The importance of a good field hat!

September 11, 2019

I’m nursing a coffee in Hebden Bridge, looking out at the drizzly remnants of Hurricane Dorian that wrought such devastation on communities across the Atlantic, but offers us only the prospect of damp waterproofs over the next few hours. We are currently about to begin Day 8 (Hebden Bridge – Cowling, 27km) of our walk …

Our walk so far…

September 10, 2019

We’re 6 days into our 9 day, 135 mile walk from the School of Geography to Malham, in time for our second year Physical Geography module. It’s been quite the journey, 91 miles done so far, there’s been highs and lows, topographically and emotionally… plenty of opportunity for geographic word play on this trip!! Also …

Talking and researching European union in the USA

September 9, 2019

A blog by Benjamin Thorpe When attending large conferences, the lag times between abstract submission and the conference dates can often mean that papers morph as ideas evolve, or as the promised research takes an unexpected direction. Less commonly – at least when dealing with historical topics – it is due to the shifting political …

Facilitating fieldwork: the importance of acknowledging friends, family and technology

September 6, 2019

A blog by Sarah Hall As an economic geographer who studies the financial services sector, my field sites are financial centres within large cities. Far removed from the mountains and lakes that may seem to be quintessentially geographical field locations, my research takes place in the clusters of financial services firms found in places like …

Lung health and cookstoves in Nepal

September 5, 2019

A blog by Sarah Jewitt During the past semester, I spent time investigating connections between the use of cookstoves fuelled with biomass (wood, charcoal, agricultural residue, dung etc.) and lung health in Nepal. This work was funded by an Institutional GCRF grant entitled Improving Respiratory Health in Nepal led by Ian Hall and Charlotte Bolton …

Coal, cotton and the value of local fieldwork

September 4, 2019

In this blog David Beckingham discusses the tradition of local research and fieldwork in the School of Geography, using as his examples sites from day one of the walk from Nottingham to Malham. Fieldwork is an essential part of any geography degree, often valued because it helps us see the world we want to understand …

Island Biology 2019

September 3, 2019

A blog by Michela Mariani and Richard Field Only few months after moving to Nottingham from Australia, Michela was heading back to the Southern Hemisphere on a memorable conference trip. For Richard, who long ago lived on the equator, it has been much longer since he last crossed that important geographic line. We both attended …

Economic Geography in the Field

Field study has long been a vital component of geography as a discipline and plays a central role in geographical education and research throughout secondary schools and universities. Indeed, fieldwork has been viewed as an ‘initiation ritual of the discipline’ [1] and as a ‘locus of becoming’ [2] – it has come to define the …

Celebrating Fieldwork

September 2, 2019

Field trips are up there with pencil crayons as a stereotype of Geography, for many of us who have made the subject our career it is one of the things (along with the colouring in) that engaged us with the subject in the first place and kept us hooked.   This month we’ve dug through …

To achieve ‘safely managed water’ for all by 2030, the Joint Monitoring Programme must monitor seasonality in faecal contamination of drinking water sources

August 28, 2019

A blog by Alfred Dongzagla, Third Year Ph.D. Student Target 6.1 of the Sustainable Development Goal seeks to achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all by 20301, with the indicator being access to ‘safely managed water’.2  The WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme defines ‘safely managed water’ as a drinking water …