The successful applicant will be a member of the Human Geography Research Group (HGRG) within GES and will be encouraged to collaborate with colleagues in the Earth Systems Research Group (ESRG). The HGRG has 13 and ESRG 24 core academic staff working closely alongside postdoctoral researchers, postgraduate research and postgraduate taught students. The HGRG’s research is organised into three themes and the successful applicant will complement and advance at least one of them.

Spatial Politics and Practices: This theme unpacks the dynamic relations between space and politics in both the global North and South, in the past and in the present. This work is informed by a range of approaches, including postcolonial theory, critical theory, subaltern studies, feminist thought, histories from below, and post-foundational work on the political. We are committed to approaches that foreground diverse forms of political imaginations and agencies and the opening of subaltern spaces of and for politics.

Creative Geohumanities: Drawing on geography’s humanities tradition, and generating new trans-disciplinary research agendas, this theme is grounded in archival inquiry, experimental and creative in conduct, and engages with diverse communities and audiences. A wide range of modes and methodologies for practice-led inquiry are employed, including site-specific studies, therapeutic interventions, place-making, audio-drifts, film-making, visual art, broadcasting, object-handling, storytelling and story-mapping. At scales ranging from the personal to the planetary, our research investigates how worlds are differently made, imagined, transformed, degraded or destroyed.

Stressed Environments and Communities: This theme examines how environments and communities become stressed, and with what emotional, ecological and earthly consequences. Stress is a common term in ecosystem and human health, referring to physical or mental pressure, strain or tension exerted upon an individual or environment, encompassing a range of climatic, geochemical, biological, economic and social stressors. We are concerned not only with contemporary threats posed to skies and seas, infrastructures and architectures, land and life, but with how a shared burden of responsibility can produce socio-spatial conditions for coping, caring and campaigning.