The recent success of the RGS-IBG in

No abstract

his paper is concerned not with the reality of past events in time and space T but with memory of them. The paper examines the commemoration of latenineteenth-century rural protest in contemporary Highland Scotland, with reference to two recent acts of memorialization and one continuing attempt to destroy an existing commemorative monument. The geography, chronology, and causal agencies motivating that protest have been discussed elsewhere What is explored here is the socially active and constitutive role of memory in giving those past events present meaning. This meaning is apparent in the built memorials themselves and in the deeper sustaining value of what, for the moment, may be understood as collective popular memory as a means to cultural identity in place. In focusing on the local and the popular, these concerns differ from related examinations of official monuments, public statuary, and the construction of national identity. In considering the memorialization of past geographies through three local examples, I want to both draw and build upon existing literature by questioning the implicit assumptions of memory as something shared and unproblematic. To do so, reference is made to some recent work on the idea of memory as socially constitutive, something that is both socially situated and an agent of lived experience that may not be shared or collective at all. If, as has been recently claimed, 'Places in the Western World are socially constructed with a considerable intensity of nostalgia as consciously and unconsciously we create and recreate them with a sense of history',2 recent events of memorialization in the Scottish Highlands suggest the creation of place identity to be a contested and far from collective process.

Trust is central to the social world and to the knowledge claims we make as academics. Yet trust has not been a central focus of research in human geography. This article examines the widespread divergent attention given to trust in disciplines other than geography and considers the limited research on trust in geography. Trust, the article claims, is geographical in several senses. Distinction is made between the spatial dimensions of trust in the work of non-geographers; research on trust within geography; and trust in the performance of geography as a discipline and in geography’s institutions. The article argues that trust and trustworthiness are important but underexamined elements in all we do as geographers.

This paper examines the role of fieldwork in the activities of natural history societies in Victorian Scotland. Fieldwork, it is argued, was an important constituent in the making of local natural knowledge. Being and doing ‘in the field’ was a means to establish through fieldwork given scientific fields and, in turn, to promote civic identity through scientific conduct.