Power, Space, Politics

Themes

Geography at Newcastle University has a particular research strength examining the expression of political power across space. We do this at a range of scales, from the international and national to the individual, and with reference to a range of global contexts.

Our explorations of power, space and politics range from group and individual negotiations of identity and political action to the lived experiences of political transformation.

We innovatively draw on ethnographic, discourse analytic, participatory and visual methodologies to come up with grounded, informed reflections on the multiple ways in which concepts of power, space and politics intersect.

We share, and make explicit, through our work a desire to produce cutting-edge research which has utility for policy and user communities.

The co-ordinator of this cluster is Matt Benwell.

Borders and boundaries

This strand of research has sought to use innovative ethnographic and analytical methods to examine international borders and boundaries.

For example, we have undertaken work moving beyond abstract, supposedly objective, accounts of borders to analyse the lived experience of borders in more detail.

Other work on boundaries and borders considers the vertical extent of sovereign territory and questions the use of aircraft to enforce, or conversely violate, international boundaries. We also undertake research on islands, archipelagos and oceanic geographies that further interrogates the often complex and shifting nature of boundaries and borders

People working on this theme:

Critical geopolitics

Our research about geopolitics encompasses a variety of approaches and areas of interest. We seek to extend current understandings of the relationships between geographies of power and resistance.

We look at this through critical analysis of geopolitical modes of knowledge production and dissemination, such as political speeches, popular music, archival sources, images and interviews.

Our work considers:

the role of religion and spirituality in the memorialisation of terror
the racialisation of geopolitics
the embodied geopolitics of childhood and youth
the geopolitics of Post-Soviet Central Asia

It also looks at:

considerations of the work of geopolitical theorists
the geopolitics of international boundaries and borders
the role of aviation in the projection of power
vertical geopolitics
airspace as geopolitical space

People working on this theme include:

Matt Benwell	Craig Jones	Peter Hopkins
Nick Megoran	Jonathan Pugh	Alison Williams

International development

This research theme is concerned with transnational development practices and their effects on particular peoples and places (especially in Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America and South Asia).

Within that broad frame are several overlapping and complementary research trajectories, namely:

theories and models of development
changing gender relations and femininities
Africa in the world economy
new social movements and popular resistance to economic restructuring
the role of non-governmental organisations in development
voice, the everyday and post-colonial institutional development in the Caribbean
participatory and environmental planning
development and culture among new development actors
politics of representation

People working on this theme include:

Kate Manzo

Jonathan Pugh

Raksha Pande

Militarism and military geographies

Newcastle University is a leading centre for the analysis of the effects of military activities on spaces, places, landscapes and people. We approach our engagements with military geographies and militarism from a number of conceptual positions including:

landscape geographies
geopolitical theory
visual sociology
work and organisation studies

Researchers working in this area use a number of methodological approaches including ethnographic and photo elicitation practices, textual analysis, field walking and interviews.

Our work focuses upon a range of spaces and scales and we are particularly interested in:

representations of UK military airspaces
the politics of military landscapes and environments
the production of contemporary military memoirs
the practices of military aviators
the value of the university armed service units
the experiences of participation in the Reserve forces
gender issues in the UK military
resisting militarisation in UK schools
the geopolitics of military commemoration

People working on this theme include:

Neil Jenkings	Craig Jones	Rachel Woodward
Alison Williams	Nick Megoran

More information can be found on our military research website.

Resistance, justice and peace

The research within this strand is concerned with a variety of subjects relating to the geographies of resistance, justice and peace.

These include conceptual developments within and empirical analysis of:

the geopolitics of peace
female sex trafficking in Nepal
conflict resolution in the Caribbean
the cultural politics of asylum and refuge

We also look at:

the political strategies of resistance and protest exercised by students and young people
the nature of radical politics today
the hegemony of neoliberalism

People working on this theme include:

More information can be found on our geographies of justice research site.

Staff

Our research group staff have significant experience and expertise in analysis of power and politics in relation to space.

StaffList: Power, Space, Politics

Dr Matt Benwell
Lecturer in Human Geography

Email: matthew.benwell@ncl.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 3935

Professor Peter Hopkins
Professor of Social Geography and University Dean of Social Justice

Email: peter.hopkins@ncl.ac.uk
Telephone: (0191) 208 3924

Dr Neil Jenkings
Senior Research Associate

Email: neil.jenkings@ncl.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)191 208 3806

Dr Craig Jones
Lecturer in Political Geography

Email: craig.jones@ncl.ac.uk
Telephone: 0191 208 3960

Dr Robert Lawshaw
Lecturer in Geography

Email: robert.shaw2@ncl.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 3918

Dr Kathryn Manzo
Senior Lecturer

Email: kate.manzo@ncl.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 6454

Dr Nick Megoran
Reader in Political Geography

Email: nick.megoran@ncl.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 6450

Professor Rachel Pain
Professor of Human Geography

Email: rachel.pain@ncl.ac.uk

Dr Raksha Pande
Lecturer

Email: raksha.pande@ncl.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)191 208 3557

Dr Jonathan Pugh
Senior Academic Fellow

Email: jonathan.pugh@ncl.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 6425

Dr Alison Williams
Senior Lecturer in Political Geography & Geography Degree Programme Director (L701/F800/FH82)

Email: alison.williams1@ncl.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 8489

Professor Rachel Woodward
Professor of Human Geography

Email: rachel.woodward@ncl.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 6434

Postgraduates' Projects

Our postgraduates are working on a wide variety of power, space, politics subjects. These range from women's political participation in trade unions in Chile to securing livelihoods in Peru through fair trade.

Name	Topic
Eleojo Abubakar	The Socio-Spatial Coverage and Inequality of Healthcare Services in Nigeria
Quan Gao	Religion, migration and the (post)secular city: politics and poetics of migrant-worker Christians in post-reform Shenzhen, China
Panayiotis Hadjipavlis	The Peculiarities of Cyprus' Airspace - Implications for Modern State Sovereignty
Matthew Hanchard	Anchoring securities and mobilities: towards a digital sociology of maps
Nathar Iqbal	Exploring everyday social and political geographies and encounters of non-heterosexual Muslims in the UK
Matthew Kearns	Military masculinities and recruitment practices in the British Armed Forces
Hannah Lyons	Assembling the nation: spatialising young, religious American's affective experiences of the nation, fear and danger in the everyday
Stefan Rzedzian	Indigenous Empowerment, Extractive Industries and the Rights of Nature: Assessing Ecuador's "Revolutionary" Political Framework
Matthew Scott	Technogeopolitics and the Berlin-Baghdad Railway
Lexy Seedhouse	Be(com)ing Indigenous in the Time of Extraction: (Re)articulating Identities in the Context of Peru’s Ley de Consulta Previa.
Andrea Wilkinson	Climate Change and Fairtrade Agriculture – Securing Livelihoods in Peru
Isabel Williams	Cartographies of Heritage: Mapping the Interpretations of Landscape

Publications

Pinkerton, A and Benwell MC. Heritage, strategic narratives, and the making of geopolitical pasts, presents and futures at Europa Point, Gibraltar. Political Geography, 2017, epub ahead of print
Benwell MC. Argentine territorial nationalism in the South Atlantic and Antarctica. In: Dodds, K; Hemmings, AD; Roberts, P, ed. Handbook on the Politics of Antarctica. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2017, pp.540-554.
Benwell MC. Going Underground: Banal Nationalism and Subterranean Elements in Argentina’s Falklands/Malvinas Claim. Geopolitics 2017, epub ahead of print.
Benwell MC. Connecting ontological (in)securities and generation through the everyday and emotional geopolitics of Falkland Islanders. Social & Cultural Geography 2017, (ePub ahead of Print).
Núñez A, Baeza B, Benwell MC. Cuando la nación queda lejos: fronteras cotidianas en el paso Lago Verde (Aysén-Chile) - Aldea Las Pampas (Chubut-Argentina). Revista de Geografía Norte Grande 2017, 66, 97-116.
Gasel A, Benwell MC. Memorias, cotidianeidad y territorios: Malvinas en las escuelas secundarias argentinas. Revista Colombiana de Ciencias Sociales 2017, 8(1), 88-107.
Manzo K. The usefulness of climate change films. Geoforum 2017, 84, 88-94.
Megoran, N. (2017) Nationalism in Central Asia: A biography of the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan Boundary, Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press.
Megoran, N. (2017) Warlike Christians in an Age of Violence, Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock
Megoran, N. (2017) Martin Luther King in the UK: A resource pack for teachers in key stages 2,3 & 4, Newcastle: Martin Luther King Peace Committee.
Khamidov A, Megoran N, Heathershaw J. Bottom-up peacekeeping in southern Kyrgyzstan: how local actors managed to prevent the spread of violence from Osh/Jalal-Abad to Aravan, June 2010. Nationalities Papers 2017, Epub ahead of print.
Behr EH, Megoran NWS, Carnaffan J. Peace education, militarism and neo-liberalism: conceptual reflections with empirical findings from the UK. Journal of Peace Education 2017, epub ahead of print.
Foster Russell, Megoran Nick, Dunn Michael. Towards a geopolitics of atheism: Critical geopolitics post the ‘War on Terror’. Political Geography 2017, 60, 179-189.
Megoran N. Warlike Christians in An Age of Violence: The Evangelical Case Against War and for Gospel Peace. USA: Wipf & Stock, 2017.
Grove K, Pugh J. Adaptation Machines or the biopolitics of adaptation. In: Lawrence,J;Bohland,J;Davoudi,S;Knox,P, ed. The Resilience Machine. 2017. In Press.
Pugh J. Review of Roberts. B.R. and Stephens M.A. (2017) Archipelagic American studies, Durham and London Duke University Press. Island Studies Journal 2017, 12(2), 329-330.
The Analogue University, Pande R, Pugh J. Control, resistance and 'the data university': towards a third wave critique.Antipode 2017.
Pugh J, Grove K. Assemblage, Transversality and Participation in the Neoliberal University. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2017, 35(6), 1134-1152.
Pugh J. Resilience as New Political Reality. In: Butler RW, ed. Resilience and Tourism. Wallington, Oxfordshire: CABI, 2017, pp.206-215.
Pugh J. Book review: Island Genres, Genre Islands: Conceptualisation and Representation in Popular Fiction. Cultural Geographies 2017, Epub ahead of print.
Pugh J. A sceptical approach to ‘the everyday’: Relating Stanley Cavell and Human Geography. Geoforum 2017, 79, 36-45.
Pugh, J. (with The Analogue University) Academic identities in the managed university: Neoliberalism and resistance at Newcastle University, UK, Australian University Review, 59, 2, 23-36.
Pugh, J. (2017). Postcolonial development,(non) sovereignty and affect: living on in the wake of Caribbean political independence. Antipode, 49(4), 867-882.
Pugh. J. A phenomenology of archipelagos: from thinking with to within the archipelago. Chapter accepted for ‘Anthology: Archipelagic Thinking: Towards New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations’, in press.
Williams, AJ. Vertical: the city from satellites to bunkers, Island Studies Journal, 12(2): 331-334.
Williams AJ. The Hidenburg Disaster and the Birth of Pathological Technology
Williams AJ. Aircraft carriers and the capacity to mobilise US power across the Pacific, 1919–1929. Journal of Historical Geography 2017, 58, 71-81.
Woodward R, Jenkings KN, Williams A. Militarisation, universities and the university armed service units. Political Geography 2017, 60, 203-212.
Williams AJ. The Empire's Edge: Militarization, Resistance, and Transcending Hegemony in the Pacific (Book Review). Geographical Review 2017, 107(2), e19-e23.
Woodward R, Duncanson C. An introduction to gender and the military. In: Rachel Woodward and Claire Duncanson, ed. The Palgrave International Handbook of Gender and the Military. London: Palgrave, 2017, pp.pp.1-20.
Woodward R, Duncanson C, Jenkings KN. Gender and military memoirs. In: Rachel Woodward and Claire Duncanson, ed. The Palgrave International Handbook of Gender and the Military. London: Palgrave, 2017, pp.525-542.
Merriman P, Peters K, Adey P, Cresswell T, Forsyth I, Woodward R. Interventions on military mobilities. Political Geography 2017, 56, 44-52.
Woodward R. Military geography. In: The International Encyclopedia of Geography. Oxford: John Wylie & Sons, 2017.
Jenkings KN, Woodward R. Serving in Troubled Times: British Military Personnel’s memories and accounts of service in Northern Ireland. In: Dawson G; Dover J; Hopkins S, ed. Northern Ireland Troubles in Britain: Impacts, Engagements, Legacies and Memories. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2017, pp.91-107.
Jenkings KN, Woodward R. Serving in troubled times: British military personnel's memories and accounts of service in Northern Ireland. In: Dawson, G., Dover, J. and Hopkins, S, ed. The Northern Ireland Troubles in Britain: Impacts, Engagements, Legacies and Memories. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017, pp.pp.92-107.