Community & teaching Applications are now open to our new MSc Global Environment and Sustainability programme! This is a new, cutting edge programme delivered fully online. the Programme Leader Dr Izabela Delabre will be giving a webinar about the new programme on 26 August. Listen to our student Emeka Forbes’s Homeland Narratives podcast that explores how diasporic communities forge connections. Events & media ‘Plan now for more beastly weather and coastal destruction’ is the title of an article written by our very own Prof Sue Brooks with Professor Tom Spencer (Cambridge) for The Guardian. The piece discusses the need for better protection plans in East Anglia in the light of weather events like Storm Darcy. Dr Penny Vera-Sanso was a discussant for the panel 'Caring in Crisis' and a roundtable discussant at the 'Old Age Care in Times of Crisis: Past and Present', On-line Symposium, 8-9th April 2021 co-hosted by Wellcome, Birkbeck, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In May, Dr Ella Harris launched her new book Rebranding Precarity: Pop-up Culture as the Seductive New Normal in an author meets critics event. The panel was composed by Dr Mel Nowicki (Oxford Brookes), Prof Ben Anderson (Durham University), Prof Harriet Hawkins (Royal Holloway) and chaired by Prof Melissa Butcher. Dr Mara Nogueira co-organised a three-part session with Dr Debangana Bose (Maynooth University) on 'Urbanisation from below' at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting Online Conference in April. She also gave a talk entitled 'The “forms of living” in the popular economy of Belo Horizonte, Brazil' at the same event. Explore the 'Living Refugee Archive', a fascinating resource that combines access to virtual exhibitions with other items from the Refugee Council archive housed at the University of East London. The archive incorporates the ‘Crafting Resistance’ exhibition about the Chilean exile community co-curated by Dr Jasmine Gideon. Read Prof Paul Watt's interview on his new book Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London for New Start, the regeneration magazine. The book was also the subject of a panel event at the Housing Studies Association, 2021 Annual Conference on 15th April. Prof Watt has given other presentations about the book at the Annual General Meeting of the Labour Campaign for Council Housing, at the Bookmarks bookshop, at the Islington South & Finsbury Labour Party and at the Housing and Communities Research Group, University of Birmingham. Dr Simon Pooley is a founding member of a new Higher Education initiative in the UK, CASCADE, the Conservation and Sustainability Consortium of Academic Institutions. It aims to harness the UK’s unique expertise in people-orientated conservation science to support the development of principles, policies, and practices that meet CBD goals in the UK and partner countries, in an equitable, socially just, and inclusive way. More details here. Prof Paul Watt gave a paper on ‘Home, block and neighbourhood: multi-scalar place attachments among displaced social housing residents in London’, at the NIAS Conference on Studies of Belonging, June 10th. At the Feeling Class: Emotions, Bodies and the Affective Politics of Social Inequalities seminar series, May 13th, he gave a paper on ‘"They don’t care if they hurt your feelings”: Emotions and class at London social housing estates undergoing regeneration’. Dr Aideen Foley gave a talk for the UNDP Archipelagic and Island States Forum event The Scholars Space: Innovative Response to Climate Change in Island and Small States. It was titled ‘Making sense of ‘old’ and ‘new’ data in island and small state contexts’. The British Institute for the Study of Iraq has hosted a talk by Dr Becky Briant and her research partner Dr Jaafar Jotheri (University of Al-Qadisiyah) on 'Najaf Sea Palaeoshorelines,' exploring the results of a recent fieldwork trip to the region. Listen to Dr Kalpana Wilson's podcast on population policies and eugenics in conversation with Kate Law (Nottingham), Paige Patchin (UCL) and Subhadra Das (UCL). The podcast is part of the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre's series 'What does Eugenics mean to us?'. Prof Paul Watt has presented the papers ‘Revisiting residualisation: social housing, private renting and the real tenure of last resort’ and ‘Back to the future in local authority housing? Grant funding, the Housing Revenue Account and Local Housing Companies’ (with Martin Wicks) at the Housing Studies Association, 2021 Annual Conference, April 15th. Dr Jasmine Gideon and Dr Penny Vera-Sanso have co-organised an event on De-Colonising Development: An open event for practitioners hosted by the London International Development Centre on the 23rd of June. Dr Simon Pooley published a plain-English account of his thinking on human-wildlife coexistence, grounded in his fieldwork in the wetlands of Gujarat, India. The publication, Current Conservation, aims to communicate academic findings in accessible form, and is beautifully illustrated, in this case featuring artwork by the wonderful Athulya Pillai. Prof Rosie Cox gave a talk entitled 'A Tale of Two (Unsuccessful) Approaches to Migrant Domestic Work: Learning the lessons from the UK Au Pair scheme and Overseas Domestic Worker' visa at the online conference ‘Decent Care Work’ hosted in April by the Goethe University in Frankfurt. In March 2021, Dr Simon Pooley gave a talk titled 'Human-crocodiles conflicts and coexistence' to zoo staff and students on the Zoo Conservation Biology MSc run jointly by Paignton Zoo and Plymouth University. Dr Paul Elsner, together with Dr Mike Bintley (Department of English), hosted a webinar on Climate Solutions for the UK that focused on the importance of the UK’s coastal seas to decarbonize our energy system. The webinar was part of the global 'Solve Climate By 2030' initiative where over 1,000 Colleges, Universities, High Schools, and K-8 schools worldwide engaged over half a million people in a one-day Teach-In on climate solutions and justice in the transition. Dr Kalpana Wilson spoke at the panel discussion on Contested Nationalisms in Contemporary India on 27 May organised by organised by the Sarah Parker Remond Centre and UCL Geography and at the concluding Roundtable at the two-day international workshop on the Epistemic Urgency of Conceptual Diversity organised by the Department of Gender, LSE. On 21st May, Prof Rosie Cox gave a talk at the symposium ‘Who Counts? : The Politics of Human Classification – challenging methods for critical social science research' hosted by London School of Economics. Dr Kalpana Wilson spoke at the Roundtable on Beyond lip service: imperatives and practical implications for decolonising 'development' which took place on 3 March, organised by the COST Action on Decolonising Development. New books Prof Paul Watt has published a new monograph with Policy Press: Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London. The book provides an in-depth account of the ways that public/social housing estate regeneration – in the form of demolition and rebuilding (‘comprehensive redevelopment’) – is reshaping London, fuelling socio-spatial inequalities via state-led gentrification. It is based on over a decade of original research at several estates, including interviews with 182 residents and over 50 officials and politicians. Dr Kezia Barker has co-edited a new collection, The Routledge Handbook of Biosecurity and Invasive Specie. The handbook draws together leading academics from across the natural and social sciences to consider the management and impact of infectious diseases, invasive species and biosafety concerns, across scales from industrial agriculture to forest ecosystems to individual gardens. It attempts to challenge what can be theoretical silos, by including opposing (and sometimes acrimonious) disciplinary perspectives and debates within one handbook. Published by Routledge, the book Home Improvement in Aotearoa New Zealand and the UK is a new monograph by Prof Rosie Cox. This book examines experiences of home improvement in the UK and Aotearoa New Zealand, providing valuable insight into the ways in which people make and maintain home in social, material and economic context. Drawing on in-depth interviews, examining both DIY projects and projects carried out by professional handymen, Rosie Cox explores how home improvement fits into wider social relationships and structures of inequality. Research news The eruption of the Laacher See volcano (Eifel, Germany) ranks among the largest European volcanic events in recent geological history and much uncertainty remained around its exact age. Dr Stefan Engels is part of a team whose ground-breaking research was able to show that the eruption must have occurred at ca. 13,006 +/- 9 years ago, much earlier than previously accepted. These results have been published by the prestigious journal Nature and inform not only our understanding of past climate change but also of similar events that might occur as a result of ongoing climate warming. Dr Becky Briant, Dr Stefan Engels, Dr Ismael Al Ameri and their team, including Tim Reynolds in HCA and Jaafar Jotheri in Iraq, have been awarded £4,105 of radiocarbon dates from the National Environmental Isotope Facility. They will be dating the paleo-shorelines they found in the Najaf Sea in western Iraq. There are currently some delays in the radiocarbon lab due to COVID, but they expect dates by 2022. Dr William Ackah will be leading a six-month project funded by The Council for World Mission (£15K), examining Racism and anti-racism in Christian educational material for children. Dr Andrea Ballatore will be working together with Prof Fiona Candlin in Arts on the AHRC funded (£187K) project, UK Museums during the COVID-19 crisis: Assessing risk, closure, and resilience. A new laboratory facility has been developed in room 325a, Malet Street. The new Geography lab space allows for palaeoenvironmental analyses including sedimentology, palaoecology and a range of other approaches. Dr Becky Briant and Dr Stefan Engels have already started to use the lab to move their research projects on sediments from Iraq and Norway forward, and it is anticipated that students in Geography as well as in other programmes (e.g. Archaeology) can use the lab space for their dissertation work too. The initiative is funded by the Government's World Class Laboratories scheme. New publications Barros, Joana. (co-authored). 2021. Measuring changes in residential segregation in São Paulo in the 2000s. In: Urban Socio-Economic Segregation and Income Inequality (open access ebook). Edited by van Ham, M.; Tammaru, T.; Ubarevičienė, R. and Janssen, H. Springer. Engels, Stefan. (co-authored). 2021. Precise date for the Laacher See eruption synchronizes the Younger Dryas. Nature, 595(7865), 66-69. Nogueira, Mara. (2021). "I Voted Bolsonaro for President": Street Vending and the Crisis of Labour Representation in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. In: Beyond the Wage Ordinary Work in Diverse Economies. Bristol University Press, pp. 233-254. Nogueira, Mara. (2021). The ambiguous labour of hope: Affective governance and the struggles of displaced street vendors in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, p.02637758211032626. Brooks, Sue. (co-authored). 2021. VEdge_Detector: automated coastal vegetation edge detection using a convolutional neural network. International Journal of Remote Sensing, 42(13), 4805-4835. Vera-Sanso, Penny (in press) Population Ageing and Development: Time to drop ageist demographies for a critical, decolonial, sociology of ageing in K. Simms, N. Banks, S. Engel, P. Hodge, J. Makuwira, E.Mawdsley, N. Nakamura, J. Rigg, A. Salamanca, and P. Yeophantong (2021) Routledge Handbook of Global Development (in press). 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