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Newsletter, Summer 2022
Hello,
As we approach the end of the summer term, we would like to wish you all a great summer holiday. Before you go, here are some exciting news from the Department of Geography - find out more about what our wonderful staff and students have been up to!
All the best,
The Geography Department, Birkbeck
Community & teaching
Our students have been busy at the Norfolk coast enjoying data gathering and analysis as part of our undergraduate field trip experience. Stunning weather, golden sand and lots of fun.
Congratulations to our brilliant colleagues Dr Stefan Engels and Dr Joana Barros for their recent promotion to Senior Lecturer and Reader, respectively. Stefan is a Physical and Environmental Geographer whose research on the study of natural archives such as lake sediment records and peat bogs to reconstruct climate change and ecosystem dynamics on time-scales ranging from the previous interglacial (ca 125 thousand years ago) to the present. Joana is an Urban Planner and Geographic Information scientist with expertise in applying geographic information data, tools and technologies to improve the understanding of urban inequalities and promote social justice.
We would like to congratulate the 2020-21 undergraduate prize winners: Elizabeth Farrel (Best Geography/Environmental dissertation), Shuvashish Thapa (Best Social Sciences dissertation), Loredana Gessa (East prize- best overall 1st year student), and Fiona Clarke (Henderson prize for best overall 2nd year student)
A recent report published by the UK government has highlighted the increased use of geospatial data in multiple sectors and a gap in geospatial skills. Our MSc in Geographic Data Science offers advanced scientific and technical training in capturing, analysing and visualising geospatial information
Events & media
Professor Paul Watt has been recently featured in the media. He was in an online Guardian video on ‘How UK housing segregates residents’, 7th October 2021. And his contribution at Camden Council was covered by Camden New Journal, 4th March – ‘Town Hall told wrecking ball strategy for estates will create areas where only affluent feel at home’.
Join us for a film screening of The Land Beneath Our Feet (2016, directed by Sarita Siegel), taking place at 6-8pm on 22nd July at Birkbeck Institute of the Moving Image (BIMI). Refreshments will be served from 5pm. In post-conflict Liberia, individuals and communities are pitted against multinational corporations, the government, and each other in life-threatening disputes over land. What can this ghostly footage offer a nation, as it debates radical land reforms that could empower communities to shape a more diverse, stable and sustainable future? The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with Dr. Emmanuel Urey (main protagonist in the film).
Dr Ella Harris convened a virtual symposium on "I-docs, Crisis and Multi-perspectival Thinking" with Dr Judith Aston (UWE Bristol) on May 9th. The symposium built on Dr Ella Harris’ pioneering work using i-docs as a participatory method for exploring new meanings of freedom during the COVID-19 crisis, and Dr Judith Aston’s leading scholarship on i-docs, polyphony and metamodernism. It was hosted with the support of the distinguished i-Docs project at the Digital Cultures Research Centre at UWE, Bristol.
Dr Penny Vera-Sanso has presented the paper 'Situating masculinity, labour migration and care over the life course: the experience of older Basotho men in Lesotho and the hazards of survivor bias' during the 4th Biennial Conference of the African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA) co-hosted by HUMA – Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town from 11–16 April 2022. She also participated in the Care of Older Persons in Southern Africa Network (COPSAN), funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund, presenting a paper with Dr Thandie Hlabana on 'Masculinity, Labour Migration and Care over the Life Course in Lesotho', 26th Jan 2022.
Professor Paul Watt was interviewed for the PusH Podcast - Episode 5: Evictions and displacement in London. PusH is ‘Precarious Housing in Europe. Pushing for innovation in higher education', a Strategic Partnership co-funded under the European Commission’s Erasmus+ Programme.
Dr Jasmine Gideon was the moderator in a panel discussion on 'Closing the Gender Health Gap' organised by the UK French Embassy on the 22nd of June. The panel was composed by practitioners and activists and it addressed questions regarding how the gender health gap manifests, what are its roots and what can be done about it.
Dr Mara Nogueira co-organised a session on “Rhythms and spatialities of work in contemporary Brazil” at the Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS) 2022 Annual Conference that took place in April 2022 in Bath. She gave a paper on "The “forms of living” in the popular economy of Belo Horizonte, Brazil".
Dr Simon Pooley has been working with local journalists and NGOs on challenges facing protected areas in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. These are wicked problems around encroachments (farming, fishing and tree-cutting) in protected areas, including Ramsar wetlands of international importance, bound up in problematic histories of eviction, service delivery failures and lost benefits due to low visitor numbers during the covid pandemic. He has published in the journal Oryx on the case of Ndumo, contributed to an article in South Africa's leading investigative newspaper The Daily Maverick (here), and an article on related issues around Dukuduku and iFutululu forests bordering the Isimangaliso Wetland Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site (here)
Dr Penny Vera Sanso was a panelist on HelpAge India's interactive webinar/round table Bridging the Gap, Leave no one behind: Elderly incomes and Livelihoods, 17th June 2022.
Dr Paul Elsner presented a paper on the role of marine geospatial data management for a sustainable blue economy at the 3rd Expert Meeting of the UN Working Group on Marine Geospatial Information (WG-MGI) in Singapore. The focus of his talk was the need for an open marine geospatial data infrastructure to enable offshore wind energy deployment on a global scale. The WG-MGI is part of the UN Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM).
Dr Penny Vera-Sanso and Dr Julie Vullnetari co-organised and chaired an international workshop on Age and Ageism in Cross-Cultural and Historical Perspective, 3 March, for the BISR Working Group Age, Care and the Caring Crisis.
Dr Mara Nogueira co-organised a session on “Brazilian Peripheries and New Forms of Entrepreneurialism from Below” at the Latin American Studies Association online conference on May 5, 2022. She gave a paper on "Insurgent Entrepreneurialism at the urban periphery during COVID-19".
Professor Paul Watt presented a paper on ‘Estate regeneration and state-led gentrification in London’ at the Urban Regeneration Trends in Europe Conference, University of Kassel, 4th March 2022. He also presented a paper on ‘Press-ganged Generation Rent: Youth homelessness, precarity and poverty in East London’ at the Critical Youth Studies Seminar Series, Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University, 20th January 2022.
Dr Mara Nogueira was a panelist in the event 'Cambrígia: Navigating UK Academia as an International Scholar' organised by the Cambridge University Brazilian Society. The event focused on the experiences of the opportunities and hurdles faced by international academics in the UK academia.
Birkbeck has hosted a joint event with the City of London to discuss Climate Change and Sustainability on the 18th of May 2022. The panel of speakers presented different perspectives on barriers to climate change, putting forward ideas about the legal, financial, human rights and environmental implications, as a basis for broader discussion with the audience. Dr Simon Pooley was one of the panellists and he spoke about "Climate Driving Wildfires and Bioinvasions".
The Centre for Urban Research on Austerity (CURA) at De Montfort University has hosted an online talk by Dr Mara Nogueira on The “forms of living” in the popular economy of Belo Horizonte/Brazil on the 16th of March.
Dr Penny Vera-Sanso chaired the British Society of Gerontology's Special Interest Group on Ageing in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Spring Research Seminar, 10 March 2022.
Professor Paul Watt spoke at the ‘Housing Emergency: make Labour act’ meeting, 20th November 2021, organised by Labour Left Internationalists and at the Labour and the Council Housing Crisis meeting, organised by Lambeth and Southwark Labour Party, 7th March 2022.
New books
Dr Ella Harris has co-edited a collection entitled "The Growing Trend of Living Small: A Critical Approach to Shrinking Domesticities" with Dr Mel Nowicki (Oxford Brooks) and Tim White (LSE). This book examines the growing trend for housing models that shrink private living space and seeks to understand the implications of these shrinking domestic worlds.
Professor Paul Watt spoke about his recent book Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London (Policy Press) at the Greater Manchester Housing Action group, 9th March 2022. He also discussed findings from his book at Camden Council’s Housing Scrutiny Committee, 28th February 2022, in which he was an invited speaker.
Dr Camelia Dewan, who is our former PhD Student supervised by Dr Penny Vera-Sanso, has published a book based on her doctoral research. The book entitled "Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh" analyzes how development actors create flawed causal narratives linking their interventions in the environment and society of the Global South to climate change.
Research news
Dr Izabela Delabre is a Co-I in the new project "No Trees, No Future - Unlocking the full potential of conservation finance." The research is funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and focuses on conservation finance and equitable cost sharing for conservation in the palm oil value chain
The results of the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF) were published in May 2022 and Birkbeck was reconfirmed as one of the UK's leading research-intensive universities. The Geography Department got some excellent results: 78% internationally excellent or world-leading outputs plus 62.5% internationally excellent for environment, a great first submission!
Professor Rosie Cox and Dr Mara Nogueira will be supervising Avinay Yadav who was awarded a ESRC UBEL-DTP scholarship to complete a PhD on "The Making of a ‘Clean City’: Governing Waste and Informality in Urban India".
Dr Nilufer Sari Aslam has joined the Geography Department as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant for the SIMETRI Project, working with Dr Joana Barros.
Dr Becky Briant has been busy in the labs, finding snail shells for radiocarbon dating. Dr Briant received funding for initial fieldwork in 2019 from the British Institute for the Study of Iraq in collaboration with various colleagues. The aim of this work was to determine the extent of the Najaf Sea in western Iraq at different times in the past. As a follow up to this, Dr Jaafar Jotheri of the University of Al Qadisiyah in Diwaniyah, Iraq, drilled two boreholes to see if the Najaf Sea had been linked to the Euphrates in the past and at what time. The boreholes were 6 and 9 m in depth and both contained fossil shells, which Dr Briant has been analysing. They suggest that the environment was freshwater, with marshes nearby, and shells will be sent in the next few weeks to determine their age using radiocarbon dating.
The Geography department will be welcoming 4 new funded PhD candidates who will be the recipient of the Mark James Scholarship. The candidates will be working on the following projects:
- Disentangling the drivers of Insect Armageddon: determining the impact of anthropogenic disturbances on midge diversity in the UK, with Dr Stefan Engels
- Geospatial modelling of the prevalence of violence against children in Sub-Saharan Africa, with Dr Shino Shiode
- Intersectional and intergenerational gendered experiences of climate change in urban India, with Dr Mara Nogueira and Dr Penny Vera-Sanso
- Making home at the End of the World: survival modalities within home-making practices, with Dr Kezia Barker, Dr Ella Harris and Professor Rosie Cox
The iDoc "The Lockdown Game" developed by Dr Ella Harris as part of her Leverhulme Fellowship was launched in the event "Life in Lockdown" on the 24th of May 2022. The iDoc that takes you through select Londoners' experience of navigating the rules, threats, possibilities and absurdities of lockdown.
Professor Melissa Butcher is currently conducting fieldwork for her new research project: Defining Freedom: American Identity and Nationalism in Times of Change. To find out more about the research you can follow the project's updates on Instagram.
The new BISR Plantations working group held its first workshop in May 2022, which was by Dr Izabela Delabre, Dr Kalpana Wilson, Dr Kezia Barker and Dr Lisa Tilley (SOAS). It included a visit to the exhibition 'Sugar and Slavery' at the Museum of London, followed by a hybrid roundtable meeting. The event included participants from across Birkbeck, as well as Goldsmiths, Sussex, UCL, King’s College London, Wageningen, ETH Zurich and the University of Sydney. Discussions considered the multiple dimensions of plantations from different disciplinary perspectives, historical and contemporary social and ecological injustices, and possibilities for sustainable and reparative activism and futures.
On Thursday 16 June 2022 Birkbeck hosted the fourth edition of the Three Minute Thesis Competition. Meiyun Meng was chosen as the overall winner for her lively and engaging talk ‘Individualising life courses: Home-making of highly educated women in Shenzhen, China’. Meiyun is in her third year as a doctoral researcher in Geography.
New publications
Barros, Joana (co-authored). Accessibility in São Paulo: an individual road to equity? Applied Geography 144 (102731), ISSN 0143-6228, 2022.
Brooks, Sue (co-authored). 'Coastal dune dynamics in embayed settings with sea-level rise–Examples from the exposed and macrotidal north coast of SW England.' Marine Geology, 2022: 106853.
Delabre, Izabela (co-authored). 'Double exposure to capitalist expansion and climatic change: a study of vulnerability on the Ghanaian coastal commodity frontier'. Ecology and Society27(1):1, 2022.
Delabre, Izabela (co-authored). 'The governmentality of tropical forests and sustainable food systems, and possibilities for post-2020 sustainability governance', Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, DOI: 10.1080/1523908X.2022.2082931, 2022.
Delabre, Izabela (co-authored).'To see and be seen: Technological change and power in deforestation driving global value chains'. Global Networks, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.12383, 2022.
Elsner, Paul (co-authored). Sand dams for sustainable water management: Challenges and future opportunities. Science of the Total Environment 838 (2), pp. 156126. ISSN 0048-9697, 2022.
Elsner, Paul (co-authored) Uncertainty of historic GLAD forest data in temperate climates and implications for forest change modelling. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information 11 (3), pp. 177. ISSN 2220-9964, 2022.
Pooley, Simon. 'A historical perspective on fire research in East and Southern African grasslands and savannas.' Special issue: Friend or Foe? Lessons from a century of evidence-based fire management in grassy ecosystems. African Journal of Range & Forage Science 39(1): https://doi.org/10.2989/10220119.2022.2028187, 2022.
Pooley, Simon (co-authored). Understanding Human-Wildlife Coexistence. Frontiers in Conservation Science, 2022. Open-access e-Book available for download here.
Vera-Sanso. 'Ageing and Development', in Sims et al (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Global Development, Routledge, 2022.
Watt, Paul. ‘Taking the long view on estate regeneration: Before, during and after the New Deal for Communities in London’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, DOI: 10.1007/s10901-022-09929-1, 2022.
Watt, Paul (co-authored). ‘Place Attachment in Non- Place Spaces? Community, Belonging and Mobilities in Post- Suburban South East England’, in P.J. Maginn and K.B. Anacker (eds.), Suburbia in the 21st Century: From Dreamscape to Nightmare?, Routledge, 2022.
