Challenging Maps and Exploration
Proudly held with the Royal Geographical Society, with IBG
About the Symposium
Join us on Thursday 30th October for a day of expert panels discussing the connections, historical and contemporary, between maps and exploration.
We will be joined by six brilliant guest speakers who will present their thoughts on each theme - Empire, Indigeneity, and Contemporary Exploring - using one or more maps. Then, guided one of three fantastic panel chairs, will be lead through a discussion of the topic, followed by questions from the audience.
This hybrid event is free to attend and open to all!
Below, you can browse the event programme, meet the speakers, and learn more about our generous co-organiser and host, the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).
Please visit the RGS website here to book your free ticket.
Advance booking for this event is essential.
Programme
This event will be held in the Education Centre and Main Hall at Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), 1 Kensington Gore, London, SW7 2AR, and online. Instructions to join the event online will be sent via email.
For those planning on joining us in person, attendees will receive hot drinks upon arrival, and lunch. A table-top display of maps from the Royal Geographical Collection's archives will be shown in the Foyle Reading Room during the conference at lunchtime.
Schedule
9.30am - Event starts. Teas and coffees served.
10.00am - Panel 1 and Q&A: Cartographic Encounters with Empire
- Chair: Dr. Katie Parker, Royal Geographical Society
- Dr. Ed Armston-Sheret, Royal Geographical Society
- Professor Sujit Sivasundaram, Cambridge University
11.15am - Break
11.30am - Panel 2 and Q&A: Cartographic Encounters with Indigeneity
- Chair: Sana Murrani, Plymouth University
- Professor Michael Bravo, Cambridge University
- Dr. Rohini Rai, Brunel University
12.45pm - Lunch
2.00pm - Panel 3 and Q&A: Cartographic Encounters with Contemporary Exploring
- Chair: Tom Allen, Royal Geographical Society with IBG
- Felicity Aston MBE, Explorer, writer, and climate scientist
- Phoebe Smith, Explorer and travel writer
4.00pm - Event ends
Meet the Speakers
Panel 1 - Cartographic Encounters with Empire
with Dr. Ed Armston-Sheret and Professor Sujit Sivasundaram
Chair: Dr. Katie Parker
How are maps and empire intertwined? How do maps reflect or challenge the power hierarchies of global empire? How can they reveal and elide the multiples minds and hands that go into making them? Panellists will take on these questions and more in an examination of the cartographies of empire from the early modern and modern periods.
Dr. Edward Armston-Sheret is a historian of exploration with a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London. Alongside a role at the RGS-IBG, he is an Institute of Historical Research (IHR) Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London.
His first book On the Backs of Others: Rethinking the History of British Geographical Exploration (2024, University of Nebraska Press).
Sujit Sivasundaram is Professor of World History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow in History at Gonville and Caius College.
His latest book, Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire (2020, University of Chicago Press) won both the British Academy Book Prize and the Bentley Book Prize in World History.
Dr. Katie Parker is the Cartographic Collections Manager at the Royal Geographical Society, where she promotes and preserves their collection of more than one million maps, charts, atlases, globes, and gazetteers. Trained as a historian (PhD, University of Pittsburgh, 2016), she is an expert in the histories of maps and mapping, exploration, empire, and the early modern Pacific world. Her publications include Historical Sea Charts: Visions and Voyages Through the Ages (2021, White Star).
Katie teaches the history of maps and mapping at London Rare Books School (School of Advanced Study, University of London) and the History of Architecture at NYU London. She is the co-Editor of Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography, and the Administrative Editor of the Hakluyt Society.
Panel 2 - Cartographic Encounters with Indigeneity
with Professor Michael Bravo and Dr. Rohihi Rai
Chair: Dr. Sana Murrani
Western maps, and map archives, often erase or minimise Indigenous presence. However, maps can also be powerful tools for Indigenous peoples to (re)claim sovereignty, place names, resources, and more. Panellists will discuss their specific projects with peoples from the Arctic and the Himalaya, as well as more general issues of Indigenous maps and mapping.
Michael Bravo is Professor of the History and Geography of Science at the University of Cambridge, where he is also the Head of the Living Cryosphere Lab at the Scott Polar Research Institute. He is author of the acclaimed North Pole: Nature and Culture (2019, Reaktion Books), which described in New Scientist as a “rich and insightful” book that “charts the layers of meaning that the pole has accumulated in our minds”, and by the Literary Review of Canada as “an exhaustively researched history of that northward obsession”.
In June 2014, he launched with Canadian partners an online Pan-Inuit Trails Atlas spanning the Canadian Arctic drawing on maps drawn by Inuit from land claims and historical literature.
Dr. Rohini Rai (she/her) is a sociologist of ‘race’, ethnicity, and migration, and is currently the Lecturer in Sociology of Race at Brunel University of London. Her areas of research include racialisation and indigeneity in relation to Northeast India and Eastern Himalayan borderlands. Her current research focuses on the politics of indigeneity in the context of Eastern Himalaya and Himalayan diaspora in the UK, focusing on three elements- archives, dances and storytelling. Outside academia, she is the co-founder of the Critical Himalayan Collective.
Dr Sana Murrani is a creative researcher whose work explores critical cartography and heritage, and forced displacement and migration, through creative trauma-informed methodologies. She is an Associate Professor in Spatial Practice at the University of Plymouth, where she is also founder of the Displacement Studies Research Network, and co-founder of the Justice and Imagination in Global Displacement Research Collective. She is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre. Sana is the author of Rupturing Architecture: Spatial Practices of Refuge in Response to War and Violence in Iraq (2003–2023) (2024, Bloomsbury)
Panel 3 - Cartographic Encounters with Contemporary Exploring
with Felicity Aston MBE and Phoebe Smith
Chair: Tom Allen
Two experienced explorers will discuss their map use and map inspirations for their journeys. They will share some of their favourite map and navigation stories about how historical maps influence their practice.
Felicity Ashton MBE is [pending a biography!]
Phoebe Smith is an adventurer and award-winning travel writer, photographer, presenter and broadcaster. In 2025 she was presented with the Ness Award by the Royal Geographical Society in London for her promotion of accessible adventure, particularly to women and those from under-privileged communities, encouraging them to engage with nature in a thoughtful and conscious way.
Phoebe is author of 11 books including Extreme Sleeps and Wayfarer: Love, Loss and Life on Britain’s Pilgrim Paths (2024, HarperNorth) which was shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Book of the Year 2025. She is co-founder of the #WeTwo Foundation, a charity empowering underprivileged youngsters through carbon negative expeditions. She has recently won Sustainability Travel Writer of the Year at the TravMedia Awards 2025.
Tom Allen is the Royal Geographical Society's Expeditions and Fieldwork Manager. He is an explorer, author, trail prospector and responsible travel advocate specialising in the Caucasus region. In addition to supporting our core audience of fieldwork and expeditions practitioners, Tom will be helping the Society to expand the Society’s support to many more people, from leading experts to the simply curious, who want to make the world a better place as they travel with purpose, develop geographical knowledge, and share what they learn.
In 2016 he was the recipient of the prestigious Land Rover Bursary, helping establish a new Transcaucasian Trail long-distance trekking route across the Caucasus region, and exploring and mapping the trail’s first national section across Armenia.
He has published numerous blogs, books and documentary films inspired by expeditions made on foot, bicycle, horseback, and by packraft, as well as building an online resource for budding bicycle travellers in the form of his long-running blog, TomsBikeTrip.com
About the Royal Geographical Society
The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) is an established learned society, professional body for geography, and registered charity.
The Society was founded in 1830 to advance geographical science and this remains their core purpose. They achieve this through supporting geographical research, education, and fieldwork and expeditions, as well as by advocating on behalf of the discipline, supporting geographers in professional practice, and promoting geography to public audiences.
You can explore their resources, research, and upcoming events online at RGS.org
The Sunderland Collection would like to extend its sincere thanks to the Royal Geographical Society, in particular to Cartographic Collections Manager Dr. Katie Parker and the RGS Events team for all of their assistance in co-ordinating the event. We are highly appreciative of the Society's support and enthusiasm for The Sunderland Collection's mission.
Images © RGS-IBG
This event is the second Sunderland Collection Symposium. You can find out about our inaugural conference, Maps are too Exciting! Digital Innovations in Mapping, held at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford with ARCHIOx in October 2024.
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