Conference Report and Reflection – RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2025, University of Birmingham
The conference, chaired by Professor Patricia Noxolo, brought together over 2,000 geographers and featured more than 400 sessions under the theme Geographies of Creativity / Creative Geographies. While wide-ranging, several strands held particular resonance for the field of night studies.
Key highlights included:
Session on Night Shift: The hidden workforce powering 24-hour cities:
This session examined how diverse data sources - from labour statistics to ethnography and spatial analysis - can advance theory, policy, and planning in night studies, with a focus on night workers. Through roundtable discussions, it explored methodological challenges, policy relevance, and the creative ways night workers inhabit and reshape urban spaces. This session offered a direct exploration of the lived realities of nocturnal labour. It underscored the precarities, governance challenges, and cultural dimensions of working at night. For my research, it provided a critical framing of how the night economy could be studied as both a labour and spatial system.
Creative and Artistic Sessions: Many papers and performances dealt with themes of temporality, rhythm, and alternative urban imaginaries. These resonate strongly with night studies, which often considers how cultural and sensory practices reshape the city after dark.
Session on entrepreneurship and finance: The session was particularly interesting, wherein twin cities of Dublin and Luxembourg were included to explore how rapid urbanisation along with flurry of capital (with designated status of International Financial Services Center) and capitalism-centric policies over a course of a couple of decades ruined the urban living standards with little hopes of recovery (basis feedback from key stakeholders such as urban developers, designers and others) and crowded out the commoner over time.
Reflection
Engaging with the conference through the lens of night studies highlighted the value of situating nocturnal life within broader debates in geography, urban studies, creativity, urban imaginaries, gender studies and labour studies.
The night work session clarified the importance of understanding the night not only as a cultural or economic sphere but also as a domain of labour relations, inequality, and regulation. This enriched my conceptual toolkit by bridging night-time economy research with critical labour studies.
The creative strands reinforced my belief that studying the night requires methodologies attuned to atmosphere, rhythm and affect. These approaches offered inspiration for how I might incorporate creative methods into my own research on nightlife and urban nightscapes.
From the networking opportunities standpoint, it underscored the need to keep supporting each other for the progress of the field. This perspective aligns closely with my project, which investigates how night-time economies are produced, regulated, and contested using a cultural complexity lens.
The core satisfaction I had was due to my lack of hesitation to understand multiple theoretical lens, methodological innovations and being in a position to ask questions during the sessions even if it was not my area of strength- the interdisciplinarity of the field of night studies has equipped me to understand how they conceptualise their projects from a theoretical and methodological standpoint. I would go on further to say this conference was the highlight of the program, given its ability to challenge notions, reimagine phenomena, revere high quality presentations and engage with a unique set of people, who could think and articulate their ideas and research work in a manner understandable to me as well (even though being from outside their core domains).
New Connections and Benefits for Night Studies
The conference enabled me to form several valuable new connections, all of which contribute to advancing night studies as a field:
Early-career researchers examining cultural and urban economies, offering opportunities for comparative conversations about nightlife across different contexts, such as Melbourne and London.
Senior scholars in night studies, whose insights into methodological innovation and governance of nocturnal work enhanced my capacity to assess my own research and how the participants responded to my questions during interviews.
These connections can support my work by broadening its theoretical grounding, enhancing methodological diversity, opening up collaborative possibilities and strengthening publication prospects in night studies and beyond.
Conclusion
Overall, attending the RGS-IBG 2025 conference was a significant step forward in my academic journey. It allowed me to situate my research within the emerging interdisciplinary field of night studies, to engage with cutting-edge debates on labour, governance and creativity and to build a network of scholars committed to advancing understanding of the urban night