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Staff Profile

Professor Helen Jarvis

Professor of Social Geography Engagement

  • Email: helen.jarvis@ncl.ac.uk
  • Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 6959
  • Fax: +44 (0) 191 208 5421
  • Address: Room: HDB.3.24
    Geography
    Henry Daysh Building
    University of Newcastle
    Newcastle upon Tyne
    NE1 7RU
Background

Introduction

Helen Jarvis has an established international reputation in each of four intersecting strands of research and scholarship in urban social geography; (i) household work-life reconciliation, including ageing and the mobility; (ii) Public space, public life and accessible cities, understanding this holistically and relationally; (iii) ethnographies and infrastructures of time-space co-ordination, with a particular focus on the 'social architectures' of shared space and self-governance in collaborative living arrangements of intentional community and cohousing; (iv) new urban policies for sustainability, focussing on the green sharing economy and its roots in voluntary civic engagement. Each strand of research engages with real-world problems. Scholarly publications include three books on Cities, Gender, Work/Life Balance and Social Reproduction and more than 20 solo-author peer-review articles in top ranking journals. She is regularly invited to speak at international symposia and to provide opinion and debate on new urban policies for sustainability in national and international news media, including appearances on BBC Radio 4 programmes Today and Thinking Allowed. Helen has held visiting academic positions at UC Berkeley and University of Washington, USA and University of Western Sydney, Australia.

Helen is deeply committed to engaging community stakeholders in collaborative research and providing students with community-based learning and research opportunities. For example, through continuous engagement with grassroots social movement organisations including Transition Towns, Cittaslow (slow towns), Sustrans (campaign for sustainable bicycle routes), Quality of Life Partnership (age-friendly city coalitions), UK Cohousing Network and the North East Community Led Development Network, she has personally generated and supervised four fully funded collaborative PhD Studentships and three undergraduate vacations studentships.  Collaboration for the mutual benefit of community-based partner organisations includes learning and teaching opportunities for student volunteering (Geo2138 and Geo3143). 

Recent press coverage: togetherness

Background

Present - Professor of Social Geography Engagement, Newcastle University

2011 -  2020: Reader, Newcastle University  

2006 - 2011: Senior Lecturer, Newcastle University

1999 - 2002: ESRC Fellowship 
1998 - 2006: Lecturer, Newcastle University
1997 - 1998: Postdoc, Cambridge University

Roles and Responsibilities

ESRC Peer Review College, 2010 to present

Member of Newcastle University Senate, from 2017

School Director of Equality, Diversity & Inclusion, 2016 - 2018

School Academic Coordinator for Erasmus and Study Abroad 2011-2014

INTO (pre-sessional ESL) liaison, 2011-2013

Degree Programme Director, 2008 through 2010 (including Internal Subject Review)

Admissions Tutor BA/BSc Hons Geography, 2003 - 2007/8

Member of the University Disciplinary Panel, 2006-10 and 2011 – 2012

Faculty liaison with university librarians, 1995-2000

Book Reviews Editor, RGS-IBG/ Wiley Blackwell journals; Area and The Geographical Journal 2005 – 2010

External examiner, London Studies Degree Programme, Birkbeck College, University of London (2007- 2010)

External examiner for PhD thesis and viva voce; including University of Durham (2007 and again in 2008); University of Amsterdam (2010); University of Manchester (2016); University of Oxford (2016).

Qualifications

PhD London School of Economics, 1997.
BSc (Econ) London School of Economics, 1994, First Class Honours.

Previous Positions

1997 - 1998: Postdoctoral Research Associate, Land Economy, University of Cambridge

Memberships

Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)

Member of the American Geographers Association
Committee member (previously treasurer 1998-2001) RGS-IBG Women and Geography Study Group (now GFGRG) 2001-2010

Director, UK Cohousing Network, Board of Directors (2013 – 2018)

UK representative, Cittaslow International Scientific Research Committee (2009 – 2019)

Honours and Awards

George and Hilda Ormsby Award for Academic Achievement, London School of Economics, 1994.

Google Scholar

 

Research

Research Interests

Helen Jarvis is internationally regarded for advancing new paradigms of sustainable de-growth and social architectures that support a green sharing economy.  She has an established international reputation in each of four intersecting strands of research and scholarship in urban social geography; (i) household work-life reconciliation, including ageing and the mobility; (ii) Public space, public life and accessible cities, understanding this holistically and relationally; (iii) ethnographies and infrastructures of time-space co-ordination, with a particular focus on the 'social architectures' of shared space and self-governance in collaborative living arrangements of intentional community (notably cohousing); (iv) new urban policies for sustainability, focussing on the green sharing economy and its roots in voluntary civic engagement.

Each strand of research engages with real-world problems. Scholarly publications include three books on Cities, Gender, Work/Life Balance and Social Reproduction and more than 20 solo-author peer-review articles in top ranking journals. Helen is regularly invited to speak at international symposia and to provide opinion and debate on new urban policies for sustainability in national and international news media, including appearances on BBC Radio 4 programmes Today and Thinking Allowed.

Helen has held visiting academic positions at UC Berkeley and University of Washington, USA and Western Sydney University, Australia.

Recent publications on the self-proclaimed Freetown of Christiania, which occupies prime real estate in the heart of the Danish capital of Copenhagen, result from unique access as one of a handful of academics awarded Christiania Research in Residence status under the CRIR programme established in 2005. In addition to published output, this participatory research informs the undergraduate learning experience through the Copenhagen residential field-course module GEO2123 and Helen’s commitment to students ‘seeing and believing’ that alternative economies and social organisations are possible. She has published on her feminist approach to participatory learning methods in a special issue of the Journal of Geography in Higher Education (2009).

Helen Jarvis maintains a strong track record in UK Research Council funding- including multi-disciplinary, multi-institution and bilateral collaboration. She is currently PI on the ESRC seminar series Collaborative Housing and Community Resilience, with the UK Cohousing Network as a non-academic partner (BH148250); she is Co-I on the EPSRC/ESRC large interdisciplinary collaborative project Mobility and Place in the Age-friendly City Environment (MyPlace). Both demonstrate collaboration with non-academic community-based organisations and civil society initiatives, as well as connections made across the Institute for Ageing and Health; Computing Science; Planning and Urban Design; Sociology and academic partners nationally and internationally.   

Current Work

Helen is currently researching everyday life in relation to experiments and innovations in collaborative housing and intentional community (notably co-housing), comparing group formation, practices of collective governance and alternative living space in Britain, Scandinavia, Australia and the USA. She is regularly invited to speak publicly on the subject of alternative housing and sustainable de-growth by grassroots community groups as well as academic institutions overseas.  She is currently PI on the ESRC seminar series Collaborative Housing and Community Resilience, with the UK Cohousing Network as a non-academic partner (BH148250); she is Co-I on the EPSRC/ESRC large interdisciplinary collaborative project Mobility and Place in the Age-friendly City Environment (MyPlace). Both demonstrate collaboration with non-academic community-based organisations and civil society initiatives, as well as connections made across the Institute for Ageing and Health; Computing Science; Planning and Urban Design; Sociology and academic partners nationally and internationally.  

Collaborative Housing and Community Resilience 2014-2016: ESRC Seminar series, in partnership with the UK Cohousing Network (together with the Universities of Leeds, Lancaster, Nottingham, Sheffield and London School of Economics) http://collaborativehousing.net/

Research Roles

Since joining Newcastle University Helen has undertaken a wide variety of roles across the subject area, school and university levels, including as an early career mentor for the SDU. She was instrumental in the 2007 Research Assessment Exercise by establishing and leading the human geography cluster Society, Space and Practice (SSP). Beyond the university she holds research consultant roles with several grassroots social movement organisations, notably as UK representative for Cittaslow International and on the Board of Directors (and associated with research strategy) of the UK Cohousing Network.  

Postgraduate Supervision

I am happy to supervise postgraduate research on any aspect of:
Broad-based community organising, social direct action and civic engagement; experiments in collaborative housing and intentional communities; community supported livelihoods; cities and gender; household resource capabilities and coping strategies; social networks/ social geographies; home and housing; work, employment and gender relations; informal care-giving; mobility (active aging) and everyday co-ordination.


Completed PhD supervision:

Rituparna Sarma (2008) Indian women’s changing status and role: lessons from the daily lives of university students of Assam.

Valerie Egdell (2009) ESRC/MRC studentship. ‘Unequal respite: mapping the sites, stages and support networks of informal care’. Submitted within 3 years.

Angela Abbott (2011) Orientations and lifeworlds of carers of older people in Tyne and Wear, UK

Ann Murphy (2014) Landscape: space, place and identity issues for Army wives.

Francesca Fois (2016) Enacting intentional heterotopias: discovering alternative spaces through a relational-scalar approach in the spiritual intentional communities of Damanhur (Italy) and Terra Miriam (Brazil)

Arezu Bari (2016) Understanding urban informality: everyday life in informal settlements in Pakistan

Tessa Holland (2017) Knowing through Cittaslow: navigating slow, 'fast' and crafted knowledges in UK slow towns.

Willbert Den Hoed (2018) The road to age-friendly mobility: how cycling changes the way we age.

Philip Mullen (2019) Care in a time of austerity: relationships, identities amongst homeless LGBTQ young people.

Matthew Hanchard (2019) Anchoring digital maps as rough guides: a practice-oriented digital society of map use. 


Currently supervising

Joe Herbert (ESRC 1 3, collaborative with ACT! Climate Change NE) 

Philippa Carter (ESRC 3.5, collaborative with Groundwork NE and Cumbria) 

Jessie Kelly (ESRC 3)

Leah Chan (ESRC 1 3)


Esteem Indicators

Helen has been invited to deliver Key-note presentations at international symposia in Italy, Luxembourg, Germany, France, Australia, Denmark and the USA; she participated in an International ‘think-tank’ on Housing Wealth (Rowntree Foundation/ ESRC) in 2007. She was invited by the Anglo-German Centrum fur Internationale Studien (CiS) Hamburg to contribute as a consultant to a workshop on 'the temporalisation of space' in December 2004. She has been hosted as an international visiting scholar/ researcher in residence (Christiania), in Australia, USA, Denmark and the Netherlands; Helen is an invited member of the Cittaslow (slow cities) international scientific committee of advisors (since 2009). She has been a non-executive Director of the UK Cohousing Network since 2014. In 2014 she supervised an undergraduate students to work with the North East Community Led Development Network as a vacation intern and the resulting project was selected from University-wide annual competition for public showcase event.

Helen has been invited as an expert public speaker to provide opinion and debate on national and international TV and radio, including BBC Radio 4 Today; BBC Radio 4 Thinking Allowed; ABC Bush Telegraph and Community TV.

Recent funding: 

ESRC Seminar Series, ‘Collaborative Housing and Community Resilience’, 2014 – 2016: £27,023 (PI in collaboration with UK Cohousing Network) (BH148250)

EPSRC/ESRC ‘MyPlace (Mobility & Place for the age-friendly city environment’ (£1,011,005); co-applicant (BH135126)

Newcastle University, School Research Committee Small Grant: ‘Cultivating a new normal: tracing alternative networks of social learning in two world-famous experimental communities; Findhorn, UK and Christiania, DK’. (£950)

University of Western Sydney IRIS award, 2010-11:  ($12,000 AUD) ‘Collaborative housing innovations in Australian cities: international lessons’

BEACON North East (For Public Engagement), 2011-2012 (£10,000) ‘Exploring cohousing as an option for older people in Newcastle upon Tyne’ (Co-applicant and in collaboration with the Quality of Life Partnership and Newcastle Elders Council).

Newcastle University HASS Faculty Small Grant, 2008-2009: (£1,600) Alternative home-life reconciliation: the case of co-housing and intentional communities in Oregon, USA.

ESRC Seminar Series, 2007-2009: £15,000 ‘Time-space and life-course’ (PI in collaboration with Durham and Lancaster Universities).

British Academy, 2005 - 2007: £7,000 (PI).

ESRC Fellowship, 1999 - 2002: £91,394 awarded for three years to undertake comparative UK-US research: "Negotiating Flexibility for Working Families: Lessons from International Comparison".

HSBC Holdings RGS-IBG Small, Grant 1999: Award of £1,500 for travel to support a 'pump-priming' 'pilot' international study of dual earner household lifestyles.

University of Newcastle Small Grant, 2000: Award of £1,500 for data collection costs to conduct a pilot study in preparation for a larger grant submission (with Professor Jane Wheelock),
"understanding 'flexible working' from a household perspective". An unsuccessful ESRC submission was made in July 2001.

ESRC, 2000: Bursary of £800 to cover full fees and travel expenses for a two-week residential course on the British Household Panel Survey at the University of Essex.

British Academy 2005-2007 (with Seraphim Alvanides): Small Grant of £7480: Understanding School Choice as a Function of Inequality: Combining Biography with Spatial Analysis.

 

Teaching

Undergraduate Teaching

Community-Based Volunteering (practice-based learning)


GEO1015 Human Geographies of the UK

GEO2110 Social Geographies

GEO2111 Doing Geographical Research: Theory and Practice (not 2017/18)

GEO2123 Copenhagen Field Course: Social Experiments, Diverse Economies (2013-2016)

GEO2138 and GEO3143 Community-Based Volunteering in Geography (collaborative research/ volunteer placements)

GEO3099 Dissertation (not 2017/18)


Postgraduate Teaching

GEO8017 Concepts in Action (MA Geography Research)


Community-Based Volunteering in Geography: information for prospective students and non-profit partners

This module is intended to be of mutual benefit to the student and the partner organisation. The module combines a block of classroom teaching on the history, theory, practices, politics, ethics and methods of community-based organising and community-based research, with extended practice-based learning from volunteering in the non-profit sector. The placement component involves 70 hours participating in small groups with a non-profit partner. This placement may specifically focus on producing a defined piece of research (such as a survey) or it may involve an element of community organising activity (such as helping with an event or outreach material). Students co-design and agree the research/activity collaboratively with the partner organisation, for the direct benefit of the partner and community concerned.

Recent or current partner organisations include: Northumbria Conflict Resolution Network; Project Bind (Magic Hat/ Ugly Duckling, food waste initiatives); Equal Arts, Henpower; Silverline Memories Men's Shed at Springwell Community Garden; Hatton Gallery; and Tyne and Wear Citizens (part of Citizens UK).



Publications