Dr Gareth Hoskins

Lecturer
Human Geography at Aberystwyth University
PhD (Angel Island ImmigrationStation, San Francisco) Photograph of Dr Gareth Hoskins.

Contact

Email: tgh@aber.ac.uk
Office: J3
Phone: +44 (0)1970 622 630
Fax: +44 (0)1970 622 659

Responsibilities

  • Postgraduate admissions and recruitment

Teaching Areas

Modules Taught

Module coordinator for:

  • Geographies Of Late Capitalism (GG25610)
  • Geographies Of Memory (GG37920)
  • Human Geography Fieldwork (GG27720)

Contributes to:

  • The City And Country: Processes Of Conflict And Change (GG10210)
  • Daearyddiaethau Cyfalafieth Hwyr (DA25720)

Research

Group Affiliation

Research Interests

  • Creative ways of relating environmental history and localized environmental change in the context of gold, coal and diamond mining.    
  • Memory Sports, The World Memory Championships, the imaginative spacings associated with the techniques, methods and routines of enhanced recollection (the roman room system, the memory theatre, the journey method), and how those imaginative spacings are correlated with the physical spaces of the brain.
  • First-person interpretation, role-adoption, museum theatre, and new strategies for generating empathy and identification between visitors and the historical characters that populate historic sites.
  • The way memory has operated as a means to extend individual humans and animals to wider collective configurations from groups, communities, species, through to pan-species entities such as the noosphere, world spirit, or world brain.
  • The residual spiritualities and affective obduarcies contained within buildings (churches/chapels) that have undergone physical conversion or change of use.
  • The 14 bridges that cross the Rheidol river and the connections and disconnections they cultivate between people, and between people and the land. 
  • Cultures of wood burning,  backyard-lumberjacks, domestic forestry, the prospecting, felling, splitting, stacking, seasoning, and burning of logs for heat. How it establishes an intimate, visceral, embodied relationship with the landscape, how it re-animates forgotten practical labours, skills, and routines, its ambiguity as an environmentally sensitive alternative to coal, oil, gas etc.

Current PhD students

  • Shelly Anning (MA) The Geographies of Sleep.
  • Jon Brettell (PhD) Psychogeography (ESRC funded)
  • Martin Dixon Jones (PhD) – An evaluation of ‘Let’s Walk Cymru’ funded by the Sports Council of Wales.
  • Han-Hsiu Chen (PhD) – The History and Memory of Tobacco Buildings in Taiwan.
  • Robert Mackinnon (PhD) The Geographies of miniature models and modelling (AU funded)
  • Lynne Moore (PhD) Symbolic Representations of Nation in Welsh Country Museums
  • Samantha Saville (PhD) Polarising nature-culture: an examination of value in Svalbard (ESRC funded)

Biography

Gareth Hoskins is a lecturer in Geography at Aberystwyth University where he teaches and researches on a variety of topics including urban geography, the politics of memory, and environmental history. He moved to Aberystwyth from Porthcawl in South Wales in 1997 and completed a PhD based at University of California, Berkeley.  Gareth has published numerous articles and book chapters on cultural heritage operations in the United States and the role of narrative in the production of place more generally.  He regularly presents at invited talks in the United States, United Kingdom and Europe. Gareth is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s peer review panel and is currently principal investigator on a 2-year AHRC-funded project exploring the environment in places of marked out as industrial heritage. Gareth is also involved in community-led local heritage initiatives in mid Wales, particularly those relating to lead-mining in the Cwm Rheidol Valley where he lives.

Additional Interests

Recent news

Gareth Hoskins delivered a paper entitled “House-bound memories” at the About Houses Conference in Machynlleth on April 5th.   The project links to programme funded by the European Commission with partners in Wales, France, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Lithuania, and Bulgaria aimed at developing a European standard for the recording of old houses.   The “House-bound memories” project has received initial funding for a masters scholarship through the Welsh Assembly Government’s Access to Masters Scheme which is currently open to applicants.  For information please contact Gareth Hoskins at tgh@aber.ac.uk.

On April 13th Gareth Hoskins attended the Conference “On the Surface: The heritage of Mines and Mining” in Innsbruck Austria.  He presented a paper on hydraulic mining in California and the interpretive potential of the technological sublime.  An extended version of the paper will appear in the Conference Proceedings publication.

On April 27th Gareth attended the final AHRC Anticipatory Histories Network Colloquium in Falmouth Cornwall where  he discussed entries for a forthcoming publication on Anticipatory Histories and environmental change.

Staff Publications

Peer Reviewed Book Chapters & Journal Articles

Articles available through academia.edu - http://aber.academia.edu/GarethHoskins

2011   

  1. Hoskins, G.C & Maddern, J.F (2011) ‘Immigration Stations’ in T. Cresswell and P. Merriman, (eds) Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects Aldershot: Ashgate pp151-165.

2010

  1. Hoskins GC. 2010. A secret reservoir of values: the narrative economy of Angel Island Immigration Station.  Cultural Geographies Volume 17(2). 259-275 DOI Narrative Economy pdf

2008

  1. Hoskins GC and Cresswell T. 2008. Place, Persistence, and Practice: Evaluating Historical Significance at Angel Island, San Francisco, and Maxwell Street, Chicago. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 98(2): 392-413. DOI. Place, Persistance and Practice pdf 

2007

  1. Hoskins GC. 2007. Materialising memory at Angel Island Immigration Station, San Francisco. Environment and Planning A, 39: 437-455. Materialising Memory pdf

2006

  1. Hoskins GC. 2006. Poetic Geographies of the Excluded: Chinese immigration through Angel Island, San Francisco. Race and Landscape in America Poetic Landscapes pdf
  2. Hoskins GC, Cresswell T. 2006. Producing Immigrant Mobilities. On the Move: The Politics of Mobility in the Modern West
  3. Hoskins GC, Cresswell TJ. 2006. Making up Chinese-Americans: Moral Geographies Immigration in the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and The Peopling of America Theme Study Act (2001). Metaphoricity and the Politics of Mobility
  4. Hoskins GC, and Cresswell TJ. 2006. The Writing on the Walls: Moral Geographies of Immigration in the Chinese Exclusion Act. in Effie Yiannopoulou E and Margaroni M. (Eds.)  Metaphoricity and the Politics of Mobility, Atlanta, GA: Rodopi Press, 69-86.

2005

  1. Hoskins G. 2005. At America's gates: Chinese immigration during the exclusion era, 1882-1943. Journal of Historical Geography, 31: 189-190.

2004

  1. Hoskins GC. 2004. A Place to Remember: Scaling the Walls of Angel Island Immigration Station. Journal of Historical Geography, 30(4) 685-700. Scaling the Walls pdf

2003

  1. Hoskins GC & Tallon AR. 2003. Promoting the ‘urban idyll’: policies for city centre living. Johnstone C and Whitehead M. (eds.) New Horizons in British Urban Policy: Perspectives on New Labour’s Urban Renaissance, Aldershot: Ashgate, 25-40. Urban Idyll pdf