July 23, 2012, by Amber Martin

A day in the life of a geographer…Amber Martin

Since my last post I’ve been pretty busy with ‘conference season’. A couple of weeks ago I attended the RGS-IBG annual conference in the beautiful city of Edinburgh where it rained a lot and I forgot to pack a water proof coat and ‘sensible’ footwear. Fashion dilemmas aside the conference was brilliant. I co-organised and chaired a session entitled ‘New and Emerging Feminist Geographies’ where we had some excellent and extremely interesting papers. I also presented a paper entitled ‘Sex Shops: representations of the female body and gendered and sexual discourses’ in the ‘Sex, Space and Security Session’ and received some very positive and interesting feedback from the audience. I also attended the ‘Women in Geography Study Group’ (WGSG) AGM and volunteered to be involved with the setting up of our new twitter account (@WGSG_RGSIBG).

This week I was lucky enough to attend a one-day conference put on by the Economic and Social Research Council (the research council that fund my PhD) at the University of Birmingham. This was a student conference intended for late stage PhD candidates that gave advice about research impact, applying for jobs and research fellowships, which was incredibly useful.

Other than my little excursion to Birmingham, this week has been spent firmly rooted in the office where I have been writing an empirical chapter of my thesis about sex shop licensing and regulation. I’m particularly pleased with the inclusion of some rather nice maps of the cost of sex shop licenses across England. Sex shop licenses cost a different amount across each of England’s 323 district councils and vary wildly. For example, if you ever fancied opening up a sex shop in The City of Westminster, an annual license would set you back a massive £29,102. Whereas opening up a shop in Epping Forest would only set you back £420.00 for a license. There really is nothing better than a bit of sex shop license trivia!

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Share on Google+
• Share on LinkedIn