{"id":847,"date":"2026-09-09T15:37:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T13:37:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.uef.fi\/menopausing\/?page_id=847"},"modified":"2026-09-10T12:00:42","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T10:00:42","slug":"becoming-a-geographer","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.uef.fi\/menopausing\/flash-ethnographies\/becoming-a-geographer\/","title":{"rendered":"Becoming a geographer \u2013 finding disciplinary kinship in Durham and London"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Meeri Ott<\/a>, 9.9.2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Over the past month, I travelled to the United Kingdom twice: first to a queer and trans worldbuilding retreat in Durham, then to the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference<\/a> in London. The settings could hardly have felt more different \u2013 one was an intimate and slower-paced space constructing new ways to be; the other vast, fast and intellectually electric. Yet together they did something similar. They showed me, a former folklorist with a lifelong companion named Impostor Syndrome, that I and my (research) interests might actually belong to the world of human geography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A retreat in Durham: Practicing queer and trans worldbuilding<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In Durham, I attended the Queer and Trans Worldbuilding Retreat, organised by the Space, Sexualities and Queer Research Group<\/a> (SSQRG) of the Royal Geographical Society with the British Institute of Geographers (RGS-IBG), in collaboration with the Queer and Trans Thematic Group in the Department of Geography at Durham University, on 12-14th<\/sup> of August 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 I got the first glance to how carefully and friendly the retreat would be organised while I was still making my way to Durham. My first flight was delayed more than four hours, which meant I would arrive in Newcastle too late to make the connecting train to Durham. When I messaged the retreat group chat, one of the organisers, Jay, immediately began figuring out how I could still arrive to my hotel in Durham that night. And before I even had time to fully stress about it, a taxi had been arranged, and I arrived the town in the middle of the night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The next morning, I decided to walk to the retreat because I had not had time to get to know the town the day before, as I had originally planned. Durham felt tranquil, the landscape held in an expectant stillness before the day\u2019s heat settled in. Some parts of the town looked like a set for some 80\u2019s film about a prestigious boys\u2019 boarding school \u2014 or, as my sister jokingly commented on the photos I sent to our family group chat, a \u201cdark academia dream\u201d. It was a nice premise for the following days, where we would learn how to slow down and notice the world and others around us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That gentleness I experienced with Jay helping me the previous day continued throughout the retreat. It was apparent in how the organisers made sure everyone had chances and time to connect with each other without forcing intimacy. This was done for example through thoughtful activities that helped us to get to know one another the first day and by making it clear that all participation to anything was nothing but optional. Different diets and access needs were accommodated, and there was a quiet space available during all of the days. Care was not just an afterthought; it was to be found in all of the details, built into the organising from the start.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I enjoyed myself in ways I hadn\u2019t associated with academic work. I almost felt like a child again: social in a more straightforward way, curious, vulnerable and allowed to make things with my hands. Across the retreat, I imagined the possible future of intimate technology by creating an imaginative technological companion. I pondered about queering accesses to historic buildings through collaging. I learned how to assemble and bind a notebook. I attended a grief circle and constructed a unique grief ceremony using exquisite corpse technique. I learned about polyperspectivity and how to do cyanotype printing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was powerful to actually see queer and trans worldbuilding in action. I had spent the previous months writing about crip-queer worldmaking and been surrounded with the heavily theoretical level of these concepts. Being at the conference made these ideas more tangible \u2013 the way of being and creating together, all the different workshops and talks \u2013 they were great examples how to move beyond the concepts to concrete actions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most freeing realisation was that this, too, can be part of my work. Even when we joked about how some would probably roll their eyes on our work day consisting of doing arts and crafts, dancing, MCing, you name it, we were actually experimenting with alternative ways of being academic \u2013 ways in which thinking, making, resting and connecting were not separate from scholarship. Many participants shared some level of frustration with traditional academia: its prejudices, its hurry, its stress, its attachment to metrics and speed. Some described academia feeling pretty lonely at times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Across those three days, we practiced how to be gentler with ourselves and more connected with one another. I at least left feeling little bit less alone in academia, and I hope other did too. The retreat was far more than I had expected \u2013 perhaps because I had not realised how much I ached for academic spaces actually organised around care. At the same time, I do not want to treat care as an easy solution to all of the harmful traditions deeply rooted in academia. Care takes labour, time, and often some sort of funding and institutional permission \u2014 resources that are themselves unevenly distributed. As queer worldmaking is sometimes critiqued being too situational, I\u2019m curious to see how and if the retreat results in some lasting effects \u2013 do the connections last beyond a new LinkedIn connection, can I really take in what I learned and apply it to my day-to-day working habits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A conference in London: Meeting human geography at scale<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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London, by contrast, arrived as motion: vibrant, crowded, and fast-paced. If Durham taught me how geography can be practiced gently (and queerly!), London\u2019s conference showed me the discipline\u2019s scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the beginning of September, I attended the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference in London, chaired by Professor Peter Hopkins, under the theme of Geographies of inequalities: towards just places.<\/a> I arrived for the final two days rather than the full conference, but those two days were dense enough to feel like an initiation into the current rhythms of human geography. Symbolically the conference couldn\u2019t have come at a better time \u2013 my year has always started from September rather than January. It felt just right to start the year with this kind of intellectual bang.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I arrived in London on Wednesday evening and had dinner with my dear supervisor Aija Lulle<\/a>, also the PI of our project \u201cMenopausing: Exploring diversity, awareness and activism<\/a>\u201d. Over shared garlic bread, we talked about the conference, academia and life in general. The dinner was a nice and gentle way to settle down to the bustling metropolis, getting the brain started for the following days full of overlapping debates and varying attempts to imagine more just places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Thursday, I began my first conference day with attending a session on unconventional geographies of solidarity and ephemeral alliances. Across the papers the question of how people create spaces of temporary utopias, safe sanctuaries, resistance and collective possibilities within unequal worlds was repeated. The presentations drew attention to the messy and sometimes contradicting human aspects of research, the emotional labour involved in solidarity, and the challenges in actually dismantling systems of oppression. One of the presentations concluded well the difficulty of ensuring that well-meaning projects do not reproduce the exclusions they set out to challenge and how sometimes when we use a lot of time and energy in creating something cool and beautiful, it can end up attracting commercial interest and local developers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next session, on new and emerging research in gender and feminist geography, asked how people internalise and negotiate identities, mobilities and belonging. Papers moved through football, abortion and informal settlements, but together they insisted on intersectional analysis across race, migration, religion, class, economic status and education. The discussion also raised an important methodological challenge as most of the research presented focused on Muslim populations: how can researchers write about Muslim women\u2019s and girl\u2019s lives without just reproducing the stereotype of subjugated victimhood. The question raised resulted in discussion around what kind of agencies can rise in different contexts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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After lunch in the bone-dry Hyde park, I continued to the Geographies of the Middle sessions, organised by Aija and Dr Amy Barron. The first session out of two focused on the middle-age and menopause, and it felt especially valuable to hear how others were making analytical space for this often-ignored life stage. Amy Barron started with \u201cthinking from and through the middle\u201d, reminding us that middle-age is not a stable category but is negotiated differently across contexts. Too often, middle-age is not a research interest, as it\u2019s seen as \u201cassumed norm\u201d or \u201cblank category\u201d. Barron concluded her presentation with an important question: \u201cWhat might happen if, rather than thinking about the middle as something positioned between two more significant endpoints, we actually began our analysis in the middle?\u201d. After all, aren\u2019t we \u201calways-already\u201d in the middle of something?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr Kate Boyer and Dr Kirstie O\u2019Neil continued with the menopause in everyday life, showing how menopause shapes women\u2019s everyday lives in the contemporary UK. I was interested by how closely some of their findings resonated with the narratives of my interlocutors: brain fog affecting the experiences of space and place; growing valuation of more peaceful rural locations; not being heard in healthcare settings; the menopausing body generating worry, frustration but sometimes also admiration; and menopause understood not only as loss, but rather as becoming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Third presentation for the session was Jenny Appel\u2019s \u201cMenopause and the geographies of the middle: everyday experiences of reproductive ageing\u201d. Appel talked about unpredictable embodiments and liminal conditions – how menopause for some means being somewhere in-between of the familiar reproductive (and young) embodiment and the unpredictability of the future ageing body. I found this notion especially intriguing because in my interviews with chronically ill, disabled or neurodivergent individuals, the described unpredictability of the bodyminds was already present before menopausing. Her paper helped me contextualise how reproductive ageing intersects with bodyminds that have long been asked to live with uncertainty \u2013 a situation far too similar to many of my interviewees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I finished Thursday with a session on care-full methods and ethics of care in (and beyond) the field. The presenters discussed how researchers care for those around them during fieldwork, but also as importantly how researchers themselves are cared for, and by whom. The session made visible the importance of researcher\u2019s positionality, the emotional and reproductive labour of fieldwork, and the risk of missing (non-normative) care if we\u2019re too focused in looking for certain kinds of acts. Yidan Cao\u2019s reflection on \u201cethics of enough\u201d stayed with me: how caring is also tied with the skill in knowing when to stop \u2013 stop interviewing, stop gathering data, stop with pre-given ethical tools that don\u2019t fit the actually lived situations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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By the end of Thursday, I realised I had not chosen sessions around one pre-planned theme, yet the day had organised itself around collectivity, community, and care (and menopause!). This may be partly because of the conference\u2019s theme of moving towards more just places. At the same time, walking back to my shiny hotel located in the posh \u2013 or in Tripadvisor\u2019s words, \u201celegant and charming\u201d – South-Kensington, I couldn\u2019t help but feeling a bit uneasy. The bright purple trash bags filled with orange peels in the middle of the street seemed highlighting the contradictions: we were discussing justice in a city deeply shaped by imperial histories and contemporary inequalities. Most of the conference was happening literally in the buildings of Imperial<\/em> College London. Large international gatherings are never innocent spaces. They depend on travel, institutional resources, visas, access, funding and uneven academic mobility. As one heated discussion in a well-known mailing list reminded me during the conference, this is not a safe space for everyone. Walking through the desiccated parks in London, I could not avoid thinking about the climate costs of our arrivals. Even though many of the sessions addressed urgent topics such as the ongoing genocide in Palestine or the dangers of AI, it is still important to question how we actually make positive and lasting change, so we don\u2019t just end up being a caricature of intelligentsia gathering together just to discuss about material realities at a safe theoretical distance from them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Friday, it was my time to present my paper \u201cUnruly bodies in transition \u2013 experiences of menopausing<\/a>\u201d in the session \u201cThe Human, Unevenly: Rethinking Human(ist) Geographies of Embodiment, Difference, and Everyday Inequality\u201d organised by Amy Walker, Jenny Appel, Jonathan Everts, and Sarah Marie Hall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my presentation, I introduced the article \u201cMenopausing through crip-queer minor gestures\u201d, written with Aija Lulle and Pauliina Lukinmaa<\/a>, to be published in 2027 in an Area<\/a> special issue on the geographies of menopausing. I outlined how we bring Erin Manning\u2019s minor gestures<\/a> into conversation with crip-queer worldmaking. Through these concepts we had analysed 10 semi-structured interviews conducted by me. One of the main messages of my presentation (and our article) was that menopausing reorganises time, space and relations. These changes described in the interviews were sometimes shaped by pain, exhaustion, and debility, but also by the joy of slowing down, newfound wisdom and refusals of productivity and \u201cpushing through\u201d. Read as crip-queer minor gestures, these changes are not simply private adjustments to often a difficult transition. They show how more liveable worlds are already being made through altered rhythms, adapted spaces and practices of care\u2026 I will save the rest for the article, so there is still something new to discover when it is published!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can find my presentation slides by clicking here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond my own paper, The Human, Unevenly first session felt like a conversation with everything I had heard the previous day. James Whitehurst spoke about stammering, relationality and the vibe, describing \u201cthe vibe\u201d combines the feelings and felt atmosphere of a certain situation, space or place. His focus on solidarity among stammering people echoed Thursday\u2019s session on unconventional geographies of solidarity and ephemeral alliances. Haifa Alarasi, Jennie Middleton and Anna Plyushteva discussed the tentative transitions of neurodivergent children, complicating the idea of transition as an empty in-between by showing it as full of unique rhythms, flows and intensities. Their presentation reminded me of Amy Barron\u2019s prompt of beginning our analysis from the middle. Eva Neely\u2019s paper on posthuman feminist subjectivities and care-full research interestingly extended the previous day\u2019s conversations about care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second part of the session continued with the same intensity. Gabrielle Reagan spoke about geographies of pleasure, Karolina Lebek about migrant bodies as lived and contested spaces, and Nicole Gombay about the altered worlds of people with traumatic brain injuries. In my notebook, I wrote one sentence in large letters: I FELT ALIEN IN MY OWN BODY. It was a quotation from Gombay\u2019s interviews, but I had heard similar statements in my own research. The sentence opened questions that I would love to delve into more in the near future – what makes one\u2019s own body feel alien? Does it stem from the sensed (un)belonging with the surrounding societal norms? What kinds of spaces, relations and practices allow bodymind to become familiar again?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Outside the conference, London as a city was also bustling, exciting and a bit hectic. I hadn\u2019t been in London for ages and after the long conference days I still tried to absorb the city: strolling through parks with a friend, eating amazing vegan Chinese food, going to art museums and walking, walking, walking. Walking has always been my favourite way of learning a city; this time it also helped me process the density of the conference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I enjoyed the electric feeling that a conference of this scale generates. I could see the RGS-IBG conference lanyards everywhere, people mingling, laughing, hurrying to the next session, drinking coffee in sunny corners. I was surrounded by geographers from all around the world, and to my surprise, I didn\u2019t feel simply like a visitor from another discipline. I felt something close to belonging \u2013 not maybe yet as a permanent arrival but sensing that me and the kind of research and ways of doing research that I\u2019m interested in are welcomed. There are already many researchers, projects and groups doing their best to construct more just worlds with the resources and possibilities given to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Back in Helsinki: Back to the day-to-day<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Back in suddenly-so-autumnal Helsinki, the question I keep returning to was one I had been asked several times during the conference: what was the most important thing I gained from it? Here, now, I extend the question to include the retreat as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I gained new friends and acquaintances, stronger belief in myself as a geographer and academic, and heaps of inspiration. Durham helped me create actual deep connections with other attendees and the concepts of queer and trans worldbuilding. The RGS-IBG conference continued to amaze me with all the wonderful, care-full, and gentle research happening within the discipline. Becoming an academic and a geographer, I am learning, is partly a process of finding the people, concepts and practices that make one\u2019s questions feel possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, sitting in my kitchen and watching the rain pour from the sky, I feel the afterlife of those journeys in my exhausted body. And that reminds me what might, hopefully, be the most important thing these journeys gave me. I want to do my best \u2013 simultaneously understanding that \u201cbest\u201d can look different at different times. Sometimes it means taking care of myself, but more often it also means taking care of others. Sometimes it means resting, and other times organising something collectively. I want to do my part in constructing alternative (academic) worlds that are more just to all of us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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