Human and Social Geography
Environmental Governance and Social Justice
- Critical approaches to ecosystem services and valuation practices
- Contemporary environmental justice mobilisations
- Environmental governance in pastoral environments
- Food, Energy Water (security, justice sovereignty)
- Perceptions and Understandings of place
- Commodity processes and relations
- Quantitative, network analysis, and visual analytics approaches to “nature 2.0” analysis
- Use of Volunteered Geographic Information and Public Participation GIS methods in grassroots movements
- Spatial analysis
- Visualisation (2D & 3D)
- Mediascape
- Urban and Social Sustainability
- Critical Geographies of Architecture
- Urban policy/Housing policy
- Critical perspectives on ecosystem services, natural capital, and the financialisation of conservation
- Environmental governance at the global level through large international meetings (e.g. World Conservation Congress, Forest Stewardship Council, COP to the UNFCCC)
- The interface between conservation politics and new digital technologies, especially social media
- More-than-representational geographies of nature
- Carbonised countrysides and low carbon transitions
- Representations of past, present and future natures and rurality
Everyday Geopolitical Lives
- Super diversity, multiculture and policy making
- Multiculture, conviviality and belonging
- Work and gender
- The production of geopolitical knowledge about sexual orientation and gender identity
- Cultural and historical geographies of the international anti-apartheid movement (1960 – 1994) and similar international solidarity social movements
- Cultural and historical geographies of individuals and organisations associated with the far Left (anarchist, communist and socialist political movements)
- Everyday cosmopolitan consumption
- ‘Making’ places (e.g. streets, markets, etc.)
- ‘Alternative’ production and consumption practices
- Quantitative, network analysis, and visual analytics approaches to understanding online activism
- Development and application of Volunteered Geographic Information and Public Participation GIS approaches
- Framing a locative digital sensorium: Virtual reality, GIS and smell
- The nature of “everyday” spatial literacies
- New methods for critically visualizing the food-energy-water nexus
- Resistance to Gentrification
- Alternatives to Gentrification
- Scholar-Activism on cities
- Aspects of international student mobility, including work focusing on international education from a postcolonial perspective, student mobility within, to and from Africa, and work examining the relationship of social media to international study
- Creative geographies, particularly focusing on aesthetic intimacy, affective geopolitics and creative methods circulating to/from/within Africa
- Embodied and emotional geographies of health, focusing in particular on geographies of cancer, including intimate geopolitics of the body and everyday survival
- The practice of radical democracy activism in anonymous virtual spaces (e.g. the darknet)
- The casual racism of the "Internet Hate Machine"
- Political economies of illicit online marketplaces
- Symbolic and affective constructions of community
- Austerity and the restructuring of spaces of community
- Museum and heritage geographies
- Touristic geographies of stillness and the accelerated sublime
- Environmentality and environmental citizenship
- Ethnographies of environmental policymaking
- Ethnography and participatory research
- Everyday urban life, popular politics, activism and social movements, the state, political economy
- Europe, Latin America and the UK
GIScience Unit
- Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), social media and user-generated content
- Deep learning methods in GIScience
- Digital geographies
- Quantitative urban geography
- Geographic Information Retrieval
- Mobile and location-based services
- Information visualisation
- GIScience
- Storyboards
- The “twitterscape”
- GPS tracking
- Spatial literacy
- Sensory GIS
- Visualisation of networks
- Spatial analysis
- Visualisation (2D & 3D)
- Mediascape
- Surface characterisation and modelling of scale
- Spatial data uncertainty and error
- Pedagogic applications in GIS and data science
Planetary, Urban and Rural Transformations
Professor Loretta Lees
- Gentrification
- Urbanization
- Comparative urbanism
- Rural and urban gentrification
- Transformations in the rural working classes
- Changing cultural representations of the countryside
- Cultural and historical geographies of sexual minority (LGBTQ) lives in urban and/or rural areas around the world
- Contemporary (and historical) studies of protests in urban space and social movements that contest processes of urban change
- Emotional geographies of industrial ruin
- Memory, heritage and post-industrial landscapes
- Markets (at all scales and configurations), their materialisations and their challenges
- ‘Craft’/’Artisanal’ production and consumption
- Urban/rural connections and materialities (e.g. food, energy, water)
- Study of information inequalities: urban/rural divides in access, participation, and representation on the internet
- Geodemographic analysis
- Regional analysis of Open Data and Volunteer Geographic Information
- GIScience
- Storyboards
- The “twitterscape”