Remembering a loyal Malawian colleague and contemplating the challenges of mortality for collaborative research in Africa

By Elsbeth Robson

This blog is prompted by the tragic death of my valued colleague and collaborator at the Centre for Social Research of the University of Malawi – James Milner. On 2nd September 2014 James was involved in a road accident while conducting fieldwork in the north of Malawi. He was hospitalised and later died in Mwaiwathu Private Hospital, Blantyre on 7th September 2014. The James I knew and miss was committed to his work, his family and his church.

James’s sudden death is a huge shock and loss to his family, friends and colleagues around the world. He worked as an economist for the Government of Malawi for five years and 19 years as a research fellow at the Centre for Social Research, University of Malawi. He studied as a postgraduate at Williams College in the USA and York University in the UK.

I worked with James on an ESRC-DFID funded project investigating young people’s use of mobile phones in Africa (available here). He joined the project team in 2012 and quickly became a valued colleague for his dedication, loyalty, dependability and thoroughness. We last undertook fieldwork together in January earlier this year when we spent several weeks running a large questionnaire survey with a team of research assistants. It was demanding work involving long days in remote communities, rough roads, heat, occasional malaria and even reluctant respondents at times. Our evenings were spent closely quality checking piles of completed questionnaires and closely monitoring research assistants’ performance. James’ contribution was vital to ensuring everything went smoothly.

During fieldwork we usually travelled as a team together with a driver and several research assistants in a Toyota Landcruiser and as I always do I regularly reminded everyone to wear a seat belt and encouraged those reluctant to use the seatbelts because they were dusty, difficult to adjust and uncomfortable that it is better to ‘Arrive Alive’. I am a passionate believer in the virtue of seatbelts having been personally in two vehicle accidents (overturned minibus on US fieldtrip; collision in Germany) where seatbelts saved lives and because I might have been orphaned as a child had my mother not been wearing a seatbelt in an accident at high speed on a UK dual carriageway. It is painful for me to know that last month James was not wearing a seatbelt and was flung from the vehicle sustaining injuries, while the front passenger (a visiting researcher from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine) and the University of Malawi driver who were wearing seatbelts escaped relatively unscathed.

I took this photo in July 2013 during the qualitative fieldwork phase of the mobile phone project. James (wearing glasses, 3^rd from left) is standing together with our hardworking team of research assistants during a break from transcription of interviews at the College of Medicine Guesthouse in Blantyre, Malawi.

While mourning the loss of a colleague James’ untimely death prompts wider reflections on the unevenness of the playing field between academics in/of the Global North and those in/of the Global South. It is a stark reality that life expectancy in the Global North (UK average life expectancy is over 80 years) far exceeds life expectancy in the Global South (like expectancy for Malawi is about 55 years). This bare demographic fact has major implications for trying to build and sustain long term North-South academic research collaborations.

It is more than poignant that on the weekend of his death James was expected to be travelling to the UK to present at a DFID-ESRC event in London with a collaborator from Durham University.  Sadly, during the past three decades of my career James is not the first academic collaborator I have worked with in Africa who has died before old age. An academic geographer at University of Malawi, as well as two team members (one a young researcher) in Ghana at University of Cape Coast all died during or shortly after we worked together on collaborative international research projects. None of these died in road accidents I believe but HIV/AIDS is one of the top causes of adult deaths for both Malawi and Ghana along with stroke and heart disease which also kill plenty of people in UK too. I can recall only one colleague in UK I might have collaborated with if he hadn’t died of cancer in his 50s. Other UK colleagues continue to be academically active into their 70s and 80s.

Where the death toll from road accidents in Africa are concerned expatriates are also not immune. I knew two British geographers and long term Africa residents who died tragically in car accidents in Kenya and South Africa. Their contributions to research and teaching which might otherwise have been expected to continue for several decades longer were curtailed.

Mortality on Africa’s roads is shockingly high - Malawi has the 3^rd highest rate of deaths from road traffic accidents in the world (here) exacerbated by poorly maintained vehicles and dangerous driving habits.

Are my experiences of the tragic loss of colleagues typical for researchers who work in the Global South and try to build up long term collaborative relationships? I suspect these experiences are not unique and there are similar challenge for those who work in Africa and other poor countries. 

Summer 'fieldwork', archives and hidden histories

By Briony McDonagh (@BrionyMcDonagh)

Following on from Michelle’s recent post on her fieldwork in Malta, several of us have decided to blog about what we’re up to over the summer break from teaching, specifically our summer research and/or fieldwork. As a historical geographer and landscape historian, much of the fieldwork I’m engaged in is rather different in nature to that undertaken by my physical geography colleagues. It doesn't involve flooded rivers or exploding volcanoes, dark caves or slippery climbs up glaciers. It doesn't require a great deal in the way of equipment and doesn't involve long and detailed risk assessments (for which I count myself extremely lucky). Instead it all takes place in the UK, a good deal of it within two or three hours’ drive of my office here at Hull. Much of what I do relies on a combination of landscape history fieldwork, maps, aerial photographs and documentary records. For me, fieldwork often consists of carefully scrutinizing – and sometimes photographing, measuring, and generally poking around – the landscape for traces of the past in the present. Hedges, field patterns, green lanes, boundary stones, and old buildings can all tell us a great deal about the way past landscapes were organised, resources utilized and space experienced by those who lived and worked there (for more on this kind of approach to the landscape, readers might like to check out WG Hoskins’ classic The Making of the English Landscape).

Hoskins' classic The Making of the English Landscape (paperback edition)

Yet this summer my ‘fieldwork’ hasn’t for the most part taken place in the field at all. Along with some odds and ends of fieldwork for other projects (for example, on the Diggers – on which more another time), I’m spending the summer chasing up loose ends for the book I’m writing on aristocratic and gentle women’s contribution to estate management and improvement in the long eighteenth century. This project has involved some work in the field proper – for example, visiting country houses owned by women, tracking down their grave inscriptions and identifying building work designed or paid for by them – but also a great deal of archival work. I’ve been to county record offices and private collections all over the country looking for evidence of women’s contribution to estate management and improvement, making use of collections from places as far apart as Cornwall and County Durham. So, like my physical geography colleagues, I’ve certainly clocked up the miles on this project if only within the UK. Moreover, we can think of archive work as a kind of field experience (on which see Lorimer, 2010 and Keighren, 2013). For historical geographers and others, local and national archival repositories provide spaces for collecting data and testing theories, sites where outcomes are often unknown and unpredictable, and where one may have to dig through endless boxes or volumes before alighting on something fantastic or finding just what you hoped might be there. And while they may be neither muddy nor dangerous, public search rooms and archive back offices are frequently cold and uncomfortable places and the documents surprisingly filthy.

My latest foray has been to Surrey History Centre, a new-build (and warm) archival repository on the outskirts of Woking. In my book I’m writing a bit about a woman called Jane More Molyneux, who inherited the Loseley Park estate near Guildford after the deaths of her brother and sister in 1776 and 1777, respectively. Like many of the propertied women who feature in my book, Molyneux was a dedicated estate manager and committed bookkeeper. I spent a day reading the volumes of estate accounts and records kept by Molyneux as she tried to repay the debts run up by her spendthrift brother and save the estate from financial ruin. The house was in a terrible condition: the account books contained endless payments for ‘pans to catch the drips’ and the steward was instructed to look over the exterior of the house every day in order to check that there was no stonework likely to fall and injure someone! In the winter, snow had to be shovelled out of the attics so bad were the holes in the roof. Plus the whole place seems to have been overrun with vermin.

Yet Molyneux took on her task with great resolve, renting out the agricultural estate in an attempt to raise cash to repair the house, selling off outlying parts of the estate and economizing on her housekeeping costs wherever she could. Ultimately her efforts paid off and by the early 1790s both the house and the estate finances were in a much improved position. Molyneux then made the somewhat unusual decision to lease out what was left of the land in hand including the house and gardens and move to London. Though she spent the rest of her life in the capital, Molyneux had already done much to secure the financial well-being of future generations of her family. Amongst the numerous volumes of accounts, notes and memoranda she handed on to her heir – the illegitimate son of her profligate brother – was a book recording the repairs she had undertaken on the house and estate in the 15 years she lived on the estate. This she had inscribed as ‘for my own perusal and satisfaction’, a note which reminds us of the personal sense of achievement and pride that women might take in bookkeeping, and indeed in estate management more generally – a theme which my book explores in greater detail.

One of Molyneux's account books (above) and detail from it (below).

Original at the Surrey History Centre. Photo B. McDonagh.

So all in, this was a good day’s work in Woking. I wasn't plagued by any of the difficulties which sometimes beset archive work – documents ‘not fit for production’, missing items or indecipherable handwriting – and unlike many Georgian women, Jane More Molyneux left a substantial collection of material which can be used to reconstruct the details of her life and estate management. More than once I’ve spent fruitless days struggling to find the materials needed to unlock the ‘hidden histories’ of particular female landowners, but here at Surrey my ‘fieldwork’ was a success. I’m now working on writing up Molyneux’s role in estate management for the book, and thinking about how her experience relates to that of other propertied women in Georgian England. But to find out the answer to that, you’ll need to keep an eye out for later blog posts on the project here and elsewhere. Or perhaps even buy the book!

Further reading:

W. G. Hoskins (1955) The Making of the English Landscape (Hodder and Stoughton).

Innes M. Keighren (2013) Teaching historical geography in the field, Journal of Geography in Higher Education 37.4, 567-77.

Hayden Lorimer (2010) Caught in the nick of time: archives and fieldwork, in Dydia DeLyser, Steve Herbert, Stuart Aitken, Mike Crang and Linda McDowell, The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Geography (Sage), 248-73.

Searching for palaeoecological clues to the rise and fall of the Maltese Temple Culture

by Michelle Farrell (@DrM_Farrell)

Now, I've done my fair share of the type of fieldwork that Karen recently blogged about here. I've spent long, miserable days with my wellies full of cold, smelly bog water, being tormented by seemingly thousands of midges trapped on the inside of my midge veil. There were actually quite a few sunny days on many of my previous field trips, but in most of the places I worked sudden changes of weather frequently occur, meaning that waterproofs and fleeces could never be left behind. So when I was offered a job as a research fellow on the FRAGSUS project at Queen's University Belfast, I was very excited - not only was it a really interesting project based in a great department, I would get to do fieldwork in Malta. Sunshine! Warmth! No more lugging around a ridiculously heavy rucksack stuffed full of clothing to cover all eventualities of cold/wet/wind/sun/hail/snow/hurricane (perhaps I exaggerate a little).

 

Fieldwork of the cold, soggy variety in Orkney: cleaning a peat section prior to sampling, and coring at another site

FRAGSUS (Fragility and Sustainability in Restricted Island Environments: Adaptation, Culture Change and Collapse in Prehistory) is a multidisciplinary research project funded by the European Research Council. The project involves archaeologists, palaeoecologists, geoarchaeologists and numerous other specialists, and aims to explore the relationships between changing environments, natural resources and the rise of complex human social systems. We hope to be able to understand more about how and why people invested in the construction of substantial monuments, such as the UNESCO World Heritage status Maltese Temples, in what was presumably a relatively resource-poor, small island environment. It is also hoped that the project will provide insights into the processes, be they socio-economic, environmental, or a combination of factors, that ultimately led to the collapse of the Temple Culture at around 2500 BC.

The Neolithic temples of Ggantija and Mnajdra

My role, working with other palaeoenvironmental specialists, is to reconstruct the past vegetation of the islands via pollen analysis, and to search for evidence of past environmental change and human impact on the environment throughout prehistory. This will be a challenge - pollen is generally best preserved in acidic, wet environments such as peat bogs (hence the reason for all the wet, muddy fieldwork) - and being situated in the Mediterranean and composed almost entirely of limestone, Malta is very dry and alkaline. However, previous work has shown that pollen does survive in Maltese sediments and, more importantly, that the assemblages recovered can be interpretable. I will need to make some adjustments to the methods that I use to process the samples in order to maximise recovery of pollen from them, and I'll need to get used to identifying degraded grains that have not been preserved under optimum conditions. There are also a few new taxa to learn, so I'm looking forward to it!

Several sediment cores had already been recovered by my colleagues before I began work on the project, so my trip to Malta in June this year didn't involve any coring. I had two tasks while I was there. Firstly, I needed to collect samples from various archaeological contexts at the Neolithic settlement site of Tac-Cawla on Gozo, where the archaeological team have been excavating for the last four months. Archaeological pollen samples can often give insights into the ways in which structures were used, and into the range of economic activities that were carried out, so I'm looking forward to getting stuck into those when they arrive back in Belfast at the end of July.

The second aspect of my work in Malta involved collecting modern pollen assemblages in order to aid interpretation of the subfossil assemblages contained within the sediment cores. This was tricky for a number of reasons - firstly, where to sample?! Although it is thought that large areas of Malta were probably once covered with Mediterranean sclerophyllous forest, characterised by Holm Oak and Aleppo Pine, it is doubtful whether any of this remains. Agriculture accounts for 51% of the land area of the Maltese Islands, with urban areas making up a further 22%. The remaining area is made up of small patches of semi-natural vegetation such as maquis, garrigue, and steppe (see here for descriptions of these habitats). Despite the lack of woodland, I still needed to sample these other habitats as they presumably would also have been present in the past. Large enough patches were often difficult to locate, and were usually to be found in remote areas that had somehow escaped cultivation.

Garrigue vegetation with typical agricultural terraces in the background

The second problem to overcome was what to sample as the pollen trap. There are traps specifically designed for the purpose of sampling the modern pollen rain ('Tauber traps'; essentially plastic containers sunk into the ground so that the top is at ground level, with a hole in the lid to allow the pollen rain to be collected). Since there can be large variations in pollen production from year to year due to variations in seasonal temperature and precipitation, at least ten years' worth of data from these traps is required in order to provide an average, and I will only be working on this project for two years. To get around this problem, most researchers doing this type of work in northern Europe would sample a moss polster as these tend to preserve the last few years' worth of pollen rain, but unsurprisingly mosses are not particularly abundant in Malta! I had to sample the top few millimetres of soil (and even soil was hard to come by at some sites) - not ideal from a pollen preservation perspective, but pollen has been known to turn up in some surprising places, so fingers crossed that it will do in this case!

I soon discovered that my dreams of ditching the heavy rucksack were just that - in the intense heat of the Maltese summer, the amount of water that I had to carry with me more than accounted for the weight I'd got rid of by discarding all the cold and wet weather field gear! I had to adjust my fieldwork schedule to cope with the heat - normally I'd get out into the field relatively early, have a brief stop to eat a packed lunch, and then carry on until the work was finished and be 'home' for tea at a reasonably early hour. In Malta I'd be on my way by 7am and work until the heat became unbearable, then take myself and my helpers off for a long lunch and cold drinks in the shade somewhere (one of the advantages of working on small islands is that you're never far from a cafe!) before heading back out for a few hours in the late afternoon/evening. Luckily though, views like the one below and snacks of pastizzi (small pasties containing either cheese or peas, sadly not both together or the temptation to link to a certain Fast Show sketch would be too much) more than made up for any discomfort!

In spite of the challenges and adverse weather conditions, I generally consider fieldwork to be the best part of my job. It usually takes me about a week to recover from a trip and forget about all the problems, and now that I've been back in the lab/office for a couple of weeks, I often find myself wishing I was out in the field again. Unfortunately for me, a few weeks in the field can generate enough lab work and data analysis to keep me going for a year or more, so fieldwork isn't something I get to do an awful lot of! So for now, it's off to the lab to process all the samples I collected, then I'll be spending weeks at the microscope counting several thousand pollen grains...

Environmental Microbiology and Me!

Researcher profile: Karen Scott (@DrKarenScott)

As an environmental microbiologist with a biological background I didn't think I would end up working in a geography department. In fact thinking back to my childhood I never thought I would end up in academia, or geography come to that - to be honest my only memories of geography from my school days involved writing a news article on the Exxon Valdez oil spill and drawing a cross section of the Earth! Having always been fascinated by animals, I grew up wanting to work with them in some way or another (once my dad had burst my bubble about a career in bricklaying not being like an episode of ‘Auf Wiedersehen, Pet’!).

I got a place on a BSc Animal Behaviour and Science course at Bishop Burton College in the East Riding of Yorkshire, which I thoroughly enjoyed. However, I found studying animals less engaging than I expected and instead was drawn towards modules assessing the impact of the environment on them. Developing my skills in this environmental sector made me re-evaluate the direction of my career.

Anaerobic workout in the lab

Once I’d completed my degree I got a job working in a microbiology laboratory testing a wide variety of samples ranging from fresh food to environmental water samples. It was a demanding job with long hours but it had its perks, such as free turkeys for the family at Christmas! After a year of working there I’d managed to save up enough money to cover the fees for a Masters degree. I joined the University of Hull Biological Sciences Department and spent a year assessing the effect of contaminated water on shore crab behaviour.

Thoroughly enjoying my year researching and writing I decided the research route was for me, and that’s when I started looking for PhDs. I picked up another microbiology role, similar to the previous one, while I hunted for a PhD and after a few months of looking I found one back at Hull based in Geography. The project investigated the ability of organic matter to decompose within the drainage system in the City of Hull, in particular studying the microbial community, and assessing if it could be increased in some way (outlined in my earlier blog post). Although the project was out of my area, it was cross disciplinary with biology so with a bit of extra background reading before starting, I was able to hit the ground running.

Nice day for fieldwork at Winscar 

After I completed my PhD, I commenced a six month research position in the department where I was split between two environmental projects. I'm now based in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds for the next 13 months working in moorland management and hydrology. The project enables me to expand my skill set within the environmental area, while allowing me the opportunity to get my teeth into some research within the department, which remains a great passion of mine. While I'm not sure if after this project’s completion I will take my career into industry or remain within the academic sector, I am excited by the opportunities for both that come my way.

How I Got To Be An Academic

by Jane Bunting (@DrMJBunting)

Time for my 'researcher profile', and particularly timely as Jacqueline Gill over at the wonderfully named "Contemplative Mammoth" blog has just announced a call for a blog carnival of posts about people's post-PhD-training careers, whether in academe or elsewhere.  I WILL begin my story with my training, but as I defended my PhD in 1993, it will cover 20 post-training years as well.  I'll try not to go on too long...

I'm currently a senior lecturer in the Department of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences at the University of Hull.  I'm a palaeoecologist (I study long term ecological systems using the remains of plants and animals preserved in stratigraphic order in lakes and bogs as my 'time machine' to look back and see how things have changed), using mainly pollen analysis, with a particular research interest in the uncertainties and limitations of our methods.  I teach biogeography, environmental change, Quaternary Science and 'skills' type modules, mostly, with a bit of environmental archaeology or landscape history some years.  Being an academic suits me because I like both teaching and research about equally (unless I'm asked the question in Marking Marathon Week).

Pond behind my childhood home (outlined in blue) - googlemaps

As a kid, I liked to know how things work - but not in a taking-apart-and-rebuilding-gadgets way, more in a systems and connections way.  Although I was raised in a really rather dull suburb of Manchester, our identikit suburban semi had an old field pond at the bottom of the garden (one of a series along a recharge zone in the clays in the area).  My parents had thoughtfully made a hedge between the tidier garden and the pond, which gave us kids privacy, and it was our own little bit of wilderness (more mine because my sister was scared of frogs and more averse to getting muddy).  I fell in it (quite a lot), fished creatures and plants out of it and identified them with the aid of a variety of books, made dens of various kinds, dug clay out of the banks and made pots, spent months of summers reading under the willow tree, collected and pressed the wild flowers... muck can be magic! I was also an obsessive reader of anything, history enthusiast, talked a lot, and played 'school' endlessly - I didn't like school, exactly, and liked it less the older I got, but I liked being the teacher and explaining stuff.

 Well into my teens, what I wanted to be when I grew up varied between an explorer, an English eccentric or a part-time hermit (I wanted two social afternoons a week, and a cabin in the hills the rest of the time.  I had it all worked out!).

I dropped Biology as soon as I could at school (didn't like the teacher, didn't want to dissect an eyeball which was the highlight of the next year's syllabus), but did get an O-level in Geography (one of the teachers was gorgeous - oh, the things that shape students' choices at 14!).  I wanted to take History, Latin and Double Maths at A-level, but when that couldn't be accommodated rather grumpily took the more conventional Double Maths, Physics and Chemistry, and realising that I wasn't good enough at maths to be a mathematician (I got A's, but there was a lad in the class who was just So Much Better than me...) applied to university to do natural sciences with a physics focus (my back-up choices were physics courses).  I messed up my first interview at Cambridge royally, was 'pooled' to Newnham College which kindly took me on, and went up in 1987 to study Natural Sciences.  Oh, the joy of a 24/7 library in the building I slept in!  But Physics quickly became my least favourite part of the course, as the theory went fine but the practicals did NOT - electronics and I are not good friends.  I soldered a lot of things together but rarely got anything to work.  I realised that the two topics in physics I most enjoyed in theory, sub-atomic and astronomy, required extensive electronics and optics, so came back for my second year not knowing what to do.  I took theoretical chemistry, history and philosophy of science and botany (chosen on the grounds that you didn't have to cut up animals or remember the names of biochemicals - despite my lack of school biology, the university sent me off with a summer reading list and let me switch), switched to the 'ecology' route in the second term which happened to include one lecture from Professor Richard West on the Quaternary History of the British Flora and that was it - I'd found my academic field.  I spent my final year in the Botany department, did dissertations on a historical topic (my first paper!) and on a pollen record from Star Carr in Yorkshire, got my first and got a NERC 'Framework' PhD studentship to continue in the department working with Dr (now Professor) Keith Bennett (sounds so tidy - hides a LOT of stress, panic, sweat etc. etc.).

Ring of Brodgar, Orkney - pic from Orkneyjar.

The topic we came up with was the Vegetation History of Orkney, and I spent three mostly happy years visiting one of the most beautiful and addictive places in Britain, reading masses of archaeological and historical literature alongside the palaeoecological stuff, counting challenging pollen samples and learning a huge amount about Geography and Environmental Change (by auditing classes, reading, listening, arguing, going to seminars, volunteering on other people's fieldwork...).  Keith gave me some very good advice on day one: "the chances of you getting an academic job are not zero, but at this point they aren't statistically distinct from zero.  If you get to the end of your PhD, can't get or don't want an academic job, and are starting out in a graduate career three years after your friends, will you regret the time lost?  If so, you should think very seriously about carrying on."  I never expected to be able to carry on after my PhD - I had vague ideas about teaching or accountancy (with a view to working for an environmental charity or the like, since they'd all need to have their books kept) - so I made the most of my chance to do nothing but learn (and row and sing, hobbies are important, but the learning was the point of it all).  At the end of my second year, Keith suggested it might be worth me applying for funding to do a year or two of post-doctoral work.  I liked the idea of spending some time overseas and being a typical near-monoglot Brit wanted to go somewhere English-speaking so contacted a few people in Sweden and Canada.  I put in a few (maybe 4?) applications for funding, then got on with my PhD, thinking of them more as a lottery ticket than a career plan.

picture borrowed from tourist board web-site - can't find my photo folder!

 But much to my surprise, I got one - and became a NATO Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Wetlands Research Centre, University of Waterloo in Canada, with Professor Barry Warner for the next two years.  In short order, I learnt a lot about sub-zero winters, the importance of air-conditioning in humid summers, coffee shops, TimBits, black flies, bug jackets, the relative lack of slang in Canadian English and teaching in the North American system - oh, and wetlands.  I enjoyed the landscape ('fall' was as amazing as the tourist brochures promised), the people, the wildlife (a chipmunk raised babies just outside our office window, SO CUTE), I missed pubs, people who talked fast and crisps in single-serving packets, and got very frustrated by my project.  A lot of things went wrong and I actually spent about half my time working with surface samples rather than on lakes as planned... in the end that turned out to be a Good Thing, but at the time it was very stressful!

View from the city of Stirling towards the university - a lovely place to live

After two years of that, I came home with a few more papers on the way, spent a few months living at my parents (we all deserve medals for surviving that) and applying for everything that came my way, a six week stint in Sheffield doing some lab work, then got a six month contract at Stirling University on an environmental archaeology related project.  Relocating to Scotland and working on environmental archaeology was exactly what I wanted to do, but the scarcity of jobs was getting me down, even as I began to get some interviews.  Richard Tipping, my boss in Stirling, kindly helped me sort out an unpaid affiliation to the university after my contract ended which gave me a desk, library access etc., and passed little bits of contract work my way when he had them, but I got depressingly familiar with the whole process of signing on, proving you're looking for work every week, applying for housing benefit cycle.  Throughout 1996 and 1997, I applied for post-docs and academic jobs across the UK, and when my first contract in Stirling ended I also developed an exit plan and set myself a timetable for either getting another academic contract or stopping the academic jobhunt altogether.

And then, just like London buses, two jobs came along at once.  I took the one in Hull because it had the longer contract, despite not knowing anything about the place, and I've been here ever since.  Most days, I think that's a good thing!  Palaeoecology definitely lets - nay, encourages! - me to get muddy and to explore how the natural world works, I get to read archaeology and history books and have it count as work, and I get to teach as well.  You'll have to ask my students how I'm doing on the English Eccentric career path... but I don't despair of achieving that goal one day too.

Geographers' gadgets: notebooks

Sadly this image doesn't come on a notebook...

by Jane Bunting

This week is kind of quiet around the Department - the second years are away on their overseas field study weeks, along with just over half the academics, the first years have mostly gone home for a break (hopefully with plenty of reading to catch up on, since it is technically reading week for them) and the third years are working away on their dissertations.  Watching the different teams get their equipment together and listening to students (and colleagues) swapping the usual "my trip will be more work/more fun/sunnier than your trip" banter reminded me again of just how varied our subject is.  We study... well, pretty much anything that comes our way.  Geographers don't just study the world, we poke our noses into every corner of the world of study.  However, the field trips also point up things we have in common.  The students are going overseas to experience places on their own terms, to try to observe objectively what happens, to compare it with what happens in other places, and then to understand something of why and how it happens, whether "it" is a piece of public art, a type of agriculture or a distinctive rock formation.  Observation, then trying to understand what we see, then trying to explain that understanding to other people, lies at the heart of the business of being a geographer.

Stationery lust objects.  I WANT THEM ALL.

Asked to write a post at short notice, I decided to write about some of the tools I use as a GEESologist, then realised that just the list would take up most of the post!  So perhaps we can have a series, along with the "my story" series... we all have our favourite pieces of kit.  I get that "ooooooo, Jane waaannnnttttt" reaction some women get at the sight of Jimmy Choos to a really well-made collapsible quadrat, to almost anything in the latest Nikon microscopy catalogue or Van Walt field soil sampler catalogue... and to a really decent notebook.  Last week one of our colleagues arrived at the Departmental Meeting with a brand new Moleskine notebook - a rich red, A5 one.  At least half a dozen people watched with varying degrees of envy as he removed the plastic, snapped back the elastic, and smoothed open that first all-important page. One of the nice things about working as a GEES-ologist is being around other people who share some quirks with me!
 As a youngster, I had a bit of an obsession with stationery, and would regularly spend my pocket money on notebooks, pens, stickers and so on.  I especially liked notebooks, and often made my own by cutting scrap paper to size, sewing a binding, making and decorating the cover...  Actually that should be in the present tense: I like notebooks.  There are about twenty empty notebooks of various kinds stashed in a drawer in my house and another 30 or so around the office at work.  Notebooks are neat, and I like to know I'm not in danger of running out any time soon.  I'm clearly not alone: in searching for images for this post, I came across a blog devoted to notebooks - oh dear, another procrastination location for me!  

One essential supply item for the undergrad field trips is the issuing of the Field Notebook, a.k.a. Field Diary.  This emphasised to me that, like all scientists, our most basic toolkit consists of our ability to observe what is actually there in the world, and to record our immediate observations for later consideration.  I find myself frequently telling students that they need to have "something to write ON and something to write WITH" for classes, field trips, meetings etc. and the same is definitely true of the professional GEESologist, even if some are beginning to transfer these functions to a virtual electronic notebook.

A page from Lyell's 1840 field notes

a page from Darwin's field notebook

The notebook tradition is quite well established - the picture on the right is a page from Darwin's notebooks kept during the Voyage of the Beagle, and on the left a page from Lyell's 1840 notebook.  Clearly the tradition of quick sketches and crossings out has a decent history!  Darwin wrote:

'Let the collector's motto be, "Trust nothing to the memory;" for the memory becomes a fickle guardian when one interesting object is succeeded by another still more interesting.'

Technology, I'm pleased to say, HAS moved on a little - the mechanical pencil (removing the need for carrying a pencil sharpener in the field), the gel or cartridge pen  (ink without the bottle!) and best of all the waterproof notebook all make it easier to take notes under field conditions - but observation, and the recording of observation, is still and always will be at the heart of the GEES-ologist's toolkit.

Fieldwork - slippery when wet

By Dr Karen Scott (@DrKarenScott)

Whenever fieldwork is mentioned the first thing that comes to my mind is long summer days walking in t-shirts by lakes or across fields (or Hull council estates as most of my PhD sampling days were spent), maybe even in an exotic location or an overseas field trip. However, it’s no secret this is not always the case, especially in this field where outdoor working is a necessity whatever the weather (much to my parents surprise who thought as soon as the temperature dropped below t-shirt weather, it became slightly chilly or the forecast suggests a bit of drizzle, it would be home time).

In fact I sit writing this having spent 6 hours trudging across the Yorkshire Moors in freezing rain that came at you sideways (no matter what direction you faced) and eating my soggy sarnies sheltering in a gully trying not to fall into a patch of boggy bare peat. And it’s with the recent weather hitting the news, I thought I’d blog about the effects of weather on fieldwork, or more so, how its put up with (I will try to avoid moaning where possible!).

 These pictures were taken within 24 hours of each other

Starting my new job in September (working on a project assessing moorland management on water quality at the University of Leeds, meaning 3-4 field days a week) I was greeted with relatively warm long days with beautiful views across the moors - which I wasn’t shy in sharing, after all it beats the office wall! But this soon changed as winter reared its head. The thing I found most interesting during field work as winter started to set in was how everything changed so quickly and how I had to change how things were done. The lack of daylight was the main issue - having to set off early to squeeze as much daylight into your working day as possible, which is something you don't normally have to think about when you are heading into the office every day. Relatively dry areas of land turned into huge boggy patches that would swallow your wellies before you had a chance to work out which piece of heather you could reach to drag yourself out. You never really find out what kind of land you are safe to walk on / avoid until you’re shin deep in it – I find frosty/snowy days the worst, as there will always be that one bog that has thawed a bit more than the others you have walked across! A lot of the vegetation dies off, which in theory isn’t a bad thing when walking along the flat, but when steep banks become involved that’s when it is time to be cautious as they become quite slippery. I generally approach these with a foot slide or a bum slide, because let’s face it, I’m probably not going to be spending much time on my feet! 

Bleak view for four hours

Chilly day in the field wearing approximately 12 layers!

Due to the change in weather my bag seems to have doubled in weight. This is mainly due to extra batteries for the equipment (they aren't as keen on the weather either), extra clothes (in case I fall in a stream and need a spare pair or it gets too cold and I have to bulk up), a flask containing luke warm tea, extra food (obviously for the cold, and not to cheer me up on bleak days) and extra water samples (with the weather being wetter the streams run more, so I need to collect more to carry home). Gauging the weather forecast in remote areas is always a difficult one. Finding the nearest town to your site seems like a good idea at first, and can be quite uplifting when you are driving to your site, it might looks a bit misty and chilly but generally a decent field day. Until you got up to the tops, turn that corner, and are greeted with snow / blizzards / hail / bears (got to be prepared!). And to finish on my favourite: the waterproofs... They never seem to be 100% dry and after going over a few stone walls they always seem to leak in the worst place.

As much as bad weather can put a damper on fieldwork (no pun intended) I still enjoy the variety it gives my job and the sunny days always outweigh the wet and the cold ones. Plus there are always others ways to brighten up the wet and windy days where it’s impossible to stand upright and even your waterproofs have given up, such as cake.

Perfect end to the day!

Overcoming Anglocentrism? Researching overseas

By Kirstie O'Neill (@KirstieJONeill)

What do we do as researchers?  I’m a post-doctoral research associate in the University of Hull’s Department of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences and I’m a social scientist.  This generally involves speaking to people as part of ‘doing’ research, although there are lots of research methods in social sciences which don’t involve directly speaking to people.  Here I’m writing about my experiences of ‘doing’ research outside of the UK, from a current project in Germany and some of my PhD research in Italy.  In particular, I’m thinking about how social scientists speak to people in other countries when they aren’t necessarily fluent in those languages.  

I never thought my A-level German would be of much use beyond school, but almost 18 years later I found myself refreshing my memory so that I could go to Germany to do a research project.  Part of that preparation involved a mountain biking holiday with my husband to the Black Forest where I found that I could remember more than ‘hello’ and could even hold a basic conversation, much to my surprise.

On returning from this, I swotted up so that I felt a bit more comfortable about living in Germany for almost a month to conduct interviews with green building businesses and policy makers in Germany, from Freiburg-im-Breisgau to Berlin, and Dresden to Cologne.  




Admittedly, many Germans speak impeccable English but I still had cause to use my German in navigating everyday life in Germany (in particular, buying cakes!).

My grant for this work in Germany (from the British Academy) included a small budget for translation in the field, but as has been written elsewhere, doing research through someone else’s ‘voice’ comes with its own issues.  In particular, social science research which involves in-depth and detailed conversations in other languages can potentially cause problems, from causing offence to asking the wrong questions or not getting the ‘right’ data.  Working with interpreters who are specialists in languages but who are not necessarily familiar with your area of work and related technical or specific terminology (in my case relating to green building in Germany and local food in Italy, see below) can be quite challenging, and trying to make sure you find out what you need to but being reliant on someone else’s interpretation of what you actually mean can be interesting!  In Italy in particular, the translator would have quite long bursts of conversation with the interviewees and then only feedback a sentence or two to me, like a Monty Python sketch – interviews can be such dynamic interactions that if you’re not following it all you risk missing vital opportunities to ask questions. 

Community apple festival, Abruzzo

As well as visiting Germany for research earlier this year, my PhD research involved fieldwork in a remote part of Italy, the Abruzzo region – stunningly beautiful but with very few English speaking people around.  I was lucky to have funding to take lessons in Italian and I love learning the language (I try to continue this post-PhD), but there is a difference between taking classes in the UK and trying to have detailed and specific conversations with specialists in their field.  Italy was quite different to Germany as only one interviewee wanted to speak in English – transcribing interviews in Italian and then translating to English was tough, but did really advance my language skills and vocabulary of Italian words.  In hindsight the extra few months I was allocated for this aspect of my PhD research wasn’t really enough since I started from scratch learning Italian! 

Certificate for local food producers
in the Majella National Park, Abruzzo

 This part of my PhD research was the bit which most worried me, and right from starting the PhD I was concerned about how I would set this up, whether people would respond to requests for interviews and whether I would be able to speak to them and understand them (quite apart from a month away from home without internet access and with patchy mobile phone coverage for a UK mobile).  It took quite a bit of setting up and a very early flight from Manchester airport, but the people I interviewed were incredible, and welcomed me openly – they were very interested in my research and were happy to tell me their experiences of local food systems in their part of Italy.  My PhD research was looking at local food systems and the contribution they can potentially make to rural development – quite different issues came up in Italy compared to my UK study area of East Yorkshire.  The photos below illustrate some of the differences in landscape and therefore the potential for different types of farming and food production. 

Bales in Yorkshire Wolds, East Yorkshire

View from agriturismo, Abruzzo

Oilseed rape field, East Yorkshire

Campo Imperatore, Abruzzo

    
How and why did I choose to visit these particular places?  With my PhD research in Italy it had already been decided that the Abruzzo region would be the case study region, based on a long standing relationship between the University of Hull and a group of local food producers running a cooperative called Parco Produce (Produce from the (National) Park).  The area also has a LEADER rural development programme (funded by the EU) like my case study region of East Yorkshire in the UK.  For Germany, this idea came out of research interviews with green building businesses in the UK who repeatedly stated how advanced Germany is in many areas of green building (interestingly, many Germans stated how advanced the UK is in terms of straw bale building!).  Germany is a pretty big country, so I started to research on the internet which areas would be good to visit - Freiburg was fairly obvious as it promotes itself as a leader in green building, but I also found interesting clusters around Cologne and the Rhineland more generally.  I also visited some of the national organisations based in Berlin and Stuttgart.  There was plenty more I could've done in Germany but I only had funding for three weeks in Germany which limited my possibilities...another time perhaps!

I was surprised when I went to Italy 4 years ago how different it was to where I was used to living – I stayed around the Sulmona area (think The American with George Clooney), which is mountainous with dispersed rural populations.  I was definitely recognisable as ‘not local’ but everyone was really friendly, and wanted to know where I was from and what I was doing.  Germany was a different experience as I mostly stayed in towns and cities which were, on the whole, more impersonal and apart from meeting up with interviewees and colleagues from German Universities I didn’t really get to meet ‘local’ German people.  I travelled to and from Germany without flying (bus, boat, train, tram etc.) and this was where I met more people.  ‘Doing’ research outside the UK is a great opportunity to complement knowledges and experiences of the places we’re used to with those we’re not used to – it’s definitely not a jolly but can be really good fun!  I’ve previously written a blog post about the German research (http://gees-talk.blogspot.com/2013/08/building-green-homes-what-does-this-mean.html) and there’s one in the pipeline on my PhD research too...

Vegetation survey in sunny Spain

by Michelle Farrell (@DrM_Farrell)

In my last blog post a few weeks ago, I gave a brief introduction to the science of palynology, or pollen analysis. Essentially, palynologists analyse the pollen grains preserved in ‘environmental archives’ such as peat bogs or lakes where sediments have accumulated in order to build up a picture of how the surrounding vegetation has changed over time. However, the interpretation of these pollen assemblages is far from straightforward, since pollen grains from different species vary in terms of size, shape and therefore dispersability, and there are also differences in the amount of pollen per unit plant produced by different species due to variation in plant reproductive strategies. For example, wind-pollinated plants need to produce much greater amounts of pollen than insect-pollinated species in order to increase their chances of reproductive success.

 

A key goal since the earliest days of palynology has been the quantitative reconstruction of past vegetation abundance from pollen assemblages. Models of pollen dispersal and deposition have now been developed, and estimation of Relative Pollen Productivity (RPP) is an essential for applying these models to reconstruction of vegetation from pollen records. Empirical estimates of RPP can be extracted from measurements of modern pollen assemblages and vegetation cover, and over the last 10-15 years considerable research effort has been invested in obtaining RPP estimates for key taxa. A recent review reported a wide range of RPP values for individual pollen taxa from different studies across Europe (Broström et al. 2008)‚ but since a standard methodology was not used to record vegetation cover it is not possible to determine whether these differences are due to variation in taxonomic groups (pollen grains can often only be identified to family or genus level, so in different regions a different assemblage of species may make up the palynological equivalent taxon Betula or Poaceae)‚ variations in environmental factors between study sites (e.g. climate‚ management)‚ or reflect the variations in methodology (Bunting and Hjelle 2010).

In May 2010, we held a workshop at the University of Hull which brought together several key researchers in the field of quantitative vegetation reconstruction from pollen records. At this workshop we came up with a standardised method of vegetation survey for obtaining RPP estimates. As part of the Crackles Bequest Project Jane Bunting and I, along with a team of European project partners, have applied this method to compare estimates of RPP within individual species across a wide climatic range and in different habitats. We’ll write more about the results of this project in future blog posts.

The majority of researchers who are interested in using models of pollen dispersal and deposition to quantitatively reconstruct past vegetation cover are based in north-west Europe, and as a result this is where most research activity to date has been focussed. The approach is now beginning to be adopted worldwide, and we are now collaborating with groups working in India, South Africa and South America to obtain estimates of RPP for common taxa in their regions. A little closer to home, research groups based in southern Europe are using the standardised vegetation survey protocol developed for the Crackles Bequest Project to taxa of interest for reconstructing Mediterranean environments. 

In June 2013 I was invited to join a team from the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology in Zaragoza, Spain on their fieldwork near the town of Teruel in the east of the country. Their research project is focused on the palaeolake at Villarquemado, from which they have recovered a 74m long sequence for pollen analysis. The group are now working towards estimating RPP for six key taxa in this sequence to enable them to quantitatively reconstruct the former vegetation in this area. I joined the group for a week to demonstrate the standardised vegetation survey methodology and to learn more about their research.

The palaeolake at Villarquemado, now mostly infilled and supporting fen-type vegetation

After a false start (I arrived at Leeds-Bradford airport on the day I was due to fly to Barcelona to find that all flights were cancelled due to a French air traffic control strike!), I eventually arrived in Zaragoza two days later than originally planned. I was met at the railway station in Zaragoza by my colleague’s husband, and we then drove for approximately two hours to the village that we would be staying in. Incidentally, if anyone is planning a holiday in this region you could do worse than to stay at the house we rented for the week – it was absolutely beautiful!

The following day we made an early start to avoid the worst of the heat (although I have to say that 30^oC was still a bit of a shock to my system, coming as I had straight from the miserable British summer that we had been having at that point!) and headed to one of the group's sampling locations. There are some differences between working in north-west Europe and in the Mediterranean region - for example in our fieldwork areas we normally collect a moss polster as our pollen 'trap', but since moss is pretty hard to come by in semi-arid Mediterranean environments 'Tauber traps' had to be used by the Spanish research group. These are essentially plastic containers sunk into the ground so that the top is at ground level, with a hole in the lid to allow the pollen rain to be collected. The team will return to empty the traps at the end of the flowering season to ensure that a full year of pollen rain is collected, so for now our task was to survey the surrounding vegetation.
 

The view from one of our sampling sites - very different to the lush green landscapes that I am used to working in in north-west Europe. Although I'm told that this is an unusually wet year and that everything is much more green than usual...

View from another sampling site, with the Tauber trap visible in the foreground

Once we had all got to grips with the intricacies of the survey method, the team worked incredibly efficiently, and we managed to survey all 12 sites in five days. We also had fantastic logistical support from the husbands of two members of the survey team, who arrived to meet us every lunch time with hampers full of goodies to fuel us through the afternoon! For me, there were huge benefits to joining my Spanish colleagues for a week – I got to know people that I had previously met only at conferences much better, I made new friends, I got to experience fieldwork in a totally different environment to that which I am used to working in, and I learned a lot about Mediterranean plants and environments. I’m really looking forward to seeing the results once Edu has processed all the pollen and vegetation data from this field season!