Skip to main content

Staff Profile

Dr Caleb Johnston

Reader in Human Geography

Background

Education

2010 Ph.D. University of British Columbia

2006 MA UBC, Geography

2004 BA (honours) UBC, Geography


Previous Positions

2023- Reader in Human Geography, Newcastle University

2020-23 Lecturer in Human Geography, Newcastle University

2017-19 Lecturer in Human Geography, Newcastle University

2013-16 Lecturer in Human Geography, Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh 

2011-13 Research Associate, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow 

2010-11 Visiting Scholar, Center for Global Metropolitan Studies, University of California, Berkeley


Editorial Work

2021- Associate Editor, Cultural Geographies in Practice, Cultural Geographies

2015-18 Editorial Board, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

2015- Associate Editor, Creative Interventions, Studies in Social Justice


Esteem

2025 Plenary, Centre for Care, University of Sheffield

2025 Invited talk and seminar, University of Amsterdam

2023 Official Selection, International Migration and Environment Film Festival

2023 Official Selection, Swiss Film Festival

2023 Award Winner, World Film Festival Singapore

2022 Official Selection, Bangkok International Documentary Festival

2022 Winner of Best Documentary Short, Rotterdam Independent Film Festival

2020 Keynote, National University of Singapore, Asian Research Institute

2020 Between Worlds performed for Germany's Nacht Kritik 

2009-19 Nanay performed in Vancouver (2009), HAU 1 Theatre Berlin (2009), Edinburgh (2012), Whitehorse (2014), Manilla (2013, 2015)

2019 Reading of Nanay at the Prairie Theatre Exchange Festival and annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Geographers, Winnipeg, with Dr Sarah Zell, Migrante Manitoba, and Winnipeg’s Migrant Solidarity Network 

2019 Between Worlds performed at Berlin's Ballhaus Ost, Newcastle's Northern Stage

2018 Invited Speaker, London School of Economics, Urbanisation and Development cluster 

2017 Keynote, Society and Space, Annual Association of American Geographers, Boston 

2014 Keynote, Participatory Geographies Research Group, RGS-IBG, London 

2013 Jasmin Leila Award, Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)

2011 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Post-Doctoral Prize (shortlisted) 

2009 The Children’s Choice Awards, Saddest and Most Realistic Play, Children’s Choice Awards, PuSh Festival


Recent Engagement

2025 Interviewed for BBC World Service, Business Daily (Gideon Long) (18-minute editorial, global audience of 40 million)

2025 Interviewed for The Telegraph (Laurel Ives) (1 million daily digital subscribers)

2024 Interviewed for the Financial Times (Michael Peel) (1.3 million subscribers)

2024 Interviewed for Nature

2024 Research featured as 3-minute editorial on Rai TV (Italy’s largest public broadcaster)

2024 Interviewed for 60 Minutes Australia (5.5 million YouTube followers)

2023 Interviewed for BBC World Service, The Documentary (Lucy Burns)

2023 Interviewed for Daily Mail (daily readership of 2.18 million)

2023 Interviewed for Sending Mum Abroad, Channel 4

2022 Interviewed for The Guardian (Amelia Hill)

2000 Interviewed for The Economist (Simon Long)


Service

2021-24 Convenor, Geographies of Social Change Research Group, Newcastle University

2014-15 Co-Convenor, International Emotional Geographies Conference, Edinburgh 

2013-16 Managing Committee, Global Justice Academy, University of Edinburgh 

2012-17 Steering Committee, Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network 

2012-13 Advisory Committee, School of Health in Social Science, University of Edinburgh


Presentation

2025. Augmenting workers and new technologies of care, American Association of Geographers (Detroit).

2025. Writing geography creatively, RGS-IBG, convener and presenter (Birmingham).

2025. Food delivery and irregular migrant workers, International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion conference, Discussant (Paris).

2023. Emerging horizons of care technologies in the UK. Deutscher Kongress fur Geographie, Frankfurt.

2023. Automating social care: Public-private partnerships and the creation of the UK digital care market. AAG, Denver

2022. Screening of City of Long Stay with panel discussion. Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), Newcastle.

2021. Dementia care for Europeans in Thailand: A geography of futures. Nanyang Technological University, School of Social Science, Singapore.

2021. A crisis of care in the global north, and new relations of transnational dementia care in Thailand. School of Earth, Environment and Society, McMaster University, Canada.

2021. Living laboratories of crisis: gerontechnologies in long-term care homes in the U.K. and Canada. Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), London.

2021. New intimacies of dementia care beyond the familiar. Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), London.

2020 Relational Comparison and Communities of Care across the Global South and North. Keynote for Transnational Relations, Ageing and Care: Asian Connections and Beyond. National University of Singapore.

2019 From Archive to repertoire in Bagong Barrio. Department of Geography, University of Toronto.

2019 Authors meet critics on Migration in Performance: Crossing the Colonial Present. (Panelists: Lieba Faier, John Catungal, Sarah de Leeuw, Alison Mountz, Tadiar Neferti). American Association of Geographers, Washington.

2018 Unsettling scripts of disposability. Urbanisation, Planning and Development cluster, London School of Economics. 

2017 Playing games of chance in the Canadian North. Performing Urgency: Space, Performance and Politics. Nordic Geographers Meeting, Stockholm.

2017 Ethnographic performances and games of change in the decolonizing present. Keynote talk for Society and Space at the annual conference of the American Association of Geographers, Boston.

2017 Tlingipino Bingo: Performing solidarity across Indigenous and Filipino immigrant experiences of state violence. Reimagining Creative Economy. University of Alberta, Calgary.

2017 Testimonial theatre and the geopolitics of trauma and empathy. University of Leeds. 

2016 Performing precarity in Bagong Barrio. Annual Meeting of Institute of British Geographers (with IBG), London (presenter and convenor).

2016 Life-times and spaces of disposability in Bagong Barrio, Metro Manila. Social Geographies of Urban Abandonment. American Association of Geographers, San Francisco.

2016 Urban crisis: resistances, opportunities and co-optation. University of Edinburgh (convenor).

2015 Who saved the city? Exploring urban activisms in times of austerity in North America and Europe and Beyond. University of Edinburgh (convenor).

2015 Performance as transnational and scholarly inquiry: migrant labour and urban dispossession. Canadian Association of Geographers, Vancouver. 

2014 Theatre, politics and the impossible ethic. Annual Meeting of Institute of British Geographers (with IBG). Keynote talk for the Participatory Geographies Research Group, London.

2014 Transnational affects in the space of theatre. Centre for the History of Emotions, University of London, Queen Mary, London.

2014 The political work of feelings. Migration and Intimate Life. Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network, University of Glasgow, Glasgow.

2013 Testimony, theatre and ethics. Queen’s University, Department of Drama, Canada.

2013 Emotions on the move. New Frontiers of Geographical Knowledge and Practice? Annual Meeting of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), London.

2013 Circulating discourses of suffering across national contexts. Institutional Spaces of Pain, Suffering and Trauma. Emotional Geographies, Groningen.

2013 Circulating suffering: part two. Institutional Spaces of Pain, Suffering and Trauma [redux]. Association of American Geographers, Los Angeles.

 





Research

Ongoing Interests

Care, ageing, social reproduction, technology

Migration, labour, precarity

Creative geographies (theatre, film, writing)

I am also committed to creating creative geographies of public engagement.


Selected Research Creations


Playing with Wildfire 2020-24

A Theatre of the Oppressed project designed to generate community-based response to multi-layered conflict in communities most affected by wildfires in Bolivia. Delivered in 14 performances attended by over 800 people in Boliva’s Chiquitania. Funded by an AHRC/GCRF Urgency Grant. Role: Co-I.

City of Long Stay 2022

A documentary film created to exmaine the conditions and circumstances drawing Europeans and North Americans to migrate to Thailand for dementia care. We consider what this tells us about widespread infrastructure failure and new forms of care and intimacy developing in Chiang Mai.

Official Selection 2023 Swiss International Film Festival

Award Winner at the 2023 World Film Singapore

Winner of Best Documentary Short at the 2022 Rotterdam Independent Film Festival

Official Selection for Amsterdam’s 2022 Lift-Off Festival

Official Selection for the 2022 Bangkok International Documentary Festival

Screened at the 2022 conference of the Royal Geographical Society with IBG (Newcastle)

Between Worlds 2018-20

Based on interviews with Thai caregivers, family members of people living with dementia, British and Swiss entreprenurs, this documentary theatre project, co-created with Costa Compagnie (Germany) and Geraldine Pratt (UBC), examines the global outsourcing and migration of dementia care from Europe and North America to Thailand. Funded by the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council, the ESRC and Germany’s Kulturstiftung des Bundes, the piece examines emerging migrations of care, kinship and the family. The piece premiered at Berlin's Ballhaus Ost and Northern Stage in Newcastle in 2019, and in 2020, the play was re-staged online for Nachtkritik, one of Germany’s premiere arts platforms.

Nanay: A Testimonial Play 2009-19

Nanay is a documentary theatre project that engenders public debate about Canada’s Live-In Caregiver Program, a temporary labour migration program that brings (mostly) Filipino women to Canada to care for Canadian children and ageing adults. The project transforms interview transcripts into a site-responsive installation. Our script is based entirely on verbatim monologues taken from interviews conducted over a 15-year period with Filipina migrant domestic workers, their children, nanny agents and Canadian employers. Performed in Vancouver (2009), Berlin (2009), Edinburgh (2012), Manila (2013; 2015), Winnipeg (2019). Role: Writer, PI.

Tlingipino Bingo 2016-17

This theatre project was developed in collaboration with Tlingit and Filipino theatre artists in the city of Whitehorse. It revolves around a bingo game, in which audience members participate as bingo players and storytellers. The performance provides the occasion for community storytelling and exchange, and serious play on issues of dispossession and trauma shared by Tlingit people and Filipino migrants in the Canadian North. The play premiered at Whitehorse’s 2016 Nuit Blanche Festival. Funded by Yukon Government of Canada.

Do You See What I Mean? 2013

Created with Lyon-based Projet In Situ, and in collaboration with Canada’s National Institute for the Blind. As an urban sensory choreography, this piece of one-on-one theatre was a 2.5-hour blindfolded tour of the streets and homes of Vancouver. Performed at Vancouver’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival.

City of Dreams 2011

In this collaboration with director Peter Reder, a map of Vancouver was created from hundreds of found objects and underscored by a soundscape composed from recorded oral testimonies, environmental and archival materials. Performed at Vancouver’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival.

Counter Mapping 2011

This contemporary interdisciplinary exhibition brought together the work of 17 professional artists around the theme of counter mapping the city of Vancouver. Working across disciplines, artists deployed a range of tactics in their rewriting of the urban, utilizing mapping and surveillance technologies to constructive disruptive and creative cartographies. Counter Mapping premiered at the 2011 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, and selected works toured to the University of Glasgow for an international conference, Excursions. Funded by City of Vancouver and British Columbia Arts Council.

A Storied Sea 2009

This geo-audio-literary work was created for Vancouver’s Western Front as part of Intersections—a new music series that brought together writers and composers together to create site-specific commentaries informing particular geographic spaces in Vancouver. Created in partnership with Vancouver composer James Maxwell, the piece spliced environmental sounds and composed music for trombones with the recorded testimonies of my grandfather, whose family squatted on the Vancouver waterfront in the 1920s.

Arts, Health and Seniors 2008-10

Funded by the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, and bringing together a collaboration between UBC's Faculty of Nursing and the City of Vancouver, Arts, Health and Seniors looked to demonstrate how involvement in the arts can improve the health and well being of seniors experiencing physical, social, and sexual orientation barriers. Engaging 80 seniors in four different community centres over a three-year period, the project built new expertise between health workers, artists and funders in the area of chronic disease management. I spent two years working as project manager, researcher and one of eight site artists in AHS. Funded by Vancouver Coastal Health and City of Vancouver. 

Practicing Democracy 2004-06

Created by Vancouver's Headlines Theatre for Living, Practicing Democracy was North America’s first deployment of August Boal’s model of Legislative Forum Theatre. Devised in collaboration with city planners and elected municipal councillors, the objective of this project was to use forum theatre to generate community-based law on issues related to homelessness in the City of Vancouver. We researched the project as a substantial effort to use a particular model of political theatre to generate creative solutions to what is now a familiar aspect of neo-liberal economic policy, namely, cuts to social services and welfare provision. Funded by Canada Council for the Arts, British Columbia Arts, and City of Vancouver.

 






Teaching

Completed PhD Students

Daniel Jones (2025) Geographies of Impulse: Tourette Syndrome and the Embodied Experience(s) of Public Space. +3.5 ESRC NINE-DTP. Currently working as post-doctoral research associate at the University of Sheffield.

Alex Hoyos-Twomey (2025) Viva Loisaida: Art and Contested Space in the Nuyorican Lower East Side, 1978-1988. +3 Northern Bridge DTP.

Melisa Maida (2024) Negotiating Belonging: The Transnational and Local Experiences of Refugee and Asylum-seeking Families in Tyneside. Funded by +3.5 ESRC NINE-DTP scholarship. Currently working as a post-doctoral research associate at Northumbria University.

Christos Galavis (2024) A Mountain Threnody: Hillwalking and Homecoming in the Scottish Highlands. Funded by Principle’s Scholarship.

Nico Stefanovics (2016) The Making of a New Downtown: Urban Place-Making in HafenCity, Hamburg, Germany.

Current PhD Students

You Zhou (2023) ‘Drifting in Africa': A Practice-led Feature Documentary Film about Chinese Workers in Ethiopia

Current Undergraduate Teaching

GEO2232 City of Crisis, City of Hope: Amsterdam (ML) 

GEO3150 Migration, Bordering and Solidarities (ML)

GEO3099 Dissertation

Current Post Graduate Teaching

GEO8010 Creative Methods in the Social Sciences (ML)

GEO8031 Migration, Displacement and Global Challenges

Publications