The Glasgow School of Art

Joanne Sharp
'Imagining the Subject of Geopolitics' listen to audio recording

Common sense global geographical imaginations divide the world into the safe space of home and the dangerous space of the international. State security promises its subjects protection from external threats. However, if we understand geography as a verb rather than a noun, it is clear how constructive - rather than descriptive - these geographical imaginations are. A critical approach challenges any creation of such separate scales, instead emphasising entanglement to show how global geographical representations become embodied in ways that are marked by gender, sex, class and race. In the current war on terror, certain figures (such as veiled women and female soldiers) have literally been made to embody dominant geographical imaginations, and this spectacle hides some of the more mundane realities from sight.

Joanne Sharp teaches geography at the University of Glasgow.  Her research interests are in geopolitical, feminist and postcolonial theories, and these have led her to work in the US, Egypt and Tanzania.  Her books include 'Condensing the Cold War: Reader's Digest and American Identity' (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 'Entanglements of Power: Geographies of Domination/Resistance' (edited with Paul Routledge, Chris Philo and Ronan Paddison, Routledge, 2000), and 'Geographies of Postcolonialism: Spaces of Power and Representation' (Sage, 2008).

Hosted by The School of Fine Art, The Friday Event Lecture Series is The Glasgow School of Art's flagship public lecture series, and brings major international speakers (including artists, architects, designers, historians and cultural theorists) to the city of Glasgow.