The Geographical Imaginations Expedition & Institute
“The GIEI” or the “Expedition & Institute” is a public geography initiative that seeks to bridge the worlds of academic and everyday geographical thinking; to explore our metacognition of space, place, region, scale and landscape; and to travel beyond the “single story” we often have of peoples and places down the street and around the world.
Between 2014-2020, the main project of the Expedition & Institute was an hour-long, monthly-produced radio essay program broadcast from Radio Fabrik, a community radio station located in Salzburg, Austria. Geographical Imaginations: Radio Expeditions into the Geographies of Everything and Nothing ran for 60 episodes, each lasting 53 minutes.
As an inquiry-based project, Geographical Imaginations asked questions and explored themes through dialogues with different texts and voices. Inevitably, the explorations returned to simple, yet complex, questions. How does _____ inform the way I picture the world in my head? How does that picture, in turn, limit or expand my place in the world?
In each episode the show made short “expeditions” investigating the geographies of _____. While many of the episodes dealt with Central European regional topics, the Expedition & Institute also traveled to and produced radio essays from Tanzania, Zanzibar, Cuba and The Arctic to bring the world back home to Austria and to listeners from around the world.
The Expedition & Institute has also developed inquiry-based, project-based and experiential learning projects and scenarios for teachers and students in Grades 6-12. These include: ASKing the World, ASKing the Arctic, World as Village: 100 People, TransAtlantic Cable, The Salzburg Geographical Expedition and The Salzburg Rhythmanalysis Project.
The GIEI continues to develop multimedia content and curriculum for expanding the ways geography is taught at the secondary school level. The Expedition & Institute is currently designing a 10-14 day Field Camp in Spain for high school human geography students and teachers.
Kevin S. Fox
Director
Kevin is from Connecticut. His own geographical imagination has been (in)formed in some ways by the discipline of geography while a graduate student at both Ohio University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Identifying himself as a cultural geographer, the questions he likes to ask come back to how we think about space and place, and this imagining of the world at all of its scales.
Kevin currently lives in Camporrobles, Spain. He founded the Expedition & Institute in 2014.
Sonia Ibáñez Pérez
Visual Storyteller
Sonia is from Madrid.
Sonia currently lives in Camporrobles, Spain. She is the Visual Storyteller at the Expedition & Institute.