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, the politics of mobility, environmental history, and material culture. His PhD research on Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco was completed while based in the Geography Department of University of California, Berkeley. Since then Gareth has published numerous academic articles, book chapters, and magazine articles on heritage operations in the United States, United Kingdom and South Africa. He was principal investigator on a 2-year international study of mining-related heritage sites funded by the AHRC and has recently completed an AHRC-funded comparative study on the logics and protocols involved in listing, landmarking, and designation by UK and US state agencies. 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.

Thinking about now...

Global Political Ecology of Mining & Visuality - on reciprocity of resource extraction & photography, cultures of earth seeing, sensing & relating materialisms.

Colonising the cosmos - on & beyond earth humanities. Solar system settlement, spaceship-ark, new archiving of the geo (global seed bank, future proofing), the meme of species immortality, future heritage, value, uncanny cosmo-politics, corporeal anxiety, space germ quarantine.

Geological mobilities - on agency, vitality, temporality, self-organizing landslides eg. The Ferguson Slide Mariposa County California moving since 2006, Sailing stones of Death Valley – their tracking, mapping, and tagging by scientists.

Historical geographies of outer space - on-earth encounters with non-earth matter. Social & cultural histories of meteorites, asteroids & craters. Outer-space as spectacle, as everyday mundane eg. space dust.

Done recently…

Gold vs. Grain? The Ancillary Ecologies of Hydraulic Mining paper delivered at International Conference of Historical Geographers Dark light & diamonds: X-rays as a geological visuality' at the Visuality, Materiality & Mining Symposium, University of Brighton.

'The integrity of feeling on the emotional production of historic places in the United States' at the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference

Keynote paper at the Quarantine Conference in Sidney Australia titled The Seduction of Interruption on our persistent love affair with un-fulfillment. Banjo-accompanied talk People Like Us on the pasts & presents of hydraulic mining as part of Aberystwyth's 'Stories by Gaslight' series.

AHRC research comparing definitions & applications of value in UK & US historical preservation.

Commentary on industrial heritage & contemporary environmental & social justice for Planet Magazine.

AHRC research on Geological Narratives of diamond mining in Kimberley South Africa at the University of Thessaloniki, in...