Date and time
Watch the recording of this year’s President’s Lecture by John Agnew, (UCLA, USA):
About the lecture: The Regional Imagination in Current Proposals for “Levelling Up”
Abstract: The purpose of this brief lecture is to survey some recent discussion and policy proposals, particularly in the US and UK, about compensating places that have been “left behind” in the context of contemporary economic trends favoring large cities and some localities over others. More specifically, I suggest that the discussion is missing much in the way of a sophisticated understanding of “regions” and tends to fall back on stereotypical notions embedded in contemporary political-electoral discourse about “rural-urban,” “backward-modern,” and “folk versus economically relevant” (such as “the North” in England and “the heartland” in the US) regions. Not much can be expected to come of this “levelling up” discussion in terms of material progress without attending to the limited regional imagination underpinning it.
Speaker information
John Agnew (Ph.D., Ohio State University, 1976) is Distinguished Professor of Geography with research interests in Political Geography, International Political Economy, European Urbanization, and Italy. Professor Agnew teaches courses in Political and European Geography. He is also a Professor in UCLA’s Department of Italian and was Visiting Professor of Political Geography at Queen’s University, Belfast, 2012-14. Editor-in-Chief, Territory, Politics, Governance, 2013-19 and the current President of the Regional Studies Association.
Jessie P.H. Poon is Professor of Geography at the University at Buffalo, New York. She is currently an editor of Environment and Planning A. She was the North American editor of Papers in Regional Science from 2002 to 2006. She has published over 100 papers on multinational firms’ locational strategies, foreign direct investment, trade, and technological upgrading dynamics in Asia.
Sally Hardy began her career at the Economic and Social Research Council where she worked as a Scientific Officer in the Industry and Employment Committee dispensing funding to UK based social science academics. Sally moved to the Regional Studies Association where she has been CEO for just over 30 years. She has developed the organisation from a small, UK focused organisation into a global Association with an international footprint. Sally has become an advocate on publishing issues for the learned society sector speaking regularly at national conferences and events. She has advocated on different aspects of Open Access – for journals as well as for monographs and also around copy right reform and educational exceptions. She speaks on publishing practice and particularly on how to grow impact from publishing activity and on issues of learned society strategy. She currently sits on the Society Publishers Coalition Council and the Governance Committee of the Association for Learned and Professional Society Publishers and is the founder member of the Academy for Social Science CEOs Committee.