A blog by Freya Peters, Geography student My first experience upon arriving in Calais was feeling the bitter wind whip across my face the moment I stepped out of my car. I was there, with the support of the School of Geography Graduate Research Fund, to conduct research with those living in informal refugee camps. On the first morning of volunteering, we were told that the previous night a boat had sunk in the English Channel and five people had died, including a 14-year-old. This was heartbreaking news to start the research with, however, deaths such as this are not uncommon. At least 64 peop ..read more

This is a blog on a sustainability conference attended in May 2023 by one of our academics, Chris Ives, and a third year Geography student, Bryony Jarman. We (Chris and Bryony) met on a sunny spring morning ready to depart on our long journey from Nottingham to the HUMANE Sustainability Summit, to be held in Konstanz, Germany. As the train pulled up, we caught up on how we were feeling about the days ahead. We were excited to share our own experiences of sustainability at Nottingham, but we were especially looking forward to the interactive sessions the students would lead and to hear stories ..read more

Sofia Márdero, Betsabé de la Barreda, Oriol Ambrogio Gali, Sarah Metcalfe and Franziska Schrodt Climate change is one of the greatest threats facing the world today, presenting particular challenges to developing countries, where a large part of the population lives in physically exposed places and in precarious economic conditions. Moreover, a significant percentage of these countries’ revenue is directly dependent on climate-sensitive natural resources. A clear example of this is the Central American country of Belize (Fig. 1), where the performance of the main economic activities like agric ..read more

Hamish Duncalf-Youngson, PhD student Lake Loktak, the Manipuri hills and a local fisherman Arriving in Manipur jolts your senses to life, from the heat and dust to the chaotic driving practices (which heavily require dodging cows in the middle of four-lane roads). None of this should have surprised me, perhaps, given I’d just arrived in India for the first time. Yet, I soon learnt that Manipur is a place completely unique and wonderful in its own right. The state sits as one of the seven Northeast Indian ‘sister states’ nestled between Bangladesh and Myanmar. It would be the site of my field ..read more

César Rodríguez Valido, PhD student Now that I’m nearing the final months of my PhD experience, I wanted to reflect on what has been, to put it lightly, an eventful experience. Whilst I was still an undergraduate (in this very department), I caught the ‘crayfish bug’ – a keen interest in invasive signal crayfish (Pascifastacus leniusculus), their story, their ecology, their impacts, and their relationship with humans. During my undergraduate this interest took the form of laboratory-based research, however, I eventually had the opportunity to return for a PhD and research signal crayfish in a ..read more

Participation in a BRISMES panel on ‘Cities: Materiality, Temporality, and Affect’ Katharina Grüneisl is a Research Fellow in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham and currently conducts research on the used clothing economy in Tunisia and on garment manufacturing in industrial zones in Jordan. The Annual BRISMES (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies) Conference took place from July 3rd-5th at the University of Exeter, bringing together interdisciplinary scholarship on the Middle East and North Africa under the conference theme “Ecology, Crisis and Power in the Middle E ..read more

By Yiming Xu, Geography PhD Student My PhD project considers the colonial and postcolonial urbanism of Changchun, known previously as Hsinking when the city was the capital of the the Japanese colonial empire in Manchuria from 1932. . The project is focusing on how material geography and social experience intersected as the Japanese enacted their version of colonial urbanism by using archival documents, maps, newspaper sources and oral history interviews.   Changchun is my hometown city and I returned to Changchun for field work in September 2021, and from then I have been worked at the ..read more

Simon Gosling, Professor of Climate Risks, School of Geography, University of Nottingham With some parts of the UK currently experiencing a heatwave, there have been large increases in water use in some areas, and some schools have shut this week due to water shortages. Is this a sign of what we can expect to become commonplace in the coming decades, and might we see a change in the time of year that exams take place so that school students are not exposed to extreme heat? Image source: 39854 from https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/imagebank/index.php What are the main risks in terms of extreme he ..read more

John Pearson, June 2023 I studied Geography at Nottingham from 1987 to 1990, and after graduating I went straight to work at the Foreign Office. Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, which gives you an idea of how long ago that was! At the moment I am the British Ambassador to Laos, and overall I have had a fairly typical Foreign Office career. I have spent about half of my time in London and about half of my time overseas. In London I have had a mix of jobs; some have been geographical, covering specific parts of the world, and some have been focused on a particular area of foreign policy (li ..read more

To mark its 50th anniversary on the 16th November 2022 UNESCO is looking forward to the Next 50! Imagining a report from the DVMWHS team written in 2072 to celebrate UNESCO 100. A blog by Ian Jackson Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site – Milling Power November 2072 (UNESCO 100 and COP 77) In hindsight, reviewing the last 100 years of UNESCO (1972-2072), and the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site (DVMWHS) in particular, it’s hard not to focus on climate change. It’s clear that globally we did too little too late but at least today we have stopped emissions from rising; we, the DVMWHS ..read more