Guest blog by Dr Sally Eden.
To celebrate International Women’s Day, this week we
celebrate notable women who have worked in or contributed to the GEES
Department at Hull since its foundation. We are lucky that we have more women
than ever before on the teaching staff now, so each weekday this week, we will
highlight women’s achievements in GEES and remind ourselves how important women
are as staff and students in this Department and this University. We wish there
were more women we could pull into the limelight, but the process of putting
together this blog series emphasised to us the the rather masculine histories
of our Department and our University, histories that we need to continually
challenge, as well as actively encouraging and supporting those women who are
moving Geography and the University forward today.
To kick off our WOW: Week of Women in GEES, we start with Jacqueline Burgess. Jacquie began her academic career here in Hull,
first as an undergraduate and then as
a postgraduate student in the Department of Geography. She completed a PhD in
1975 entitled The meaning of place: a
study of geographical imagery with particular reference to Kingston upon Hull.
For her, Hull was not only the location of her studies, but also the subject of
them, as she began to shape the developing subdiscipline of cultural geography.
She then moved to the
Department of Geography at University College London in 1975, becoming their
first female Professor in 1998 – remarkable to realise that this ‘first’ occurred
only 17 years ago! In 2006, she moved to the School of Environmental Sciences
at UEA, becoming their Head of School.
A key figure in environmental
geography, Jacquie set the agenda for applying insights from cultural geography
to environmental perception and policy making, as well as critiquing economic
models of environmental valuation and behaviour change. She helped found the Landscape Research Group, which she chaired through
the 1990s, and championed qualitative methods, such as in-depth
discussion groups and developing deliberative, participatory environmental
decision-making processes, helping to make such methods widely accepted.
Jacquie’s research has
always been highly policy-relevant and she has contributed to the work of key
national organisations such as English Nature, Countryside Commission,
Countryside Agency, and the Environment Agency. In the early 2000s, she chaired
the Board of Global Action Plan, a national charity committed to helping
individuals and organisations develop more environmentally-sustainable
practices. She also led the assessment
of the ‘cultural services’ of nature by the UK National Ecosystem Assessment
Expert Panel (2008-10).
After retiring from academia in 2010, Jacquie joined
the Norfolk and Suffolk Broads Authority in 2012, becoming Vice-Chair in 2013
and continuing to shape the geography of that very culturally important
landscape.
InternationalWomen's Day (8 March) is a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future. International Women's Day celebrates women's success, and reminds of inequities still to be redressed. The origins of IWD can be traced to the struggle for women to gain the vote in European countries about a century ago. The first International Women's Day event was run in 1911
InternationalWomen's Day (8 March) is a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future. International Women's Day celebrates women's success, and reminds of inequities still to be redressed. The origins of IWD can be traced to the struggle for women to gain the vote in European countries about a century ago. The first International Women's Day event was run in 1911
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