Inspiring Science lecture: Rita Gardner - The modern learned society and its complex interfaces with the academy

Dr Rita Gardner from the Royal Geographical Society will be giving a lecture with the title 'The modern learned society and its complex interfaces with the academy'.

Learned societies are an integral part of the scholarly ‘ecology’ in the UK and have been for decades and, in some cases, centuries.

Charged with advancing their discipline and supporting its practitioners, and reliant on generating their own income, societies develop symbiotic relationships with their communities but to varying degrees.

In the face of substantial change in the academic environment, in scholarly publishing and in wider society, how does a modern learned society evolve, what is it best placed to do and how is this reflected in interfaces with the academy?

The lecture explores these questions, drawing on the example of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).

Dr Rita Gardner is Director of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), the learned society and professional body for geography and geographers in the UK.

Rita has led the Society through a period of substantial modernisation in the past fifteen years; raising £22 million in the process to fund new developments that build on the Society’s renowned history of exploration in the 19th and early 20th  centuries. The Society has expanded its remit, now supporting research, expeditions and fieldwork, education, policy and wider public engagement with geography. It is widely regarded as one of the leading and most innovative of the learned societies in the UK, engaging with a wide range of professional and public audiences, as well as one of the largest and the most active of the scholarly geographical societies in the world.