An Atlas of countries that don't exist...

New from Nick Middleton, and just ordered.

A stunning gift hardback featuring beautiful maps and stories of unrecognised countries

Acclaimed travel writer and Oxford geography don Nick Middleton takes us on a magical tour of countries that, lacking diplomatic recognition or UN membership, inhabit a world of shifting borders, visionary leaders and forgotten peoples.

Most of us think we know what a country is, but in truth the concept is rather slippery. From Catalonia to the Crimea, and from Africa's last colony to the European republic that enjoyed just a solitary day of independence, the places in this book may lie on the margins of legitimacy, but all can be visited in the real world.

Beautifully illustrated by fifty regional maps, each shadowy country is literally cut out of the page of this book. Alongside stories, facts and figures, this Atlas brings to life a dreamlike world of nations that exist only in the minds of the people who live there.

Not much notice, but Nick is speaking at Stanford's Bookshop tomorrow in Covent Garden.

£3 a ticket

Oymyakon: Going to Extremes

The Pole of Cold as it is known is a town in the Sakha district of Eastern Russia, an area also known as Siberia.
I used to use it as an example of an extreme environment, and made frequent use of a programme made by the geographer Nick Middleton.
It describes his journey to the coldest inhabited place in the world, and the impact it has on him. He eats the meat-rich diet that local people rely upon, and finds that as the temperature drops, things start to break and stop working properly.

Siberia is a region of Asia which I would use for my Russia case study for the new KS3.

You can watch the programme in four sections on YouTube. The image quality is not the best, as its presumably ripped from a video tape (my copy is probably still languishing in a filing cabinet in my former school...)
Enjoy the journey, and wrap up warm...
And you can learn Dutch from the subtitles as an extra bonus...

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3

 

 Part 4

 

Communicating Geography...

A blog post which started off with Twitter and then turned into something more useful...

Started with me following the RGS's Geographical Journal twitter feed by following what someone else had said about it...
Scrolled down and noticed a link to an article / editorial written by Nick Middleton, who has been supportive of our Mission:Explore books (and was also going to be involved in a bid that we made for the Go Beyond bursary a few years back...)

Nick Middleton works at the School of Geography, University of Oxford. In the article, he starts by saying:

Geography is a slippery fish. Some like to make a distinction between the subject matter and the academic discipline, a division that others consider unnecessary. Within academe, geographers have become so specialised in their research and teaching interests that many have closer links with other disciplines than with some of their supposed colleagues. This fragmentation has made it gradually more difficult to attain a synoptic view of geography as a discipline, a particular irony to those who see their subject as one with a focus on synthesis. Indeed, the talk now is increasingly not about geography at all, but about geographies.

Article mentioned a guide to Researchers which I followed up (produced by the RGS-IBG) and had some useful sections on the links that could be developed between academic geographers and teachers

This Saturday, Simon Renshaw hosted a seminar as part of an ESRC funded series on Engaging Geography. I went to a previous event in the series, and it was a pity to miss meeting up with some of the people who were involved in this one... Good to see that Young People's Geographies was included in the programme for the event.

So, the message is that teachers can make use of the work that is being done in universities, and should be looking to make any possible links with the nearest institution, or perhaps one that is slightly further away, but to which several students from the school have perhaps secured places in the past....

2 new books

Have mentioned before that my desk is next to the shelves where the books come into the GA for review and featuring in magazines. My eye was caught this week by two new books:

The first is by Nick Middleton and is called "Deserts: a Very Short Introduction". It's published by Oxford University Press, who also published the very useful "Geography: a Very Short Introduction" by John Matthews and David Herbert.

Flicking through it, it would seem like a very useful resource for those people doing the Edexcel 'A' level course, or those doing OCR 'A' GCSE

The second book is "Understanding Cultural Geography: Places and Traces" by Jon Anderson

(not the singer with 'Yes')

Has a lovely clear introduction on the importance of culture in our lives, and a range of fascinating chapters. I wanted to sit there and read it rather than get on with what I was supposed to be doing. Available for just under £20 from Amazon. What's nice is the relationship between the cultural forms and PLACE.

The book begins by saying "We live in a world of cultural places... we contribute to it every day and night."

Context is vital of course with culture, and I use the word a lot when describing the work that teachers do...

Cultural geography tries to explore "the intersections of context and culture. It asks why cultural activities happen in particular ways in particular contexts."

Some really interesting sections looking at things like: Disneyfication, Belfast murals, Banksy and Graffiti and the Berlin Wall. Chapter 4 looks at the whole idea of Knowing (your) Place.