Angela Last’s research while affiliated with University of Leicester and other places

This article discusses the tension between economic and intellectual demands that play into the authoring of a ‘creative thesis’. At least since the ‘cultural turn’, human geographers have voiced support for creativity in research. Although ‘creative theses’ are often discussed in relation to artistry and innovation, the economic conditions in which such research is produced are less often in focus. At present, time and funding pressures are making the ‘creative thesis’ risky for supervisors and PhD researcher. This can lead to greater restrictions, even in cases where abandoning creativity is not an option if the thesis is to fulfil its intellectual and ethical aims. Rather than simply offering a critique, I am drawing attention to possibilities of supporting ‘creative theses’ within a challenging institutional environment.

This special section illustrates how learning and teaching in UK higher education reinforces, but can potentially also help to counteract, racism. This introduction provides some context for this intervention and provides an outline of key themes that emerge from the collection of papers. We use these themes to sketch out three guiding principles for the incorporation of explicitly anti‐racist praxis in our learning and teaching within British Geography 1) Recognise each other’s humanity 2) Say the unsayable 3) Experiment with (y)our history. We call for explicitly anti‐racist praxis while conscious of the ‘disciplinary fragility’ that moves to address racism might elicit. It is argued that an anti‐racist approach to learning and teaching in British Geography has the potential to equip staff and students with the tools to help make our discipline, and wider society, more equitable and just.

This chapter demonstrates how learning and teaching about race can both further understanding about racial inequality within geography, and improve disciplinary knowledge about the history and spatiality of racism as it intersects with wider structural inequalities. Through doing so, the chapter contributes to longstanding and more recent debates over how geography curricula are shaped by and perpetuate subjectivities, epistemologies and practices underpinned by racist logic. We illustrate how insights from decolonial approaches, and Critical Race Theory (CRT) perspectives, can support geographers in creating degree programs that address and counteract the perpetuation of 'white geographies' i.e. the racist and colonial assumptions that are normalised and circulated through our institutional arrangements and practices. We conclude by calling on geographers to embrace a 'curriculum against domination', which rejects learning, teaching and knowledge production that perpetuates hierarchies of superiority and inferiority. [137 words]