A message of introduction from LRG’s new Chair of Trustees, Dr. Tim Waterman, elected at our last trustee meeting on 18th May.
Tim is Associate Professor in Landscape Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, UK.
I am pleased and honoured to take up the role of Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Landscape Research Group. I have had so much pleasure and intellectual stimulation from my association with the organisation and its members over the years that it feels natural that I should do more to further the LRG’s aims and to broaden its reach.
I am fortunate to enter the post following Dr Chris Dalglish’s careful and thoughtful stewardship of the organisation and his oversight in developing LRG’s new strategy, building our staff capacity, and updating our governance framework so that the LRG can focus less on bureaucracy and more on research. It is, of course, not just Chris’s work, but the unity and collegiality of an excellent board that has built both stability and interest in recent years.
Thus in the years ahead my desire is to maintain the excellence and support the growth in quality of our journal, Landscape Research, and all our other communications, including Landscape Exchange (LEX), which will very soon be replacing Landscape Research Extra with a considerably augmented (and augmentable) resource.
In addition to strengthening the LRG’s core, including its events, its research strategy, and its publications, I am committed to several other areas for growth and exploration. I will:
- seek to create opportunities for members to participate in the LRG’s activities and networks, and to improve ways in which members may create, identify, and support new research initiatives;
- work to make the LRG more social, as it is togetherness and sharing at all scales that is a wellspring of good research;
- question the very nature of research and what forms and modes of research are valued by institutions, and advocate for the expansion of definitions and methods of assessment;
- expand the membership in many ways beyond mere numbers: in diversity, cosmopolitan reach, inter-, multi-, and trans-disciplinarity, beyond academia, and for advocacy; and
- build audiences, readerships, and networks in and between landscapes everywhere, both in academia and beyond.
I would like to reach out to all our members to share ideas and opportunities with me at any time.