Newsletter, Autumn 2022
Birkbeck's 200th anniversary
Hello,
As we start a new term, all of us in the Department of Geography wish you a very Happy New Year! To get you all up to speed with the wonderful work our staff and students have been up to, here is the Autumn issue of the Geography newsletter.
All the best,
The Geography Department, Birkbeck
Funding and Prizes
Fellowship of the Academy of Social Sciences
Rosie Cox, Professor of Geography and Deputy Dean of SSHP, has been elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. The Academy’s Fellowship is made up of distinguished individuals from academic, public, private and third sectors, across the full spectrum of the social sciences. Through leadership, scholarship, applied research, policymaking, and practice, they have helped to deepen the understanding of, and address, some of the toughest challenges facing our society and the world.
Birkbeck's Research Innovation Fund
Dr Roberto Murcio, Lecturer in Geographic Data Science, has been awarded an innovation fund to support the project Human mobility, Inequality and Segregation in London. Using mobile phone data, this
project aims to develop a methodology to extract/process using machine-learning techniques to create a novel dataset that replaces traditional travel-diary data and enables large urban areas studies at an individual level.
The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Dr Penny Vera-Sanso, Senior Lecture in the Geography department, in collaboration with Megan Davies, York University, Canada, has been recently awarded a grant for a 2023 Tour: Covid in the House of Old.
The Tour will take a powerful interactive exhibit about the pandemic in Canadian long-term care (LTC) homes to Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Wiikwemkoong, Toronto, and Montreal.
CLASP Fellows Program
Dr Aideen Foley has been awarded a prestigious fellowship on the CLASP programme which is funded by OSUN and focused on teaching practice.
Read more @ CLASP Fellows Program – IWT CLASP (bard.edu)
OSUN Engaged Research Fund
Dr William Ackah, Senior Lecturer in Black and Community Geographies obtain this fund for a project on knife crime in Hackney. The aim is to address how effective Haringey Council’s community focused approach has been in tackling knife crime in the borough. The OSUN engaged research award will fund a scoping exercise to determine the parameters of the research and formalise the developing working relationship into a partnership focusing on examining successful strategies for reducing knife crime utilising a community-based approach.
Public engagement award commendation
David Tross and Laura Bradnam were highly commended at the recent public engagement awards for their Community Leadership work done in Camden with Widening Access (who submitted the application for the award). Here is a great picture of David with Chris receiving his award – congratulations
Spotlight on: Our programs
Applications for April entry for our new online MSc Global Environment and Sustainability programme are due on 13 March 2023. More information about this fully online, cutting edge new programme may be found here.
MSc Geographic Data Science
Our GDS program provides technical and transferable skills in manipulating and analysing spatial data about natural and human phenomena with cutting-edge tools and technologies.
This course equips you with geospatial skills that are in high demand according to the UK government.
Race, Environment and International Development
This module, 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.
Scholarship opportunities
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 the undergraduate and postgraduate levels available each academic year.
What our students say
Wasif Sajjad, MSc Climate Change student received invaluable help and support from his dissertation supervisor, Dr Becky Briant, Reader in Quaternary Science, during his Master’s degree.
Wasif presents a powerful testimony about how Geography supervisors make a huge difference in the live of Birkbeck's students.
Read more about his story here.
Dr Becky Briant with Wasif Sajjad
Spotlight on: Research
Prof Melissa Butcher is currently working on a new book based on her recent research in the USA, The Trouble with Freedom: Re-imagining America’s Future at a Difficult Time. Writing and visual material from the project can be found here Blog and on instragram
Dr Mara Nogueira was in Brazil in August 2022 visiting the research sites of her British Academy project "Engineering food: infrastructure exclusion and 'last mile' delivery in Brazilian favelas" in the cities of Belo Horizonte and São Paulo. In the picture you can see pictures of an urban agriculture project (Mulheres do GAU) in the peripheries of São Paulo, where a group of women generate income by producing organic vegetables.
Events and Media
Al Berry Annual Lecture
Dr Kalpana Wilson delivered the AI Berry Annual Lecture on 28 September at the Department of Global Development Studies, University of Toronto. The topic was 'Revisiting Gender and Development in a Time of Fascisms'.
Dr Penny Vera-Sanso was the moderator for London International Development Centre’s Research Seminar: Women’s Work – Is Age a Development Issue?, 14th December. Speakers were Shobhini Mukerji Executive Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab presenting a multi-wave, seven year panel study of older people in the State of Tamil Nadu, India and Dr Ezi Beedi explaining why civil servant pensions discriminate against women forcing them to join the informal economy after retirement.
Dr Stefan Engels was invited by the Cambridge Natural History Society to explain how subfossil remains of non-biting midges can be used to learn more about past environmental change
DEVI project film 'weaving knowledge'
Prof Karen Wells travelled to Ghana in November to screen the previews of the DEVI project film 'weaving knowledge'. The film was screened to an audience of policymakers, filmmakers, senior practitioners and University of Ghana researchers in Accra and to villagers in the villages where some of the film was shot, in northern Ghana near Bolgatanga. Audiences were enthusiastic about the film's depiction of children's participation in complex crafts in rural villages and the scope for incorporating local technologies into classrooms to scaffold children's learning of science, design, technology and maths.
Dr Simon Pooley, Lambert Lecturer in Environment, gave a seminar for the City of London environmental thinktank Z/Yen Group on 13 September 2022 titled "Climate change and global wildfires". This was at the invitation of Professor Michael Mainelli, as part of a program being developed by Birkbeck and the City of London to link business and academia in focusing on environmental challenges.
You can watch the recording here.
Dr Stefan Engels was one of the organisers and lecturers of the 5th INTegrating Ice core, MArine and TErrestial (INTIMATE) international summer school, this year held in Turku (Finland). About 20 PhD students and ECRs from across Europe and beyond gathered to study annually laminated sediment records and discussed how they can inform us on environmental change in the Anthropocene.
Dr Penny Vera-Sanso convened the on-line international workshop of the Special Interest Group on Ageing in Asia, Africa and Latin America, British Society of Gerontology, 28th November, where she presented the paper ‘A caring crisis? : what does the evolution of UN policy on ageing and later life tell us?’
Whose City? London, Housing and Inequality
Prof Paul Watt participated in the event: Whose City? London, Housing and Inequality event, held at Birkbeck College, University of London on 9th November 2022. At this event, panelist discussed how our cities are increasingly places owned, run or benefitting someone or something else. The purchase of homes as assets by investment companies, the profiteering of landlords, the sale and demolition of social housing, the erosion of ‘red tape’ in the name of unfettered investment by the wealthy – these are all signals of a kind of urban life in which every day working populations are being unhomed, displaced and dislodged from the everyday needs that cities had come to provide in the post-War period.
Living with Predators
Dr Simon Pooley joined Professor Amy Dickman of the University of Oxford's Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU) and Professor Adam Hart, Professor of Science Communication at the University of Gloucestershire, for a panel on Living with Predators, at the Cheltenham Science Festival in summer 2022.
Panelists interviewed by Joanna Durrant for BBC Gloucestershire
On Wednesday 26 October Paul Elsner and Stefan Engels organised an event for the current MSc students on our Environment & Sustainability, Climate Change and Geography programs. Three former students returned to Birkbeck to talk about their dissertation projects: from first ideas to methods and results, as well as their reflections on the process.
Dr Izabela Delabre co-convened a session for a POLLEN (Political Ecology Network) 22/3 asynchronous workshop on Conservation and Agrarian Change. Videos from the session, “the political ecology of ‘sustainable’ global food supply chains: prospects and limits for transformative change” can be viewed here.
Dr Penny Vera-Sanso co-convened a hybrid international workshop with Dr Louise Hide and Dr Kerry Harman on the Crisis of Care and Caring, 7 December for the BISR Working Group Age, Care and the Caring Crisis where she presented the paper, ‘Who cares? The international development agenda and the UN’s Decade of Healthy Ageing’.
Dr Mara Nogueira gave the keynote at the workshop Bicentenary of Brazil's Independence: Imagining autonomy for the next 200 years organised by the Cambridge University Brazilian Society (CUBS). The workshop took place in Cambridge on 15 November and Dr Nogueira's talk was entitled "The 'new' world of labour: challenges for progressive politics".
Dr Paul Elsner was invited to the 3rd International Conference on Marine Spatial Planning in Barcelona, jointly organised by the Directorate General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries of the European Commissionand the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO. Paul gave the talk “Offshore renewable energy on the high seas: An emerging need for Marine Spatial Planning in areas beyond national jurisdiction of coastal states”
Conferences
Dr Roberto Murcio presented the work Inner-city hierarchies: urban self-organization through street percolation at the Conference of Complex Systems (CSS), Palma the Mallorca, Sep 2022. The CCS is the largest and most important annual meeting of the international complex systems community
Dr Stefan Engels gave one of the plenary talks at the Subfossil Chironomid symposium held in Basel, Switzerland. He showed preliminary results of his BBK-Research Initiative Funds (RIF) funded project on “A palaeoecological perspective to Insect Armageddon
Dr Izabela Delabre presented the paper, “Problems and prospects of multistakeholder governance for sustainable food systems” at the 2022 Toronto Conference on Earth System Governance in an online session on “Post-2020 Sustainable Food Systems Governance.”
Dr Mara Nogueira co-organised a panel on "Entrepreneurialism from below: governance and neoliberalism in the peripheries" with Prof Gareth Jones (LSE) and Dr Aiko Ikemura Amaral (KCL) during the RC21 Conference in Athens last August. She gave a paper on "Insurgent Entrepreneurialism at the urban periphery during COVID-19".
Dr Kezia Barker presented the work ‘Awakening to Catastrophe: Spatial multiplicity in knowing, resisting and surviving Catastrophic Futures’ in the 'Placing the Future', 20th symposium in the Klaus Tschira Symposia series on Knowledge and Space, Heidelberg (Sept 22) and in July 22, at the UGI-IGU, Paris, presented the work ‘Foraging for Meaning and Survival: Crisis Temporalities within Plantlore Knowledge Exchange in the UK’
New publications
Dr Simon Pooley recently published The challenge of compassion in predator conservation (frontiersin.org). Frontiers in Psychology 13
Dr Stefan Engels published the paper Synchronous vegetation response to the last glacial-interglacial transition in northwest Europe in Communications Earth and Environment. You can also read the “Behind the Paper” blog on the results of the research.
Dr Mara Noriega published the following pieces of work:
Nogueira, M (co-authored with Hasenberger, H.). Subverting the “Migrant Division of Labor” through the Traditional Retail Market: the London’s Latin Village’s Struggle against Gentrification. Urban Geography, 2022.
Nogueira, M. (co-authored with Shin, H. B.). The ‘right to the city centre’: political struggles of street vendors in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. City, 2022.
Dr Joana Barros co-authored the article: Towards a new paradigm for segregation measurement in an era of big data. Urban Informatics 1 (5), ISSN 2731-6963 (2022).
From Dr Izabela Delabre, we have the next two new publications:
To see and be seen: Technological change and power in deforestation driving global value chains, which was published in Global Networks in June.
The governmentality of tropical forests and sustainable food systems, and possibilities for post-2020 sustainability governance was published online in the Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning in June.
Dr Kezia Barker published Awakening from the Sleep-walking Society: Crisis, Detachment and the Real in Prepper Awakening Narratives in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
Kind regards,
Department of Geography
