Geographies of Social Change
Newcastle hosts one of the largest and most dynamic groups of social geographers in the world.
About
We are committed to agenda-setting research that:
- addresses spatial and social inequalities
- explores the geographies of justice
- illuminates the spaces of everyday life
Our work highlights disparities in wealth, health, violence, living conditions and life-chances. It engages and analyses the many sites, scales and dimensions of disadvantage and discrimination that undermine the social and ethical fabric on which human well-being depends.
Our research is situated in a diverse range of places in the global North and South, and moves from and between the intimacy of the body to the global. Our work examines and brings to life the connectivities and co-dependencies among people, relations and events across these realms.
The principles of participation, co-production, collective action and social regeneration are central to much of our work. These are reflected both in our development of innovative ways of doing and putting our research out in the world, and in our commitment to producing knowledges that have material benefits to those with whom we collaborate in the wider community, the voluntary sector and the policy sphere.
Geographies of Social Change includes a significant and vibrant cohort of postdoctoral and postgraduate researchers, and we welcome enquiries from those interested in developing their research career with us.
The group’s commitment to creating knowledge that has material benefits to the wider community, voluntary sector and policy sphere is evidenced through engagement and coproduction with diverse local and international organisations including: Tyne and Wear Citizens, Islamic Diversity Centre, Muslim Engagement and Development, Tyneside Women’s Health, Northumberland Trans Equality Network, Canadian Filipino Association of Yukon, UNHRC, and Dadaab Refugee Training Centre Kenya.
The cluster has also advanced influential participatory and arts-based methodologies: participatory action research, participatory GIS, and community-based volunteering.
Research themes
Race, ethnicity and migration
Using a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, we produce leading geographical research on race, ethnicity and migration. Our work on this theme includes the everyday consequences of bigotry and prejudice connected to events such as terrorism and Brexit; theorisation of whiteness and anti-racism; evolving youth identities in light of globalisation and local and regional change; regional and local population change and migration; and the emotional and political impacts of the movement of transnational labour.
- Migration, diaspora and displacement (, , , , , Thompson, Lear)
- Anti-racism and whiteness (, , Barwick)
- Ethnicity, gender and class ()
- Geopolitics, racism and Islamophobia ()
- Geographies of religion (, )
Rethinking gender and sexualities
Our research examines changing representations and lived experiences of gender and sexuality across a range of contemporary locations. We are interested in the ways that private relations are fundamental to the expression and enactment of social and political power in other sites. We study changes in the urban lives of women, men and children; shifting masculinities in diverse cultural and place-based contexts; the manifestation of intimate violence across public, private and geopolitical domains; the spatial and political implications of gender non-conformity; and gender and sexual prejudice within institutions including Universities.
- Family lives in the city (, , , Kelly)
- Gender and the military (, )
- Masculinities (, , , Finn)
- Gender-based violence (, , , Vaughan, Yates)
- Everyday sexism ()
- Transgender identities (, Ridley)
Spaces of youth and childhood
Members of GOSC have a longstanding reputation for their research on the geographies of youth and childhood. This work ranges from young people’s engagement with national identity and geopolitics in sites including South America and Scotland; education and aspirations among black and minority ethnic youth in the North East; and the intersections of gender, generation and class.
- Children, young people and critical geopolitics (, , , Barber)
- Youth, race and ethnicity (, )
- Children’s agency ()
- Children and play ()
- Youth transitions (, , , Kelly)
- Generations and intergenerationality (, )
Domestic-global spaces
A key conceptual focus of our work as social geographers is unsettling scale as a hierarchical organising principle, and exploring the potency of the local and the intimate. We do this by, for example, challenging taken for granted assumptions about the nature and form of domestic spaces; examining how family and community life respond to austerity; analysing the consequences of the disposability and displacement of low income homes and households; studying new forms of family and politics created when intimate relations stretch across the globe; and interrogating alternative modes of living, housing and creating community.
- Transnational families ()
- Austerity and community (, )
- Cohousing and multigenerational reciprocity ()
- Memory, nostalgia and alternative living (, )
- Loneliness (, , Kelly)
- Social housing and homelessness (, , Chan)
- Household energy use ()
- The home at night ()
- Geographies of trauma (, )
Justice, wellbeing and community
Our research on this theme focuses on the broader spatial configurations of justice and wellbeing. We study health, housing, consumption, technology, energy and urban life, asking who gains, and loses out, from contemporary spatial patterns and processes. Our scholarship has a strong emphasis on the development of alternative social forms that challenge inequitable distributions of power, and we study the ways that these are enabled or stymied by different modes of activism and organising.
- Health, health care and wellbeing (, Jenkins, , Morrison)
- Implications of geospatial technologies for justice and citizenship ()
- Class (, Mew)
- Environmental justice and green activism (, Herbert, , Lee)
- Intentional communities and degrowth initiatives (, Herbert, Lee)
- Cities at night (, Souter)
- Sustainable, ethical and resilient consumption (, )
- More-than-human communities (, Lee, )
- Citizen participation, civil society organising and social inclusion (Lin, , Sari, )
Watch our Newcastle University Collaborative Housing.
Participatory approaches and arts-based methodologies
In GOSC we use a diverse range of methodological approaches in our research, including both more traditional and innovative quantitative and qualitative techniques. A particular specialism of our cluster is our deployment and development of contemporary participatory and arts-based approaches:
- Participatory action research (, , , , Mew), participatory GIS (), community based volunteering (, Mew), and other approaches for the co-production of research
- Novel methods for working with children and youth, and debates on the politics and ethics of research (, , , , , ).
- The integration of collaborations with artists professionals into many research projects, using an array of media and forms - both as innovative methods for research, and vehicles through which we can represent and disseminate research findings and outputs to diverse audiences. These include theatre (, ), video, storytelling (Richardson), museum exhibition, visual arts, movement and dance (Jenkins) and songwriting.
Staff
Our research group staff have significant experience and expertise in analysis of geographies of social change.
Projects
Our research projects have included subjects as diverse as the geography of housing market areas in the UK and collaborative housing and community resilience.
- Asian Youth: Religious Identities Islamophobia and Everyday Geopolitics
Project Leader(s):
Project Dates: From March 2013 to March 2016 - Caring in Distant Lands: A Performative Enquiry into the Outsourcing of Elder Care
Project Leader(s): Dr Caleb Johnston, Felix Meyer-Christian, Professor Geraldine Pratt
Project Dates: 2018- Ongoing - Collaborative Housing and Community Resiliance
Project Leader(s): Dr Helen Jarvis
Project Dates: From November 2014 to November 2016 - Decline in the frequency of people moving home: the UK experience
Project Leader(s): Tony Champion with Ian Shuttleworth (Belfast) and Tom Cooke (Connecticut)
Project Dates: 2014-ongoing - Housing Hope: the place of politics and people in housing governance
Project Leader(s): Emma Ormerod
Project Dates: 2018-2019 - Migration, housing and planning in the London region
Project Leader(s): Tony Champion with Ian Gordon (LSE)
Project Dates: 2017-ongoing - Muslim youth and political participation in Scotland
Project Leader(s): Peter Hopkins
Project Dates: 2016 - Nanay, a testimonial play: Labour Migration, Precarity, Transnational Families, and Testimonial Theatre
Project Leader(s): Dr Caleb Johnston, Professor Geraldine Pratt
Project Dates: 2008-2017 - Overseas Conference Grant
Project Leader(s): Dr Peter E Hopkins
Project Dates: From March 2009 to March 2009 - Sexual harassment, rape culture and youthful urban Indian masculinities
Project Leader(s): Raksha Pande
Project Dates: 2017 - ongoing - Tlingipino Bingo: Filipino Migration, Settler Colonialism and State Multiculturalism in Canada
Project Leader(s): Dennis Gupa, Dr Caleb Johnston, Sharon Shorty, Ricky Tagaban, Professor Geraldine Pratt, Hazel Venzon
Project Dates: 2016 – 17 - Understanding trauma from survivors’ perspectives
Project Leader(s): Rachel Pain
Project Dates: 2018
PhD students
Our postgraduates are working on a wide variety of power, space, politics subjects. These range from the geopolitical imagination of video gamers to exploration of racist perpetrators in the North East of England.
|
Name |
Topic |
|---|---|
|
Eleojo Abubakar |
The Socio-Spatial Coverage and Inequality of Healthcare Services in Nigeria |
|
Dan Barwick |
The Black Lives Matter Movement: Transnational Activism and the Role of Neo-Liberal Urbanism |
|
Alessandro Boussalem |
Lives at the intersection: Exploring LGBTQ subjectivities in Brussels, Belgium |
|
Leah Chan |
Contested spaces of homelessness and houselessness: mobilising media in action-oriented research. |
|
Jonathon Finn |
|
|
Quan Gao |
Religion, migration and the (post)secular city: politics and poetics of migrant-worker Christians in post-reform Shenzhen, China |
|
Joe Herbert |
Between crisis and transformation: exploring the agency of young green activists in an era of socio-ecological upheaval |
|
Tessa Holland |
Exploring the potential of co-creation in the convivial politics of Cittaslow (slow towns) UK |
|
Nathar Iqbal |
Exploring everyday social and political geographies and encounters of non-heterosexual Muslims in the UK |
|
Jessie Kelly |
A Lonely Generation? Understanding Loneliness and Togetherness in the Emotional Geographies of Millennials |
|
Niamh Lear |
Generation Emigration? Exploring experiences of Irishness in Britain post-Brexit. |
|
Hannah Lyons |
Assembling the nation: spatialising young, religious American's affective experiences of the nation, fear and danger in the everyday |
|
Heather Mew |
Resistance, protest and austerity: how do working class people 'fight back', and against what? |
|
Libby Morrison |
Exploring the lives of informal carers of dementia in Northumberland, at home, in the community or in residential settings |
|
Ged Ridley |
Transgender experience of public bathroom |
|
Novieta Sari |
Communication Approaches for Participatory Planning and Civic Engagement in Sustainable Governance Systems in Indonesia |
|
Lexy Seedhouse |
Be(com)ing Indigenous in the Time of Extraction: (Re)articulating Identities in the Context of Peru’s Ley de Consulta Previa. |
|
Alicia Souter |
|
|
Clare Vaughan |
Violence and Fear in Homeless Careers: A Biographical Investigation of Young Women at Risk of Homelessness |
|
Isabel Williams |
Cartographies of Heritage: Mapping the Interpretations of Landscape |
|
Anna Yates |
Female fear, urban design and neighbourhood segregation in Stockholm, Sweden |