RGS and IGB conference and Cambridge Off-Grid Cities Workshop
Reflections by Temba Middelmann, Postdoctoral Researcher on the Off-grid Cities project.
The opportunity to attend a conference of like-minded critical thinkers is something special. To be in person at such events is a treat for academics, especially having had much of our work shifted to online spaces over recent years. Even more special is to follow-up such a conference with a writing workshop with the team of researchers one is working on to collectively dig deep into our writing processes as individuals and as a group working towards wrapping up our project.
These opportunities came in a bundle with attendance at the Royal Geographical Society conference this year. The theme was ‘Climate Changed Geographies’, which was an exciting overarching theme for our project in general, but especially for the paper I presented which aims to connect local infrastructure dynamics in Cape Town with wider scales of climate change and global energy transitions.
“It was valuable as a multi-disciplinary researcher to be amongst geographers who, while researching similar things, utilise different theories and languages than I am used to, which gave me new ways of thinking about and framing my work.”
I presented my paper on multi-scalar insights into the energy transition as part of a triple session with a total of 15 presenters focused on ‘Understanding the Geographies of Clean Energy’. It was a brilliantly framed and organised session, where the papers all spoke to each other well and generated a strong thread of discussion across the three sessions. It was valuable as a multi-disciplinary researcher to be amongst geographers who, while researching similar things, utilise different theories and languages than I am used to, which gave me new ways of thinking about and framing my work. In this and other sessions at the conference, my understanding of the interaction between different scales of the energy transition was enhanced. One take-away from Stuart Dawley, who convened the session I presented in, was about how “conflict between scales is fundamental to their outcomes”, which I found can be a useful hook to unpack the interaction of different scales. It was also very useful for myself and others to present on the South African context, where a lot of similarities with situations in other contexts surfaced with exciting potential for generative comparative research in the future.
Excitingly, my longer-term endeavour of unpacking the relationships between public and private (in terms of space, goods, interests, people etc.) was valuable in shaping discussions I participated in, and likewise was shaped by exciting conversations with peers. Ideas of New State Capitalism and State Accumulation were helpful to me in strengthening my understanding of the historical and current relationships between public and private. This was gratifying as an academic to feel like my ideas are resonating well in different contexts. There were many stimulating chances to meet other researchers and exchange contact details, ideas, and readings. This was the case both with junior researchers like myself and senior, well-established academics who were generous with their time and energy at this event. As such, I left the conference inspired and excited to push my work forward on a number of fronts.
In this situation, it was perfect to move right along to a writing workshop where we could harness that inspiration and direct it towards our written outputs, which is important at this stage of the project. The opportunity to give and receive careful feedback on written pieces was greatly valuable, and the setting in a beautiful Cambridge college was a real treat for all of us. The workshop was structured around structured writing time, meetings between co-authors on group papers, some inputs from senior lecturers about career paths and writing strategies, with lots of time for walks, tea, coffee and conversation in between. This structure was very productive and it felt like the time together as a team helped bring things together. Ending off by setting some goals within a group where we are all supporting each other was a fantastic way to set our direction going forward, and I am returning to ordinary working life with renewed motivation to write, read, talk, walk and write some more.
