Keynote Speakers

Dr. Liz Bondi

Liz Bondi is Professor of Social Geography at the University of Edinburgh, where she currently divides her time between contributes to professional education in Counselling and Psychotherapy, and her counselling and psychotherapy practice. Liz began her academic career in human geography, which she continued while training part-time in counselling.

Combining her academic background in human geography with her engagement in counselling and psychotherapy, she has lead or contributed to a series of research projects about the cultural shaping of counselling and psychotherapy in Scotland. She also applies ideas from counselling and psychotherapy to the developing field of "emotional geographies". She is founding editor of the journal Emotion, Space and Society and author of numerous academic papers as well as co-editor or co-author of several books.

Dr. Lynda Jonston

Lynda Johnston is Professor of Geography, Associate Dean (Academic) and Deputy Dean of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Waikato. Her research interests include genders, sexualities, bodies, tourism and leisure, performative methodologies, and constructions of knowledge. She concentrates on the mutual construction of embodied subjectivities and places (e.g. homes, weddings, activist spaces, gay pride festivals, sporting places, cities, rural and nature spaces). Lynda uses critical social theories, such as queer, feminist, emotion, affect,poststructuralist, and postcolonialist theories.

For almost two decades Lynda has pursued community based research on the challenges and spatial complexities of inequality. She was a founding member (from 2007) and co-chair of the group Hamilton Pride Incorporated and has organised numerous festival events – workshops, symposiums, art installations, panel discussions– to advocate for queer geographies of belonging. Lynda is connected, globally, to organisations such as the International Geographical Union (she the Chair of the Gender and Geography Commission) and recently finished her term as Editor of Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography (2010 – 2016). She is an editorial board member of the journals Social and Cultural Geography and Emotion, Space and Society.

Lynda is contracted by Progress in Human Geography to write annual progress reports on gender, sexuality and geography for 2015, 2016, and 2017. Her book publications include: Space, Place and Sex: Geographies of Sexualities (2010) co-authored with Robyn Longhurst; Queering Tourism: Paradoxical Performances of Gay Pride Parades (2005); and the co-authored Subjectivities, Knowledges and Feminist Geographies: The Subjects and Ethics of Social Research (2002). Lynda is currently working on the book: Transforming Gender, Sex and Place: Gender Variant Geographies (Routledge) which aims to deepening understanding of where and how gender variant people feel in, and or, out of place.