Staff Profile
Education
2010 Ph.D. University of British Columbia
2006 MA UBC, Geography
2004 BA (honours) UBC, Geography
Previous Positions
2023- Reader in Human Geography, Newcastle University
2020-23 Lecturer in Human Geography, Newcastle University
2017-19 Lecturer in Human Geography, Newcastle University
2013-16 Lecturer in Human Geography, Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh
2011-13 Research Associate, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow
2010-11 Visiting Scholar, Center for Global Metropolitan Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Editorial Work
2021- Associate Editor, Cultural Geographies in Practice, Cultural Geographies
2015-18 Editorial Board, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
2015- Associate Editor, Creative Interventions, Studies in Social Justice
Esteem
2020 Keynote, National University of Singapore, Asian Research Institute
2020 Research cited in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, BBC World Service and The Economist
2020 Between Worlds performed for Germany's Nacht Kritik
2009-19 Nanay performed in Vancouver (2009), HAU 1 Theatre Berlin (2009), Edinburgh (2012), Whitehorse (2014), Manilla (2013, 2015)
2019 Reading of Nanay at the Prairie Theatre Exchange Festival and annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Geographers, Winnipeg, with Dr Sarah Zell, Migrante Manitoba, and Winnipeg’s Migrant Solidarity Network
2019 Between Worlds performed at Berlin's Ballhaus Ost, Newcastle's Northern Stage
2018 Invited Speaker, London School of Economics, Urbanisation and Development cluster
2017 Keynote, Society and Space, Annual Association of American Geographers, Boston
2014 Keynote, Participatory Geographies Research Group, RGS-IBG, London
2013 Jasmin Leila Award, Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)
2011 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Post-Doctoral Prize (shortlisted)
2009 The Children’s Choice Awards, Saddest and Most Realistic Play, Children’s Choice Awards, PuSh Festival
Service
2021- Convenor, Geographies of Social Change Research Group, Newcastle University
2014-15 Co-Convenor, International Emotional Geographies Conference, Edinburgh
2013-16 Managing Committee, Global Justice Academy, University of Edinburgh
2012-17 Steering Committee, Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network
2012-13 Advisory Committee, School of Health in Social Science, University of Edinburgh
Presentation
2023. Emerging horizons of care technologies in the UK. Deutscher Kongress fur Geographie, Frankfurt.
2023. Automating social care: Public-private partnerships and the creation of the UK digital care market. AAG, Denver
2022. Screening of City of Long Stay with panel discussion. Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), Newcastle.
2021. Dementia care for Europeans in Thailand: A geography of futures. Nanyang Technological University, School of Social Science, Singapore.
2021. A crisis of care in the global north, and new relations of transnational dementia care in Thailand. School of Earth, Environment and Society, McMaster University, Canada.
2021. Living laboratories of crisis: gerontechnologies in long-term care homes in the U.K. and Canada. Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), London.
2021. New intimacies of dementia care beyond the familiar. Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), London.
2020 Relational Comparison and Communities of Care across the Global South and North. Keynote for Transnational Relations, Ageing and Care: Asian Connections and Beyond. National University of Singapore.
2019 From Archive to repertoire in Bagong Barrio. Department of Geography, University of Toronto.
2019 Authors meet critics on Migration in Performance: Crossing the Colonial Present. (Panelists: Lieba Faier, John Catungal, Sarah de Leeuw, Alison Mountz, Tadiar Neferti). American Association of Geographers, Washington.
2018 Unsettling scripts of disposability. Urbanisation, Planning and Development cluster, London School of Economics.
2017 Playing games of chance in the Canadian North. Performing Urgency: Space, Performance and Politics. Nordic Geographers Meeting, Stockholm.
2017 Ethnographic performances and games of change in the decolonizing present. Keynote talk for Society and Space at the annual conference of the American Association of Geographers, Boston.
2017 Tlingipino Bingo: Performing solidarity across Indigenous and Filipino immigrant experiences of state violence. Reimagining Creative Economy. University of Alberta, Calgary.
2017 Testimonial theatre and the geopolitics of trauma and empathy. University of Leeds.
2016 Performing precarity in Bagong Barrio. Annual Meeting of Institute of British Geographers (with IBG), London (presenter and convenor).
2016 Life-times and spaces of disposability in Bagong Barrio, Metro Manila. Social Geographies of Urban Abandonment. American Association of Geographers, San Francisco.
2016 Urban crisis: resistances, opportunities and co-optation. University of Edinburgh (convenor).
2015 Who saved the city? Exploring urban activisms in times of austerity in North America and Europe and Beyond. University of Edinburgh (convenor).
2015 Performance as transnational and scholarly inquiry: migrant labour and urban dispossession. Canadian Association of Geographers, Vancouver.
2014 Theatre, politics and the impossible ethic. Annual Meeting of Institute of British Geographers (with IBG). Keynote talk for the Participatory Geographies Research Group, London.
2014 Transnational affects in the space of theatre. Centre for the History of Emotions, University of London, Queen Mary, London.
2014 The political work of feelings. Migration and Intimate Life. Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network, University of Glasgow, Glasgow.
2013 Testimony, theatre and ethics. Queen’s University, Department of Drama, Canada.
2013 Emotions on the move. New Frontiers of Geographical Knowledge and Practice? Annual Meeting of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), London.
2013 Circulating discourses of suffering across national contexts. Institutional Spaces of Pain, Suffering and Trauma. Emotional Geographies, Groningen.
2013 Circulating suffering: part two. Institutional Spaces of Pain, Suffering and Trauma [redux]. Association of American Geographers, Los Angeles.
Ongoing Interests
Care, ageing, social reproduction, technology
Migration, labour, precarity
Creative geographies (theatre, film, writing)
I am also committed to creating creative geographies of public engagement.
Selected Research Creations
City of Long Stay 2022
A documentary film current being created to exmaine the conditions and circumstances drawing Europeans and North Americans to migrate to Thailand for dementia care. We consider what this tells us about widespread infrastructure failure and new forms of care and intimacy developing in Chiang Mai.
Official Selection 2023 Swiss International Film Festival
Award Winner at the 2023 World Film Singapore
Winner of Best Documentary Short at the 2022 Rotterdam Independent Film Festival
Official Selection for Amsterdam’s 2022 Lift-Off Festival
Official Selection for the 2022 Bangkok International Documentary Festival
Screened at the 2022 conference of the Royal Geographical Society with IBG (Newcastle)
Between Worlds 2018-20
Based on interviews with Thai caregivers, family members of people living with dementia, British and Swiss entreprenurs, this documentary theatre project, co-created with Costa Compagnie (Germany) and Geraldine Pratt (UBC), examines the global outsourcing and migration of dementia care from Europe and North America to Thailand. Funded by the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council, the ESRC and Germany’s Kulturstiftung des Bundes, the piece examines emerging migrations of care, kinship and the family. The piece premiered at Berlin's Ballhaus Ost and Northern Stage in Newcastle in 2019, and in 2020, the play was re-staged online for Nachtkritik, one of Germany’s premiere arts platforms.
Tlingipino Bingo 2016-17
This theatre project was developed in collaboration with Tlingit and Filipino theatre artists in the city of Whitehorse. It revolves around a bingo game, in which audience members participate as bingo players and storytellers. The performance provides the occasion for community storytelling and exchange, and serious play on issues of dispossession and trauma shared by Tlingit people and Filipino migrants in the Canadian North. The play premiered at Whitehorse’s 2016 Nuit Blanche Festival. Funded by Yukon Government of Canada.
Nanay: a testimonial play 2009-19
A testimonial theatre project designed to engender public debate about Canada’s Live-In Caregiver Program, and directly addresses the experiences of Filipino domestic workers who come to Canada as migrant labourers. Nanay transforms very conventional qualitative interview transcripts into testimonial theatre, which is to say, our project is based entirely on verbatim monologues taken from interviews conducted over a 15 year period with domestic workers, their children and Canadian employers. Our overall objective in Nanay is to forge a more complex identification with both the plight of domestic workers, as well as that of middle-class families struggling to secure affordable care in Canada.The production premiered at Vancouver’s 2009 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, and then toured to Berlin’s HAU1 Theatre as part of their Your Nanny Hates You! Festival. In 2012, we conducted a script reading with professional actors at the annual conference of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) in Edinburgh (2013), Whitehorse (2014), and in 2019, the project was reworked by Migrante Manitoba and Winnipeg’s Migrant Solidarity Network. We have also carried out two productions of the work in Metro Manila (2013; 2015) involving partnership with Migrante International and the PETA Theatre. In 2019, a performed reading of the play was carried out with Migrant Worker Solidarity Network and researchers at the University of Winnipeg. This was delivered at the Prairie Theatre Exchange Festival, followed by the annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Geographers.
Do You See What I Mean? 2013
Created with Lyon-based Projet In Situ, and in collaboration with Canada’s National Institute for the Blind. As an urban sensory choreography, this piece of one-on-one theatre was a 2.5-hour blindfolded tour of the streets and homes of Vancouver. Performed at Vancouver’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival.
City of Dreams 2011
In this collaboration with director Peter Reder, a map of Vancouver was created from hundreds of found objects and underscored by a soundscape composed from recorded oral testimonies, environmental and archival materials. Performed at Vancouver’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival.
Counter Mapping 2011
This contemporary interdisciplinary exhibition brought together the work of 17 professional artists around the theme of counter mapping the city of Vancouver. Working across disciplines, artists deployed a range of tactics in their rewriting of the urban, utilizing mapping and surveillance technologies to constructive disruptive and creative cartographies. Counter Mapping premiered at the 2011 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, and selected works toured to the University of Glasgow for an international conference, Excursions. Funded by City of Vancouver and British Columbia Arts Council.
A Storied Sea 2009
This geo-audio-literary work was created for Vancouver’s Western Front as part of Intersections—a new music series that brought together writers and composers together to create site-specific commentaries informing particular geographic spaces in Vancouver. Created in partnership with Vancouver composer James Maxwell, the piece spliced environmental sounds and composed music for trombones with the recorded testimonies of my grandfather, whose family squatted on the Vancouver waterfront in the 1920s.
Arts, Health and Seniors 2008-10
Funded by the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, and bringing together a collaboration between UBC's Faculty of Nursing and the City of Vancouver, Arts, Health and Seniors looked to demonstrate how involvement in the arts can improve the health and well being of seniors experiencing physical, social, and sexual orientation barriers. Engaging 80 seniors in four different community centres over a three-year period, the project built new expertise between health workers, artists and funders in the area of chronic disease management. I spent two years working as project manager, researcher and one of eight site artists in AHS. Funded by Vancouver Coastal Health and City of Vancouver.
Practicing Democracy 2004-06
Created by Vancouver's Headlines Theatre for Living, Practicing Democracy was North America’s first deployment of August Boal’s model of Legislative Forum Theatre. Devised in collaboration with city planners and elected municipal councillors, the objective of this project was to use forum theatre to generate community-based law on issues related to homelessness in the City of Vancouver. We researched the project as a substantial effort to use a particular model of political theatre to generate creative solutions to what is now a familiar aspect of neo-liberal economic policy, namely, cuts to social services and welfare provision. Funded by Canada Council for the Arts, British Columbia Arts, and City of Vancouver.
Current Teaching
GEO2100 City of Crisis, City of Hope: Amsterdam
GEO2110 Social Geographies
GEO3099 Dissertation
GEO3159 Migration, Bordering and Solidarities
Current PhD Students
Daniel Jones. Geographies of Impulse: A Study of Individuals with Tourettes Syndrome and the Embodied Experience of Public Space. ESRC PhD studentship.
Alex Twomey. Making Space: Collaborative Art Practice and Community Building in Abandoned New York City School. Northern Bridge PhD studentship.
You Zhou, ‘Drifting in Africa': A Practice-led Feature Documentary Film about Chinese Workers in Ethiopia
Completed PhD Students
Maida, Melisa. (2024) Negotiating Belonging: The Gendered Experiences of Refugee Women in Tyneside. ESRC PhD studentship. Currently a Research Assistant at Northumberia University.
Christos Galavis. (2024) Hillwalkers and Homecomers: Walking as Belonging among Munro Baggers and Scots-Canadians in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Principal's Career Development scholarship.
Nico Stefanovics. (2016) The Making of a New Downtown: Urban Place-Making in HafenCity, Hamburg, Germany.
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Articles
- Johnston C, Bagelman J, Tosch J. Relearning black presence in Amsterdam through guided tours: Teaching beyond the classroom. Cultural Geographies 2024, Epub ahead of print.
- Miramonti A, Fontana L, Johnston C. Forum Theatre for Reconciliation: a drama-based approach to conflict transformation applied to socio-environmental struggles in Bolivia. Peacebuilding 2024, epub ahead of print.
- Johnston C, Pratt G. Automating adult social care in the UK: Extracting value from a crisis. Geoforum 2024, 151, 103997.
- Fontana L, Johnston C, Miramont A. Women in Wildfire Crises: Exploring Lived Experiences of Conflict through Forum Theatre. Studies in Social Justice 2023, 17(2), 269-279.
- Pratt G, Johnston C, Johnson K. Robots and care of the ageing self: An emerging economy of loneliness. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 2023, 55(8), 2051-2066.
- Johnston C, Holland A. Picturing these days of love and rage: XR’s impossible rebellion. Cultural Geographies 2023, 30(2), 315-323.
- Cole A, Fontana L, Hirzel M, Johnston C, Miramonti A. On burning ground: Theatre of the Oppressed and ecological crisis in Bolivia. Cultural Geographies 2023, 30(4), 639-648.
- Johnston C, Winders J. What does 'in practice' mean?. Cultural Geographies 2022, 29(1), 129-130.
- Pratt G, Johnston C. Dementia Care for Europeans in Thailand: A Geography of Futures. American Behavioral Scientist 2022, 66(11), 1880-1895.
- Johnston C, Pratt G. Anticipating a Crisis: Creating a Market for Transnational Dementia Care in Thailand. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 2022, 112(7), 2064-2079.
- Johnston C, Pratt G. Traveling intimacies, translation and betrayal in a creative geography. Cultural Geographies 2021, 28(2), 417-428.
- Pratt G, Johnston C. Dementia, Infrastructural Failure, and New Relations of Transnational Care in Thailand. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 2021, 46(3), 526-539.
- Pratt G, Zell S, Johnston C, Venzon H. Performing Nanay in Winnipeg: Filipino Labour Migration to Canada. Studies in Social Justice 2020, 14(1), 55-66.
- Johnson K, Pratt G, Johnston C. Filipinos settle in the Canadian North: unsettling a gendered frontier. Gender, Place and Culture 2019, 26(5), 680-699.
- Johnston C. An Artful Civic Disruption in Vancouver. Studies in Social Justice 2018, 11(2), 318-326.
- Pratt G, Johnston C, Banta V. Lifetimes of Disposability and Surplus Entrepreneurs in Bagong Barrio, Manila. Antipode 2017, 49(1), 169-192.
- Pratt G, Johnston C, Banta V. Filipino Migrant Stories and Trauma in the Transnational Field. Emotion, Space and Society 2017, 24, 83-92.
- Pratt G, Johnston C. Crossing Oceans: Testimonial Theatre, Filipina Migrant Labor, Empathy, and Engagement. GeoHumanities 2017, 3(2), 279-291.
- Pratt G, Johnston C, Banta V. A Traveling Script: Labour Migration, Precarity and Performance. The Drama Review 2017, 61(2), 48-70.
- Johnston C, Pratt G. Tlingipino Bingo, settler colonialism and other futures. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2017, 35(6), 971-993.
- Johnston C, Bajrange D. Street Theatre as Democratic Politics in Ahmedabad. Antipode 2014, 46(2), 455-476.
- Johnston C, Lorimer H. Sensing the City. Cultural Geographies 2014, 21(4), 673-680.
- Johnston C. Politics in the Informalizing Metropolis: Displacement and Uneasy Negotiations in Uncivil Ahmedabad. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 2014, 38(2), 539-572.
- Pratt G, Johnston C. Filipina Domestic Workers, Violent Insecurity, Testimonial Theatre and Transnational Ambivalence. Area 2014, 46(4), 358-360.
- Pratt G, Johnston C. Staging Testimony in Nanay. Geographical Review 2013, 103(2), 288-303.
- Johnston C. A Felt Geography. The Geographical Review 2013, 103(2), 153-161.
- Johnston C. The Political Art of Patience: Adivasi Resistance in Ahmedabad. Antipode 2012, 44(5), 1268-1286.
- Johnston C, Pratt G. Nanay (Mother): A Testimonial Play. Cultural Geographies 2010, 17(1), 123-133.
- Pratt G, Johnston C. Translating Research into Theatre: Nanay: A Testimonial Play. BC Studies 2009, 163, 123-132.
- Pratt G, Johnston C. Turning Theatre into Law, and Other Spaces of Politics. Cultural Geographies 2007, 14(1), 92-113.
- Johnston C. Field Note: Ahmedabad, India. Women's Studies Quarterly 2006, 34(1/2), 235-238.
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Authored Book
- Johnston C, Pratt G. Migration in Performance: Crossing the Colonial Present. London: Routledge, 2019.
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Book Chapters
- Katz C, Johnston C, Pratt G. In the wake of the pandemic, Reworking the labors of care: a conversation between Cindi Katz, Caleb Johnston and Geraldine Pratt. In: Eisenberg D; Rothenberg E, ed. Reworking Labor. Chicago: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago Galleries, 2023.
- Johnston C, Pratt G. Taking Nanay to the Philippines: Transnational Circuits of Affect. In: Hurley, E, ed. Theatres of Affect. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2014, pp.192-212.
- Pratt G, Johnston C. Nanay (Mother): A Testimonial Play. In: Erin Hurley, ed. Once More with Feeling: Six Affecting Plays. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto, 2014.
- Johnston C. Accommodation Politics. In: S Karogal, ed. Saath Saal-ki Baat (The Story of Sixty Years). Pune: Padma Gandha, 2012.
- Pratt G, Johnston C. Translating Research into Theatre: Nanay: A Testimonial Play. In: Julie Salverson and Ric Knowles, ed. Popular Political Theatre and Performance. University of Toronto Press, 2010.
- Pratt G, Johnston C. Putting Play to Work. In: A Tickell, E Sheppard, J Peck and T Barnes, ed. Politics and Practice in Economic Geography. London: Sage, 2007, pp.71-81.
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Exhibition
- Cole A, Drawert E, Fontana L, Hirzel M, Johnston C, Miramonti A. Playing with Wildfire: Exhibition. 2022. London: Royal Geographic Society, 35.