Apologies for cross-posting
We're advertising three PhD studentships in human geography in the Dept of Geography at Northumbria University. Please consider forwarding to interested parties. The deadline for applications is 7th April.
Thanks
Local Authority Use of Visualisation for Analysis and Communication
Supervisors: Dr Jon Swords, Dr Helen King, Prof Peter Taylor
We’re living in an increasingly data driven age. Data is crowd sourced, ‘big’, user generated, and open. It is changing the way decisions are made across the private and public sectors, and creating a political economy of data. At the same time public bodies are under pressure to be transparent in their decision making and to make their data public. In the UK this is happening in the context of austerity spending which has seen council budgets greatly reduced. These trends present new challenges to local authorities: how should they use data in their operational and strategic planning? In what form should data be made available? Whose data should they use? What skills do local authorities require to get the most from data? The aim of this PhD is to evaluate the role of visualisation techniques in meeting these challenges. Visualisations are produced for analysis and to communicate information that attempts to persuade, seduce and coerce audiences to their way of thinking. This PhD will engage with recent developments in visualities, economic, political and critical geography to unpick the power relations of depicting information within a political economy of data. This will be done through a mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology, including case studies of local authorities in the UK.
More details: http://www.findaphd.com/search/ProjectDetails.aspx?PJID=53600&LID=2316
The Emotional Geographies of Protest and Activism in Contemporary Ukraine
Supervisors: Dr Kathryn Cassidy, Dr Maureen Fordham and Dr Kye Askins
In 2013, a new wave of protest swept Ukraine in opposition to President Yanukovych’s refusal to sign an association agreement with the European Union. 10 years after the Orange Revolution, Kyiv’s Independence Square once more became the focus of protests relating to the future political direction of the country and increasing incursions on civil liberties. Despite years of disillusionment linked to failings of the Orange Revolution, supporters of co-operation with the EU, civil/human rights protestors and political opposition sought change through protest. Recent years have seen increasing interest in activism, protest and revolution in academia and geography, in particular. Linked to global events such as the Occupy movement and Arab Spring, research has focused on the political and social geographies of protest and occupation. The ‘emotional turn’ within human geography has also contributed to this burgeoning literature especially in theorising emotional engagements with activism. This research will further conceptual and empirical work in these fields, exploring the emotional labour of sustaining both activism and mass mobilisation of people in/to spaces where protest involves the threat of violence and will focus particularly on a feminist approach, which elucidates the role of gender. It will examine the emotional geographies of protest in Ukraine from 2004 to the present day, generating in-depth, qualitative data gathered through participant and non-participant observation, and semi-structured interviews with a variety of participants across both the current wave of protests and the Orange Revolution, during 12 months of dual-sited ethnographic fieldwork in the Ukrainian cities of L’viv and Kyiv.
More details: http://www.findaphd.com/search/ProjectDetails.aspx?PJID=53630&LID=2316
Destination UK? The evolving transnational geographies of migrants from acceded EU nations
Supervisors: Dr John Clayton and Dr Kye Askins
The continued territorial growth and spatial reach of the European Union and resultant ‘freedoms’ of movement and labour has led to considerable academic attention, public debate and in many cases, media-led panic. Nowhere is this more the case than in the UK, a nation with a unique, peripheral and fractious relationship with the idea and practice of Europe. In an attempt to further understand the dynamics of migration, identity and belonging from the perspectives of migrants themselves in a period of demographic change and economic austerity, this project will explore the varied experiences of migrants from newly acceded nations to the European Union to the UK and beyond. With a focus on experiences and expressions of belonging, attachment and transnationalism, the project will explore motivations and factors influencing initial and continued mobility between, within and beyond the UK. The research will consider the everyday biographies and future intentions of migrants in relation to settlement and movement to understand their migratory identities and evolving relationship to ideas of settlement, belonging, home, work and leisure in an expanded Europe. The research methodology will be based on a multi-site, transnational approach that will locate and maintain contact with migrants as they settle and/or move between places within and beyond their country of origin and the UK. Consideration will be given to both embodied mobility, but also the significance of networks of in/dependence, reliance and support and the manner in which these may vary and change over time for specific groups of migrants.
More details: http://www.findaphd.com/search/ProjectDetails.aspx?PJID=53632&LID=2316
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