News

We will be relaunching our OpenSpace annual Doreen Massey events on 3rd September 2026 in Kilburn, London. Hosted as a 'fridge event' at the Royal Geographical Society with Institute of British Geographers annual conference, the evening roundtable event will take place at Metroland Cultures studios behind Kilburn markets. The roundtable will include contributions from Dave Featherstone (Glasgow) as well as the artists involved in the Voices of Place exhibition within the studios at Metroland Cultures.

A new exhibition inspired by the work of geographer Doreen Massey will be opening from 16th July 2026 in Kilburn, London. Funded by the Antipode Foundation's 'Right to the discipline grant', the exhibition is part of the Voices of Places collaboration between Brent-based arts and culture organisation, Metroland Cultures and geographers at the Open University.

Designed to assess the social and cultural values of urban treescapes, the ‘porting’ tool produced by the UKRI/Government-funded ‘Branching Beyond’ project has been fully released. An explanatory paper can now be found in npj Urban Sustainability. 

We are delighted to share news of a brilliant new "River Stories" exhibition which is now open at the Manchester Histories Hub in the Manchester Central Library until Saturday 21st March. River Stories brings together the collective concerns and creative work of Many Hands Craft Collective, artist Liz Wewiora, and our very own doctoral researcher & artist, Fiona Brehony. 

Find out more about the project. 

We're really pleased to announce that OpenSpace member, Alessandra Marino, has just published a new paper 'From disorder to harm? Governing the Moon and protecting its sites of interest'. It is part of the Global (Dis)Order international policy programme ran by the British Academy and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

OpenSpace member Sonja Rewhorn, along with co-authors David Higgitt and Derek France, have just published an editorial in the Journal of Geography in Higher Education, ‘Sharing, showcasing, shouting: a half-century’. The Editorial marks its 50th volume of the journal by reflecting on its origins as a forum for sharing geography teaching innovation. Enduring themes include fieldwork, technology and debates over curriculum.

We're really pleased to announce OpenSpace members, Parvati Raghuram and Gunjan Sondhi, have a brilliant new chapter out entitled "Decolonising This, Decolonising That: Beyond Rhetorical Decolonisation in Migration Studies".

Professor Michael Pryke has become part of Just Water Futures, a global network of scholars and activists providing evidence-based interventions into the questions related to water financing and the increasing power of financial actors in water governance. Founded in October 2024 in Hannover, Germany, the network emerged from discussions on the impact of financialization on the hydro-social cycle, from Thames Water in London to the Water Futures market in California and new hydro-power infrastructures in Brazil and India.

OpenSpace member, Professor Michael Pryke, has written a short essay entitled "Engineering water into financial flows: drawing lessons from the UK, US, and Chile", part of a special issue on "Reclaiming futures: water sovereignties" as part of the Against Catastrophe initiative. 

We're delighted to hear that OpenSpace member, Lucy Baker, with co-authors, Julien Potron and Daniel Kerr, were awarded a best paper award for their submission on ‘The uneven geographies of off-grid solar PV’ at the 2025 Globelics International Conference.