Staff Profile
Olivia Mason
Research Associate
- Email: olivia.mason2@ncl.ac.uk
- Address: School of Geography Politics and Sociology
Henry Daysh Building
Newcastle University
Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK
NE1 7RU
I am currently a Research Associate in Geography at Newcastle University and PI of an ESRC New Investigator Grant entitled 'A cultural politics of nature reserves'. Prior to this I was employed as a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Glasgow, as an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Geography at Newcastle University, and as a Lecturer in Political Geography also at Newcastle. I have a PhD in Human Geography from Durham University, a BA in Human Geography from Newcastle University, and a MRes in Geography from Glasgow University. I have eight years of teaching experience in higher education and I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
My research sits at the interface of cultural, environmental, and political geography, and explores mobility politics and resource colonialism with a focus in the Middle East and North Africa.
My current research covers three main areas.
1. Cultural politics of nature reserves in Jordan
This research is currently funded by an ESRC New Investigator Grant for a 2 year project entitled 'A cultural politics of nature reserves: resource tensions, state-formation, and Bedouin in Jordan'. This project focuses on three nature reserves/protected areas in Jordan to understand the relationships between postcolonial nationalism, resource scarcity, and community environment engagements. A combination of archival work and participatory methods with local communities in these areas, including a participatory film, will enable this project to provide a historical and contemporary understanding of resource scarcity and environmentalism in Jordan. Work connected to this project on human-animal encounters has been published in GeoHumanities.
2. Mobility politics
My interest in mobility politics spans across several but connected aspects of my work. First, how mobile methods can re-narrate terms central to political geography such as borders and territory beyond state centric understandings. Second, how are mobile practices such as walking shaped by situated politics and how can we move beyond Eurocentric accounts of mobility in Geography. Third, how are infrastructures of movement a means to understand contested and connected colonial mobilities and politics. These interests have resulted in published papers in Political Geography and Cultural Geography.
3. The politics of knowledge production in higher education
My research is also interested in how the increasing neoliberalism of academia is shaping the politics of who can produce knowledge and how that knowledge is produced. This work has resulted in co-written publications addressing the impact of casualisation and precarity on early career researchers and how neoliberalism is shaping the experiences of what it means to be a geographer.
I have over 8 years undergraduate and postgraduate teaching experience across a variety of topics and subjects including political geography, political ecology and the environment, the Middle East, research methods, cultural politics, and biopolitics. I take a research-based approach in my teaching by introducing students to real-world issues to offer a clear, practical, and applied route into theoretical discussions.
Modules I have taught at Newcastle University and the University of Glasgow include:
Undergraduate
Geographical Skills (Newcastle): Seminar leader (1st year)
Interconnected World (Newcastle): Lecturer and seminar leader (1st year)
Contemporary Human Geography of the UK (Newcastle): Lecturer (1st year)
Geographical Analysis (Newcastle): Seminar leader (1st year)
Doing Human Geography Research (Newcastle): Seminar leader (1st year)
Political Geography (Newcastle): Module leader and lecturer (2nd year)
Geopolitics (Newcastle): Module leader and lecturer (final year)
Geography 1 (Glasgow): Lecturer (1st year)
Population Geography (Glasgow): Module leader (honours level)
Research skills (Glasgow): Lecturer (honours level)
Conceptualising Human Geography (Glasgow): Seminar leader (honours level)
Geographical Thought (Glasgow): Seminar leader (honours level)
Personal tutor (Newcastle).
Undergraduate dissertation supervisor (Glasgow and Newcastle).
Postgraduate
Earth Futures MSc (Glasgow): Lecturer and dissertation supervisor
Human Geography Research MA (Newcastle): Lecturer
Undergraduate Fieldtrips
Fieldwork at Home (Newcastle): Module leader (2nd year)
Exploring Everyday Political Geographies in a Divided City: Nicosia (Newcastle): Co-module leader and lecturer (2nd year)
Inverness Fieldtrip (Glasgow): Co-module leader (2nd year)
-
Articles
- Mason O. The geographies of colonial infrastructures: Mobility, im/materiality, and politics on walking trails in the Middle East. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 2023.
- Marr N, Lantto M, Larsen M, Judith K, Brice S, Phoenix J, Oliver C, Mason O, Thomas S. Sharing the Field: Reflections of More-Than-Human Field/work Encounters. GeoHumanities 2022, (ePub ahead of Print).
- Mason O, Megoran N. Geography as a vocation? Becoming a geographer under neoliberalism. Geografiska Annaler. Series B. Human Geography 2022, Epub ahead of print.
- Mason O, Megoran N. Precarity and dehumanisation in higher education. Learning and Teaching: The International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences 2021, 14(1), 35-59.
- Mason O. A political geography of walking in Jordan: movement and politics. Political Geography 2021, 88, 102392.
- Mason O. Walking the line: lines, embodiment and movement on the Jordan Trail. Cultural Geographies 2020, 27(3), 395-414.
- Patterson C, Emslie C, Mason O, Fergie G, Hilton S. Content analysis of UK newspaper and online news representations of women's and men's ‘binge’ drinking: a challenge for communicating evidence-based messages about single-episodic drinking?. BMJ Open 2016, 6, e013124.
-
Book Chapter
- Mason O. Moving across the field: researcher mobilities and immobilities during international fieldwork. In: Ajebon, M;Diego, A;Kwong, C, ed. Navigating the Field. Springer, 2021, pp.13–24.
-
Online Publication
- Ahearn A, Mason O. Development and Environmental Futures: Reflections from Dana. 2023.
-
Review
- Mason O. Book Reviews / Comptes rendus. The Arab World Geographer 2015, 18(4), 315-318.