Birkbeck's 200th anniversary Dear students, as Birkbeck gets ready to celebrate its 200th anniversary in 2023, we are promoting some changes in the ways we deliver our teaching in Geography. Your voice is crucial in shaping this process! We will be organising focus groups in the forthcoming year to hear your ideas. Each participant will receive a £10 book voucher. Community & teaching Applications for April entry for our new online MSc Global Environment and Sustainability programme will open 1 December. More information about this fully online, cutting edge new programme may be found here. Dr Penny Vera-Sanso with UCL/IOE colleague Dr Katherine Twamley has won a Bloomsbury College Studentship, Fatherhood at a crossroads?: Exploring how fathers in India understand and ‘do’ fathering. Dr Shino Shiode has also secured a studentship, ‘Geospatial variations in the prevalence of intimate partner violence against women in low-to-middle income countries’, working with Prof Karen Devries at the The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. The projects will start on 2021/22 Our PhD student, Meng Meiyun, was the winner of a £2,000 award granted by the Great Britain-China Educational Trust. Her research examines how educated female migrants (with Bachelor degree or above) in Shenzhen moved to, developed (or failed to develop) senses of attachment to Shenzhen through making/unmaking their home(s). By analysing the (migration) ‘routes’ and ‘roots’ (the emplacement) of these females, the project aims to articulate a new theoretical framework, Anchoring/Sailing, to theorise how migrants’ emplacing processes (or displacement) are entangled with (or separated from) the development of fast-developing Chinese city like Shenzhen. Esri UK has announced the new Geospatial Scholarship Fund to encourage and support Black African, Caribbean, Black or mixed Black heritage students, significantly underrepresented in the study of geography and geoscience. The fund will provide financial and other support for students throughout their studies, with awards at undergraduate and postgraduate level available each academic year Professor Sue Brooks led a group of Environmental Processes students to Fenland on Saturday 6 November to learn about flood management and to discover what a natural Fen has to offer. Social Justice and Equality Our programmes International Development, Children, Youth and International Development and International Development and Social Anthropology are completing respectively 20, 15 and 10 years. Social justice and equality are key concerns in our teaching in these programmes, which are marked by their critical appraisal of the field of international development and of development studies more generally. We will be holding an anniversary event in the summer term of 2022 bringing together staff, alumni and students and reflecting on the shifting priorities and evolving debates that have occurred over the past two decades. Follow us on Twitter (@bbkgeography) and watch this space for further details later in the academic year. News from the field: Prof Karen WellsThe project Development Education in the Vernacular for Infants and children in West Africa (DEVI, the Ewe word for child) has just completed the first phase of fieldwork.
Fatou Diouf, the field researcher for the project has been hosted by three families in three villages in northern Ghana since July 2021. Our collaboration in northern Ghana is with the Ghanaian NGO, Afrikids. Afrikids facilitated our access to the villages, arranged accommodation and seconded a field officer, Emmanuella Awuni, to work with Fatou. In October this year Professor Karen Wells who is the PI for DEVI and Co-I Dr Peace Tetteh of University of Ghana went to villages with filmmaker Anita Afonu to film the activities in the villages that show what and how children learn through out-of-school activities. The findings of the research are very promising, and we are currently working on a paper on makerspaces as sites of alternative/additional education for children in rural West Africa. We are conceptualising weaver's workshops, bicycle repair shops, blacksmiths, and basket weavers' spaces as 'makerspaces' and thinking about what kinds of science and maths concepts children who participate in these activities may learn. We are excited to be introducing a new level 6 and 7 module this year, Race, Environment and International Development. The module, which will be taught by Dr Kalpana Wilson, examines how racism shapes, and is in turn shaped by, changing global structures and relationships. It traces how constructions of race have been central to the way international development is understood, from the colonial ideas of 'trusteeship' and the 'white man's burden' to contemporary approaches to climate change, population, gender and property rights, and how these approaches have been challenged and resisted by people’s movements. It will explore how dominant understandings of the Anthropocene, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and sustainable development are racialised, and the possibilities for anti-imperialist, decolonial and abolitionist visions of climate justice. Spotlight on: Dr Penny Vera-SansoMy research is motivated by an interrogation of taken for granted discourses that values certain doings and beings over others. My main focus has been on age, gender, class and ethnicity/caste in evaluating people's right and needs and their subsequent position within systems of distribution. This has led me to investigating how the global economy extracts labour from the urban and rural poor in India, forcing people to continue working into deep old age in order to help support themselves and their family and wider kin networks. Far from being dependent older people are footing a chain of unpaid and poorly paid work that enables wealth accumulation further up the chain of economic relations. This focus on i) relations of inequality and exploitation and ii) the range of institutional, academic and popular discourses that make these relations appear acceptable informs my teaching of development studies and social anthropology. Dr Penny Vera-Sanso was Discussant for the Development Studies Association's Annual Conference Symposium entitled Ageing and older age: unsettling development assumptions, on 1st July. Events and media The legacy of Eila CampbellThis November sees the latest in our biannual Eila Campbell lectures in the Department of Geography being given by Dr Sana Murrani from the University of Plymouth. Sana looked at how mapping can help refugees to remake their links with place as they rebuild their lives in a new home. The series celebrates the legacy of Professor Eila Campbell, but who was she? For students at Birkbeck Geography in the 1970s, they might have known her only as Head of Department, a role she held from 1970 until her retirement in 1981, but they would have felt her influence in what they learnt. Not only was cartography seen as a key element of their studies, but the history of cartography as a subject was so tied to Eila that when she retired, it was removed from the University of London curriculum. In this focus on cartography as a key element of the geographical curriculum, Eila was firmly in the tradition of her forerunners Professors John Unstead (1921-1930), who retired early to further his writing on the definition of regions within cartography, and Eva Taylor (1930-1944 - the first woman to hold a chair of geography in the United Kingdom), whose research was crucial to urban planning during the second world war. Similarly, Eila also came to University lecturing after a career in school teaching (1934-1945). Indeed, Eila studied for her BA and MA alongside working, as do many Birkbeck students to this day, although most do not then join the staff. We in the Geography Department at Birkbeck are proud to have honoured her memory in this way since 1995. As a member of the Race and Development Working Group, Dr Kalpana Wilson co-convened a series of three roundtables at the Development Studies Association's 2021 conference 'Unsettling Development' on the theme of Race and Development: What's so Unsettling? In August, Dr Kalpana Wilson spoke at The Reykjavík Dialogue Conference 'Renewing Activism to End Violence against Women and Girls', hosted by the Icelandic government in co-operation with the City of Reykjavík and the Nordic Council of Ministers. This international event was organised in collaboration with RIKK – Institute for Gender, Equality and Difference at the University of Iceland. Dr Joana Barros was an expert panellist in the Seminar on the Research Project on Informal Urban Nuclei in Brazil, developed by the Brazilian National Institute for Applied Economics and the National Housing Office, part of Brazil’s Ministry of Regional Development. Dr Mara Nogueira was a panelist during the III Conference of the Association of Brasilianists in Europe (ABRE). She gave a paper entitled “’The PT sold the street vendors’: Revanchist populism and the crisis of labor in Belo Horizonte, Brazil” as part of a session on “Political Subjectivities After The Pink Tide In Brazil”. On 28 September 2021, Dr Simon Pooley participated on an expert panel discussion entitled “looking beyond human-wildlife conflict” as part of the Student Conference on Conservation Science (SCCS) - Bengaluru 2021. This conference is described as a sister conference to SCCS-Cambridge, and focuses on attracting student participants primarily from countries in South and South-east Asia, and Africa. As Co-convenor of the British Society of Gerontology's Special Interest Group on Ageing in African, Asia and Latin America, Dr Penny Vera-Sanso organised a symposium for the BSG's 50th Annual Conference, organised as a fringe meeting so the Conference fee would not pose a barrier for participants from around the world: On 27 September 2021, Dr Simon Pooley gave a panel talk entitled “Counting the Crocs: Using data to inform the implementation of effective, quantifiable measures to reduce human-crocodilian conflict” on Session 4, Monitoring Human-Wildlife Conflicts for the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, at the Third Wildlife Forum of the Collaborative Partnership on Sustainable Wildlife Management (CPW). Listen to Dr Olivia Sheringham in a podcast for the Museum of Domestic Architecture and Design, Home Mobilities, looking at how the idea of home is both created and disrupted through transnational mobility and migration. Dr Kezia Barker presented an invited paper ‘Biosecurity beyond borders: biosecure citizenship in novel eco-communities’ to a session of the Demilitarized Zone Global Forum 2021, ‘Peace establishment in DMZ in the Era of Climate Change’ on October 28th. The Forum is managed by the Republic of Korea Ministry of Unification to discuss sustainable cooperation and peace building in the Korean Demilitarize Zone (DMZ), and this year took place in a hybrid online and offline form in Yanggu, Gangwon Province. Hear Dr Jasmine Gideon’s new podcast as part of the Cuerpa Politica series, Gender and Health: Understanding Care Work, Policy and the Economy in Latin America, highlighting how her work on health/gender/globalisation speaks to the theme of social justice and equality. Professor Rosie Cox appeared on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s discussing gender inequalities in housework, available here. Dr Penny Vera-Sanso presented a paper with Thandie Hblana, University of Lesotho, to the Global Challenge REsearch Fund's Care of Older People in Southern African Network (COPSAN) on 21st Oct called Masculinity and care over the life course for older Basotho Men'. Dr Olivia Sheringham will be speaking at next month’s event, 'Storying Food: gendered, racialised and classed politics and possibilities'. Dr Joana Barros discussed her research on residential segregation in São Paulo and London on the podcast Urbanidades organised by the Centre for Metropolitan Studies, University of São Paulo. In November, Dr Kalpana Wilson was invited to give a seminar on What is the Difference Between Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Justice: Resisting the Imperialism of Global Population Policies' by the Reproductive Justice Research Network, based at the University of Cambridge. Professor Paul Watt presented a paper on ‘Press-ganged Generation Rent: Youth homelessness, precarity and poverty in East London’ at the UCL Webinar on Precarity, Youth and the City, 20th October. Dr Ella Harris has also recorded a podcast for the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, which will be out soon, and will be speaking at next month’s event, 'Storying Food: gendered, racialised and classed politics and possibilities'. Professor Paul Watt was a speaker at a Fringe Meeting on ‘Labour Housing Policy and the Environment’ at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton, 27th September, and gave presentations based on his book at the Oxford and Cambridge Club, London, 12th August, and the University of Tartu, Estonia, 29th June, available here. Dr Ella Harris has finished a web documentary, and has announced a call for papers for a virtual symposium, I-docs, Crisis and Multi-perspectival Thinking. The collaboration between Dr Ella Harris, Birkbeck, University of London and Dr Judith Aston, i-Docs, UWE Bristol will take place online on May 9th, 2022, and builds on Ella Harris’ postdoctoral research on i-docs as applied to the cultural geographies of precarity and crisis, and on Judith Aston’s ongoing work around polyphony and multi-perspectival thinking as a convenor of the i-Docs research group. Future sea level rise and climate change - how certain is it?The models that project future sea level rise due to climate change have to make some big assumptions about how ice sheets work, which is complicated and not fully understood. In this video, Dr Becky Briant, Reader in Quaternary Science, explains the limits of what is known and the areas of uncertainty that still remain around sea level rise and climate change New books Professor Paul Watt’s recently published monograph with Policy Press, Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London was the subject of an Author Meets Critics event at the RC21 Conference: Sensing and Shaping the City, in Antwerp, 16th June. The critics were Professor Rowland Atkinson (University of Sheffield), Dr Martine August (University of Waterloo, Canada), and Dr Mervyn Horgan (University of Guelph, Canada). Dr Ella Harris has given a Mediapolis Q&A about her book Rebranding Precarity, along with Mara Ferreri’s The Permanence of Temporary Urbanism. Research news Professor Melissa Butcher is spending the 2021-22 academic year based at Fordham University, New York, working on a new research project: Defining Freedom: American Identity and Nationalism in Times of Change. In July, she was part of a colloquium, with artist Manu Luksch, Sarah Keenan & Joel McKim, discussing Manu’s virtual exhibition, Predictive Cities, examining the effects of emerging technologies on daily life, social relations, urban space, and political structures (July 2021). Dr Simon Pooley’s research and work through the IUCN Task Force on Human-Wildlife Conflict and Coexistence focuses on ethical and conceptual questions around how human-wildlife interactions are framed and investigated within conservation science. He is leading a special issue, with expert colleagues, on Understanding Coexistence with Wildlife (details here), for Frontiers in Conservation Science. The aim is to publish papers from multiple disciplines and bring more perspectives and voices into discussions of human-wildlife interactions. Another special issue Simon is co-editing is: Understanding Changing Human-Wildlife Relations in Indigenous and Local Societies (details here). In a perspective essay, Simon asks conservationists to consider who coexistence is for, who it affects, and who is making it happen. He considers challenges for a narrow conservation-oriented framing of human-wildlife coexistence, offering suggestions for more effective and more just ways (for indigenous and local peoples as much as wildlife) of addressing the challenges. The Learning from Small Smart Cities ESRC-Newton Fund project (led by Prof Ayona Datta, UCL, Prof Sanjay Srivastava, IEG Delhi, Prof Melissa Butcher, BBK, and Sophie Hadfield-Hill, Co-I, B-ham) is winding up in Autumn with a final workshop (12-13 November 2021) and exhibition at the Building Centre, London, from 12 November – 10 December 2021. Recent scholarship on smart cities and digital urbanism suggests a shift in focus from the grand visions of Internet of Things, Big Data and widespread ‘technological solutionism’ (Kitchin 2015) to more prosaic and everyday uses of technology. This workshop and exhibition will explore how we may rethink ‘smart’ through shifting scalar logics from the global to the local, from the regional to the relational, from the urban to the domestic. Focusing on power from below that has the potential to disrupt utopian imaginaries of technological driven urban life from above, we ask how we might go about rethinking ‘smart’ through the lens of small and medium sized cities, rebuilding data democracy and internet freedom from within communities and homes. Dr Penny Vera-Sanso and BBK colleagues Dr Kerry Harman (Psychosocial Studies) and Louise Hide (History, Classics and Archaeology) have been successful in an application to the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research for support for a three year Working Group on 'Age and Care Crisis'. Taking a cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional perspective the WG aims to interrogate assumptions about who needs care, who provides care and how we think about age and care across the life-course. The objective is to bring together academics, activists and advocacy groups to think reflexively about concepts of age, care and caring with the objective of identifying strategies to move the discourse nationally and internationally and to explore the potential for joint action and further research. Following an online conference organised in November 2020, the SUNRISE project has just finished a special section in Small States and Territories journal, featuring a guest editorial by Dr Aideen Foley and Dr Stefano Moncada. Birkbeck at the RGS-BG Annual International Conference Dr Mara Nogueira was part of a session on “Labour, Work-Life and the Urban”. Her paper, co-authored with Harry Pettit (University of Reading), was entitled “The death of the proper job? Aspiration, class, and labour in urban Brazil and Egypt”. Professor Paul Watt presented the conference paper: ‘Bourdieu, council estates and regeneration in London’, at the RGS Conference, London, 2nd September. Professor Rosie Cox, with Birkbeck PhD student Lexter Woodley and Karin Schwiter (from Uni of Zurich) organised two sessions at the RGS-IBG conference in September. The sessions were on ‘Breaking the Borders of Home: Transformations of Care & Reproductive Work’ and included presenters from Canada, Switzerland, India and around the UK. Dr Kezia Barker contributed an invited paper to the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group Conference Plenary session on Borders and Contemporary Social and Cultural Geography. She discussed increased references to 'awakening' as a threshold between denial and action, in calls for a sleep-walking society to 'wake-up' to catastrophe. New publications Foley, Aideen (co-authored). "Learning from the archives of island jurisdictions: why and how island history should inform disaster risk reduction and climate action." Small States & Territories (2021). https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/45256/ Nogueira, Mara. "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 39, no. 5 (2021): 863-879. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758211032626 Nogueira, Mara (co-authored). "When the (face) mask slips: Politics, performance and crisis in urban Brazil." City 25, no. 3-4 (2021): 235-254. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2021.1946325 Pooley, S. Fire in African Landscapes. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. Oxford University Press, 2016—. Article published October 29, 2021. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.984 Pooley, S. Coexistence for Whom? Frontiers in Conservation Science, Human-Wildlife Dynamics, September 2021: https://doi.org/10.3389/fcosc.2021.726991 Sertã, Ana Luísa. "Following Seeds: Circuits and Paths of the Sateré‐Mawé Craftwork in Urban Amazonia." Bulletin of Latin American Research (2021). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/blar.13312
Kind regards, Department of Geography |