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Staff Profile

Dr James Riding

Senior Lecturer

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

 

I supervise PhD students working on landscape, memory, and conflict, and teach the annual undergraduate field course to Bosnia and Herzegovina.


I lead the Power, Space, Politics research cluster in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University.


Research

Subjective Atlas of Bosnia and Herzegovina

This novel participatory mapping project is collaborative and fully co-produced from design stage with societal impact in mind. It maps the environment from inside out, starting from a place-based understanding, grounded in lived experiences. Taking place in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the project brings together the skills of two partners, the Post-Conflict Research Center in Sarajevo, a peace-building organisation, and Subjective Editions, a map-based publishing platform which produces Subjective Atlases. The aim of this public-facing project is to build a new atlas of Bosnia and Herzegovina through knowledge exchange workshops where local participants create a unique repository of maps, images, and inventories. The project will provide a platform to develop map-based participatory processes in collaboration with local peace-builders, leading to the creation of a Subjective Atlas of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a bottom-up cartographic publication remapping the post-conflict state from within. Subjective Atlas of Bosnia and Herzegovina has been funded by the Independent Social Research Foundation [ISRF Flexible Grants for Small Groups].


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

GEO2235 Geographies of Memory: Bosnia and Herzegovina Human Geography Field Course (Module Leader)

GEO1024 Coast and Communities (Module Co-Leader)

GEO1026 Becoming a Geographer

GEO2140 Research Design and Planning for Human Geographers

GEO3099 Dissertation


Postgraduate Teaching

GEO8011 Environmental Humanities (Module Leader)

GEO8010 Creative Methods in Social Sciences

GEO8089 Research Dissertation


PhD Supervision

Haris Husarić 

Emma Bloodgood 

Chloe Barker

Jack Wake-Walker

Publications