Kallio K-P, Riding J. Dialogical peer-review and non-profit open-access journal publishing: welcome to Fennia. Fennia 2018, 196(1), 4-8.
- Kallio K-P, Riding J. Geographies of welcome. Fennia 2018, 196(2), 131-136.
- Riding J. A radical regional geography: notes on a revolution. In: Riding, J; Jones, M, ed. Reanimating Regions: Culture, Politics, and Performance. London: Routledge, 2017, pp.97-116.
- Riding J. Extreme geographies: a response from a dependent semi-periphery of the post-neoliberal Europe. Fennia 2017, 195(1), 106-112.
- Kallio K-P, Riding J. Six sideways reflections on academic publishing. Fennia 2017, 195(2), 161-163.
- Riding J. Death drive: final tracings. In: Hawkins, H; Straughan, E, ed. Geographical Aesthetics: Imagining Space, Staging Encounters. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015, pp.181-196.
- Riding J, Kallio KP, Behroozi P, Berg LD, Brackebusch A, Derksen M, Ducs J, Henriksen IM, Huijbens EH, Jakobsen TS, Jones M, Magusin H, Parker A, Peak A, Pyyry N, Refstie H, Smeplass E, Tao H, Thorshaug RØ. Collective editorial on the neoliberal university. Fennia: International Journal of Geography 2019, 197(2), 171-182.