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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
Background
My research advances the geographies of landscape, the geographies of memory, and the geographies of conflict, and shapes the wider interdisciplinary fields of memory studies, peace and conflict studies, and landscape studies.

I have contributed to a creative turn in human geography that has established creative methods and practice-led research as key disciplinary approaches through publications and a series of research grants (see Research). Beyond the intellectual leadership developed through my publications (see Publications), I have built critical spaces to support creative arts-based work on landscape, memory, and conflict. Core to my research is collaboration and knowledge exchange with memorial sites, museums, peace-building organizations and practitioners, and I have expertise in impact and audience engagement. 

I co-edit the Finnish geography journal, Fennia: International Journal of Geography.

I am a Book Review Editor at the journal, Dialogues in Human Geography. 

I supervise PhD students working on landscape, memory, and conflict, and lead an undergraduate fieldtrip module to Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

Research

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.

 

Teaching

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 

Publications