Now firmly established in practice, the goals of the Summer Institute in Economic Geography are:
- to provide participants with an in-depth understanding of the innovatory developments and continuing challenges in the field of economic geography, broadly defined;
- to facilitate more effective communication, lateral learning and innovation, and mutual appreciation across what has become diverse field, in methodological, theoretical, geographical, and substantive terms;
- to enable the growth of collaborative and professional networks for early-career economic geographers, across an international peer group;
- to support the internationalization of research/research training in economic geography;
- and to complement and add value to extant programs of graduate training and early-career mentoring.
The Summer Institute provides a unique opportunity to investigate—in a residential workshop setting—a series of leading edge theoretical, methodological, and research-practice issues across the field of economic geography, along with a range of associated professional and career development matters. The program deliberately leaves a certain amount of space for unstructured interactions, while featuring a wide array of formal sessions on topics, ranging from interrogation of emergent literatures and current debates to the evaluation of innovative methodological approaches, and from skills development in areas like grant applications and journal publishing to the consideration of economic-geography careers inside and outside the academy.