Geographies of Social Change

GPS Slideshow

A well-established research strength within Human Geography at Newcastle explores and extends an applied, critical understanding of cities and urbanism. Geographies of Social Change encompasses the work of 10 staff in the School (Bonnett, Botterill, Champion, Coombes, Hopkins, Jarvis, Laurie, Nayak, Stenning, Tate) and more than a dozen current or recently completed postgraduate students.

The common core of our research is its attention to the changing social geographies of towns and cities, through which we explore often longstanding and always important social issues in projects which are both methodologically and theoretically innovative. We seek to understand the everyday geographies of urban life and to explore the intersections and inequalities which shape those geographies. Ideas about identity, families and households, health, welfare and care, infrastructures and community run through our research and these lead us to connect with issues of gender, race, ethnicity and migration, youth, religion, class, social size and generation, amongst others.

The work of Newcastle's urban social geographers is both international and interdisciplinary. We are proud of both our local research, much of which builds on participative and collaborative projects with communities across the North East, and of our more global collaborations. The international, transnational and comparative work that many of us undertake showcases specialist research skills (in language-based area studies, for example) and allows us to draw on a wide range of contexts and experiences in our seminars and workshops.

These international collaborations also support the work of our postgraduate students who have, in recent years, undertaken research in Poland, Peru, Colombia, Nigeria, Serbia, Thailand, Bolivia and the UK. Our interdisciplinary engagements mean that many of us work closely with our colleagues in Sociology, in the Institute of Health and Society, and in the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies, amongst others.

Research in this strand has led to the publication of key texts for prestigious publishers: Cities and Gender (Jarvis); Young People, Place and Identity (Hopkins); Domesticating Neoliberalism (Stenning); Indigenous Development in the Andes: Culture, Power, and Transnationalism (Laurie) and Gender, Youth and Culture: Young Masculinities and Femininities (Nayak).

It has also attracted funding from a variety of sources, both academic (including ESRC, AHRC, Nuffield, and the British Academy) and policy (such as the Department for Transport, the Scottish Government, the Forestry Commission, and the Department for Communities and Local Government). Through these collaborations, we engage with a range of key policy agendas, including those around citizenship, asylum, volunteering, community, health and faith.

Some of our urban social geographies work takes place within the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS), a research centre with a strong track record in academically-rigorous, policy-relevant research on city-regions, migration and commuting, geographies of unemployment, and housing markets (Coombes, Champion).

Research themes within this cluster include:

The co-ordinator of this cluster is Alison Stenning