How I became an environmental economic geographer

By Julia Affolderbach

When asked professionally, I will say I am an economic geographer. Yet, this doesn’t feel right as I don’t specialize in the central topics of the discipline. Supply chains, international division of labour, clusters, innovations, and the quantitative analysis of these trends are not my domains. When attending economic geography conferences, I sometimes struggle to find sessions relevant to my work. This is why after stating that I am an economic geographer, I usually specify that I am interested in how the natural environment and environmental values impact and change economic development. Since childhood, I have identified as being an environmentalist. I grew up worrying about and criticising nuclear power plants, acid rain, deforestation in the Amazon, pollution levels in Germany’s river Rhine and other environmental problems driven by economic activity. This is why I would never have expected to go from environmentalist to anything related to economics.

When I started my studies in Germany at the University of Cologne in 1995, the only degree programs offered were combined undergraduate and postgraduate programs through which you would gain a degree comparable to a British MA or MSc degree. Although I enrolled in Geography, Geology and Botany, I also took courses in Zoology and Spanish. I enjoyed learning and was thirsty for diverse experiences. This exploration led me to an introductory economic geography course. I struggled to wrap my head around the concepts but I enjoyed it. Despite getting by far the lowest mark I ever received during my studies, I caught the attention of my economic geography professor who would later become my mentor, as I was one of only three students who passed the course.

Half way through my degree program, I won a scholarship to study at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver (Canada) for one year. During my two semesters there, I mapped and analysed geological landforms along the coast and within the Rocky Mountains and in Washington State in the US. I learned to identify 300 of British Columbia’s endemic plant species and their ecosystems, saw black bears, moose and the famous salmon runs. It was fantastic!

Upon my return to Cologne, I had to take one last course before I was able to move on to my dissertation – a two-week field school. The field schools on offer varied from year to year. I had originally signed up for a hiking trip through central Sweden but wasn’t able to attend due to my studies in Canada. Left with very few options, I signed up for an economic geography fieldtrip to the old-industrial district at the German-French-Luxembourg border. The economic geography professor who had supported my studies since the economic geography course was running the fieldtrip. During the trip my mentor convinced me that studying the environment was fine but that environmental issues could not be fully understood without considering the role of humans. He argued that I would never be fully satisfied focusing simply on geomorphology or plant ecology.

Following field school, my mentor introduced me to a colleague at Yale School of Forestry who was conducting a comparative case study on forest certification schemes. He was looking for a collaborator to conduct a survey on the German wood and paper industry – my MSc dissertation topic. While working on my dissertation, my mentor also introduced me to a Canadian visiting professor named Roger Hayter, who had a similar interest in environmental economic geography. At the time, environmental aspects were rarely taken into consideration within economic geography. Prof. Hayter asked me whether I would be interested in joining a research project on the restructuring of the forest industry and, as I had been considering doing a PhD, I accepted.

Logging operations at Arve Loop, Tasmania, Feb. 2006.

I finished my German degree, spent half a year in South America practicing my Spanish, passed my English language certificate at 4000m in elevation at the British consulate in La Paz, and then left for Vancouver to start a PhD on forest conflicts and the role of environmental activism in the restructuring of the forest industry in Canada and Australia. My PhD research led me to Tasmania where I spent three months in and around the native forests interviewing environmental activists, logging contractors, saw millers and other forest workers, tourism operators, politicians, policy makers, Indigenous representatives and many more to better understand the nature of the forest conflict.  

I have worked on a number of different research projects since, all focused in one way or another on environmental aspects linked to the economy. I have also broadened my interests to aspects of urban and social sustainability. For example, I spent two months in 2013 in Massachusetts studying environmental justice organisations and their campaigns to address environmental, social, and economic inequalities in urban settings. Currently, I am working on a project that explores the role of green building in urban strategies to reduce carbon emissions. The GreenRegio project (greenregio.uni.lu) includes not only technological aspects of green building but also policy, institutional and other changes based on case studies in Brisbane, Freiburg, Luxembourg, and Vancouver.

I am an environmental economic geographer.

How I Became a Music Geographer

by Dr Kevin Milburn (@kevmilburn)

Oxbow lakes. That’s the first thing people tend to say to me when I mention that I’m a geographer. Occasionally this is followed by ‘glacial moraine’, or, much rarer still, by ‘Christaller’ and ‘central business districts’. I then helpfully correct them by saying that I’m a music geographer, but invariably that just confuses matters further.

Me. Next to a river. 2013

So, I will try here to explain what it is that I tend to spend my days doing – an exercise likely to prove at least as beneficial to me as to anybody else. But before I do so, a quick detour, a circumlocutory ramble concerning how I reached this point. I was born in the town of… no, too far back, no one cares… Secondary school (onto education at least, vaguely relevant) was divided between Essex and Detroit, two places not well known for being linked, unless that is you had a family member working for the Ford Motor Company. Perhaps being schooled in a different culture gave me a lasting interest in notions of similarity and diversity, in what connects and divides us, core ideas that continue to generate considerable levels of discussion within human geography. More likely is that that is just psychoanalytical babble but it did perhaps stimulate an interest in American subject matter which continues to inform my teaching, as on the World Cities (New York) module, as well as my research (as detailed below).

New York, New York. 2006

Next up, came the ‘geography years’; three years studying the subject as an undergraduate at the University of Manchester. The courses offered back then were interesting up to a point, although truth be told, there was a slight sense that rather too many lecturers were counting down the days till their retirement, and I encountered a more dynamic research environment in the geography department at University College Dublin, where I spent an enjoyable term as a student on the EC’s Erasmus scheme. However, one member of staff at Manchester who certainly was not coasting along at that time was Gill Valentine.  Valentine, now a pro-vice chancellor at the University of Sheffield, was the academic who encouraged me, along with other students, such as John Wylie, now a highly regarded professor of geography at the University of Exeter, to engage with a relatively fresh approach / set of ideas / way of thinking — fresh at least in the 1990s — called ‘new cultural geography’.  Interest in this branch of the subject inspired me to do a dissertation with the badly punning title, ‘On the Road with Jack Kerouac and the New Cultural Geography’.

Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957. Penquin Books

A decent mark for the Kerouac dissertation prompted me to decide to stay in academia for a bit longer and I successfully applied to do a Masters in Media Culture, taught jointly by the Universities of Strathclyde and Glasgow. The start date of that wouldn’t be for another year however, so in the interim I spent a year working in, and travelling across, Canada (a summer dressed as a monk in a monastic themed restaurant called ‘Brothers’) and Australia (telemarketing to Outback truck drivers, a ‘character building’ experience, and fruit picking in the Bush. The latter was one of the worst jobs imaginable, especially bad were the days spent wrestling with oranges – who knew the trees were so prickly? – and grapes – the juice squirts, the flies descend. Not good).

Once safely ensconced in Glasgow, my longshore drift away from geography and towards popular culture began (years later, I cunningly began to devise various ruses to bring the two together).  On my Media Culture course students had the option of focusing either on TV and film or on popular music. I chose the latter; I'd always been a music nut and had spent a good deal more time than I should have as an undergraduate writing music reviews for Manchester's student paper.  Extended essays on topics of such pressing social concern as the semiotics of New Romantic fashion followed. The culmination of this period of wrapt self-absorption was my dissertation: The production, marketing and consumption of popular music as high art: a case-study of David Sylvian’. Somewhat miraculously, all of this training in becoming a pop pub bore actually led to me landing a job. I know, amazing right?!

David Sylvian, Brilliant Trees, 1984. Virgin Records

A couple of months after leaving Glasgow I was in the capital, doing marketing (still not a term I fully understand) on an event called London Music Week, an exhibition, conference and live music event co-sponsored by Music Week (the music industry’s trade magazine), Radio 1 and MTV. After this I joined the Mercury Music Prize, the annual prize and awards ceremony for the best album of the year from the UK and Ireland, http://www.mercuryprize.com/ Joining the Prize saw me reunited, sort of, with my Masters supervisor from Strathclyde, Simon Frith, who has been chair of the Mercury Prize judging panel since the prize started in 1992 and is widely acknowledged as the world’s foremost academic when it comes to popular music. I worked full-time at the prize for many years, most of them as a director; I stopped working full-time for it in 2008 but have continued my long association with it, to varying degrees, ever since. This year's shortlisted albums are announced a week today (10th September) in Covent Garden, whilst the decision on who will follow the likes of PJ Harvey, The xx, Alt-J and James Blake in becoming the overall winner of the Prize, will be made at the show at the Roundhouse, north London on 29th October.

Working for the Prize, and by extension, with the music and media industries was enjoyable and very rarely dull; my role included: getting the entries in; choosing and liaising with the judges; running retail campaigns in HMV, Fopp, Virgin and so on; writing press releases, website copy and also event scripts for hosts Jools Holland and Lauren Laverne; presenting to sponsors, hosting media announcements and doing lots of press and broadcast interviews. Here’s one that I did with BBC 6Music (with my name mis-spelt most of the way through!) that explains a bit more about how the prize works: http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/news/20080722_mercury.shtml and here's another with The Independent, one that was also syndicated to the Belfast Telegraph: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/entertainment/music/news/the-night-of-the-unknowns-the-mercury-music-prize-28062460.html  Quite a lot of my time at the Prize was spent talking about, and talking up, the shortlisted albums, such as here, in relation to Thom Yorke’s solo album, Eraser: http://www.bbc.co.uk/oxford/content/articles/2006/07/19/eraser.shtml

Mercury Prize Albums of the Year Launch, 2013 (t); A Mercury Prize / HMV retail display, 2009 (b) 

However, after a few years at the Mercury, and some might say rather inexplicably,
I began to miss academia. So I did what any sane person would do and started another Masters, this time in Japanese Cultural Studies. I undertook the degree on a part-time basis at Birkbeck, University of London whilst still working at the prize. Here I am talking about combining the two in an interview I did for The Guardian at that time:
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2006/oct/09/careers.theguardian8

My considerable interest in Japan was prompted by a few trips I made to the country in quick succession at the turn of the century. The degree was, as its name suggests, essentially Cultural Studies but with a Japanese emphasis. Debate and ideas encountered there, most notably surrounding issues of identity, representation, and Orientalism, have continued to inform my research and my teaching, most notably in Hull on the Imagining Place, Cultural and Historical Geography and World Cities (Tokyo) modules.  The course was wide ranging and I covered topics as diverse as Tokyo’s 1920s café culture and jazz age, Okinawan modes of cultural protest, Japanese food and identity, and representations of Japan in travel writing and western films. Again, when it came to my dissertation I focused on popular music, this one had the snappy title of: ‘Self-reflexive Orientalism and Cultural Hybridity: a Case Study of Ryuichi Sakamoto and the Yellow Magic Orchestra’.   

Yellow Magic Orchestra, Yellow Magic Orchestra, 1979. A&M Records

As with my earlier Kerouac dissertation, the enjoyment I derived from writing this, allied to some positive feedback, encouraged me to think about pursuing such things in more depth. Therefore, in 2008, I began to scale back my involvement with the Mercury and started a PhD in the Department of Geography at the University of Nottingham. I chose this department principally because Andrew Leyshon and David Matless, two out of the three editors of a book that had captured my attention, The Place of Music, were based there. Andrew became one of my PhD supervisors (along with Alex Vasudevan), whilst David would be one of my viva examiners, the other being Simon Rycroft, also a contributor to that still important collection of writings on music and geography.

Andrew Leyshon, David Matless and George Revill (eds), The Place of Music, 1998. Guilford Press

The content and focus of my PhD thesis evolved during the course of its gestation, as it seems do most, but at its core was an investigation into why and how the city, particularly the nocturnal city, has been aestheticized in certain forms of (generally male authored) romantic balladry and electronica.  Initially, the plan was to produce a kind of 50 year sweep of this topic but it soon became apparent that even a work of 100,000 words would struggle to accommodate all I wanted to say. Sadly, contemporary musicians whose work I reflected on, including Burial, Carl Craig and Richard Hawley, were put to one side (to be ‘re-mobilised’ years later as examples in undergraduate lectures years…) Instead, the focus congealed around two case studies, Frank Sinatra and The Blue Nile, the latter a trio most active in the 1980s, acts with sufficient similarities and differences to warrant being studied together in a comparative fashion in an extended piece of work. Not only were there clear links between the music of both, but there was also no shortage of cultural connections, particularly musical ones, between the cities with which the two artists were most readily identified: New York (Sinatra) and Glasgow (The Blue Nile), something which the thesis explored in some depth when exploring relationships between notions of place and the production and reception of popular music. As is often the way, the title came quite late, and again brevity was not its strong point: ‘Songs of the City: geographies of metropolitanism and mobility in the music of Frank Sinatra and The Blue Nile’.

The Blue Nile, Hats, 1989. Linn Records (l); Frank Sinatra, In the Wee Small Hours, 1955. Capitol Records (r)

Writing the PhD was great fun; no misery memoir here concerning my experience of doing it. Besides the actual writing and editing, one of the most enjoyable aspects of doing the doctorate was getting the opportunity to travel and to attend conferences in many different places, including London, Exeter, Aberystwyth, Durham, Edinburgh, and, easily the most exciting of the lot, Kyoto.

Kyoto Railway Station, 2001

Following completion of my PhD there followed a spell in which I divided my time between the Research and Higher Education Department at the RGS-IBG in Kensington and convening a 3rd year module on Auditory Cultures in the Department of Culture, Film and Media at the University of Nottingham. I got to know the East Midlands Trains timetable better than I ever wished to.

Next, and we are nearly at the end destination now, I took up a Research Fellow position for a few months in the Department of Geography at the University of Exeter, working on two AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) funded public engagement projects, both of which were led by Nicola Thomas, who I first encountered at the Kyoto conference. Given that I am writing this a few days after attending the RGS-IBG conference, it reaffirms the importance of being present at such events (especially if they are held somewhere nice…)

The first of the projects that I worked on with Nicola involved developing a historical geography prototype Android app under the aegis of REACT, http://www.react-hub.org.uk/ It covered many themes but foremost among them were issues of gender, biography, race and status in the Indian Raj, using the life, celebrity and experiences of Mary Curzon, the former Vicereine of India, as something of a prism with which to interrogate these themes; here’s a blog I wrote that highlights how fashion became enrolled in such discourses: http://www.react-hub.org.uk/books-and-print-sandbox/projects/2013/digitising-the-dollar-princess/journal/delhi-durbar-dress-in-derbyshire/ The second AHRC project involved me initiating a timeline for the 80^th anniversary of the Gloucestershire Guild of Craftsmen. Like the Curzon one, this was largely archival in nature and involved extensive research into the Guild's history, most of which was undertaken at The British Library, the Gloucestershire County archives and the Crafts Study Centre in Farnham.

And then finally, in 2013, to Hull. To that place with the distinctive and likeable “end of the line sense of freedom”, as Philip Larkin so accurately put it. An end of the lineness that is even more appropriate in this context given that mobility is one of the geographical themes that I’m most interested in and because my arrival in Hull is where this blog kisses the buffers.

Vintage LNER Hull and London poster

It turns out that I never did get round in this blog to saying what it is that I do all day. I suspect I prevaricate for the most part, hence not getting around here to saying what it is that I do... But I do know what it is that excites me about being a cultural/music geographer: it is coming across all those seemingly random but actually not random at all connections, that sense of “oh look, this links to that, and that informs this.” That’s what keeps me interested, that exploration of those endlessly rich links between, for example, Kerouac and Sinatra (artists both at their prime in 1950s America), between London and Tokyo (Olympic cities), New York and Glasgow (creative connections), Liverpool and Hull (Cities of Culture) and many more besides. And the geography department at Hull is an excellent place in which to feed one’s wonder and intrigue about such things. 

Should you want a or a more straightforward account of my teaching and research there’s always my Hull webpage: http://www2.hull.ac.uk/science/gees/staff/milburn.aspx Additionally, on my blog, www.sonicgeographies.com, I write about music and geography; I also tweet (@kevmilburn), sometimes about the former, and occasionally about the latter #butiamstillcluelessaboutoxbowlakes.

How I became a historical geographer

By Briony McDonagh (@BrionyMcDonagh) 

Hi all! This is the latest blog in our series about how we came to do what we do. My name's Briony and I'm a lecturer in human geography here at GEES in Hull. My research interests lie in historical and cultural geography, and I’m particularly interested in how issues of power, space, identity and gender have been played out in the British landscape over the last 1000 years.

Like many of my colleagues I certainly didn't know I wanted to be an academic as a child, but I did like old and ruined buildings, Time Team and trying to figure out why the landscape looked like it did. My friends and I spent considerable amounts of time exploring an abandoned group of farm buildings not far from school (below), which it later turned out were 16th century in date and built from the ruins of a medieval monastery. For some reason I've long ago forgotten, I chose not to take History at GCSE, but ended up taking  a combination of A-level subjects which included both Geography and Classics. I applied for degree courses in a range of subjects but finally settled on a BA hons in Geography at University of Nottingham with the intention of applying for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office when I left.

Haltemprice Priory Farm © Mr Gareth Parry LRPS

From: http://www.imagesofengland.org.uk/Details/Default.aspx?id=164688&mode=adv

That didn't happen, of course, principally because I got bitten by the research bug. I took second year courses which included classes on ancient woodlands, urban histories and the mappa mundi and third year modules which involved fieldwork on Italian environmental histories and the urban plan of Revolutionary Paris, along with archival work in the University of Nottingham's Manuscripts and Special Collections. I was hooked. I chose to stay at Nottingham to complete a Masters in Landscape and Culture – which included training in standing buildings and landscape archaeology – followed by 3 years writing a PhD on the historical geographies of the Yorkshire Wolds before c. 1600. It was during this time I developed my current interdisciplinary approach to the landscape combining documentary research, maps, landscape archaeology and theoretical perspectives drawn from cultural geography and elsewhere.

The day I submitted by PhD I was offered a job with the Victoria County History contributing to a volume on the history of Howden and the surrounding region. I did this for 7 months before securing a longer-term post-doctoral position working on an AHRC-funded project researching the long-term impacts of parliamentary enclosure on the landscapes and communities of Northamptonshire (you can find out more about the project here). As part of my post, I also taught in the History department at the University of Hertfordshire, teaching a second year social history course and a third year module on the history of the English landscape, something I absolutely loved doing. Whilst working through endless boxes of archival materials at the Northamptonshire Record Office I came across Elizabeth Prowse, a committed agricultural improver who radically remodelled her estate during her 43-year widowhood (for more on Prowse, see my chapter on her here). It was as a result of researching and writing about Prowse that I began to wonder about the contribution made by other elite women to managing and improving landed estates in Georgian England. We know many male landowners pushed forward enclosure and introduced agricultural improvements on their estates, but we know almost nothing about the part female landowners played in the changes which transformed the English landscape in the century after about 1730. Women certainly owned property as widows and heiresses and sometimes even wives, but how involved were they in its management and improvement?

Wicken House (Northamptonshire), the home of Elizabeth Prowse

These are the questions that my current research project sets out to answer. Whilst still working as a post-doc in 2009, I secured a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship for the project which I then undertook at the University of Nottingham between 2010 and 2014 (the end date for the project was twice extended as a result of the arrival of two little people in my life). Running my own project was a great experience and I later managed to secure additional funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to write a book from the project. I transferred this grant to the University of Hull when I took up my post here in early 2014, and I’m now about halfway through writing up the book (to be published by Ashgate, hopefully in 2015).

So after almost 7 years of post-doctoral and fixed term posts, I finally have a permanent job. I have to admit that when I was completing my PhD, I never imagined I would spend quite so many years in post-doctoral positions. But those 7 years have given me the real luxury of being able to conduct a huge amount of research on a wide range of topics. In addition to my book on elite women, I'm currently working on projects on late medieval popular geographical imaginations, early modern anti-enclosure protest (see, for example, https://hull.academia.edu/BrionyMcDonagh) and the land rights movement in the 21st century (you can listen to me talk about the latter project here). I'm hoping having got all this research under my belt will stand me in good stead in my new job given all the demands on my time that a larger teaching role and increased departmental administration are likely to bring. All in, I’ve certainly got plenty to keep me busy for the next 7 years! 

My Journey to Social and Cultural Geography

By Dr Suzanne Beech (@suzanneebeech)

Hi everyone! I am Suzanne and I joined GEES in October last year. Being a geographer is very much in my

Walking the South Downs Way in the Snow (April 2013)

blood. My mum has been a geography teacher since the 1970s and I not only followed in her footsteps in terms of choosing to study geography but by going to the same university as she did, Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), and even being taught by some of the same academic staff as well. I loved reminding my PhD supervisor, Prof Steve Royle, that he had also taught my mum when he first arrived in Belfast. That is (sadly?) where the similarities end. My mum would definitely consider herself a physical geographer, whereas I would very much describe myself as a social and cultural geographer – people are my business, in particular international student mobility has been the focus of my career to date. So, how exactly did I end up in Hull, and when did I realise that being involved in research and teaching was the job for me?

  

The Lanyon Building at QUB - a typical 'QUB Postcard' Image

I went to QUB straight after school – admittedly I was not sure about this at first. Queen’s had been my second choice, I did not think I would actually end up going there, but my Biology A-Level did not go quite as well as perhaps it should have done. Consequently I went determined not to enjoy myself. This is something I really laugh about now given that I ended up spending over eight really happy years there. Back then doing a PhD was not really something that was on my radar (I was convinced that I was supposed to be a primary school teacher for quite a long time). Research did seem, though, like something that would be a really rewarding thing to do, and I really looked up to all of the PhD students who often helped with teaching in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology (GAP), but they all seemed so intelligent and clever and all a little bit out of my league. You could perhaps say that research is something that has always been at the back of my mind, but was definitely not something that was set in stone.

My attitude changed completely during the third year of my undergraduate study. I was enrolled on a four year degree programme that included a year spent overseas in Spain on the Erasmus scheme and in September 2007 I moved to Madrid where I studied at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM). This was a bit of a shock to the system in a number of ways: first, I had never actually lived away from home before; second, at the time the population of Madrid was about twice that of Northern Ireland and I felt a little overwhelmed by the sheer number of people; third, my Spanish was nowhere near as good as I thought it was when I left home and therefore studying Geography in Spain in Spanish was a bit of a challenge for the first three months or so. I recall going on a fieldtrip to Extremadura in the West of Spain on the Portuguese border shortly after I had arrived where I spent a weekend in blissful ignorance, with no idea where exactly we were, what we were doing, or what the point of the whole expedition was. I came to realise that fieldtrips were a common feature of the Spanish higher education system, in Geography at least, and every few weeks it seemed we were off doing something in the field whether for a day or a weekend.

Selected Fieldtrips in Spain
Clockwise from top left: The Extremadura landscape, a lighthouse in Galicia, the Old Town in Toledo, the castle at Segovia

My year in Madrid was one that changed me in so many ways. By the time I left at the end of June I had matured massively, spoke Spanish pretty fluently (sadly while my Spanish is still good, I am definitely no longer fluent) but more importantly gained a huge understanding into what it means to be an international student. This included the cultural and social implications of being in a totally different country, the financial costs (Erasmus is funded, but it can still be quite an expensive venture) and also the emotional costs of being away from home. I had, therefore, gained all of this first-hand experience, but I also decided to do my dissertation research into student exchange programmes when I was there. When I was writing it up I became absolutely certain that this was something that was very much for me. The student mobilities literature was exciting, dynamic and really stimulating, and I felt like what I was doing was actually making a difference. My supervisor must have seen something in me as well, because he suggested turning it into a larger PhD project. I could not believe it when I actually managed to secure myself a studentship at Queen’s – at that point I really felt like I had made it (I did not realise just how much more there was left to do!).

Prof Steve Royle - a good likeness

I began my PhD in September 2009, just after I had finished my BSc and spent the next three and a bit years researching and writing up my findings into the motivations and influences for international student mobility to the UK, under the supervision of Prof Steve Royle. It was the most fantastic experience and I loved spending my time with lots of international students, from all manner of backgrounds and nationalities and hearing their stories of how they found themselves to be studying in the UK. Learning about their decision making and how geography and place were critical to this process was an exciting time – albeit one that was filled with blood, sweat and tears. People are always putting pictures of their babies on social media – I posted a picture of my thesis, it is my baby.

Students waving field notebooks at me in Amberley Working
Museum, West Sussex

Doing a PhD is a really unusual time. I loved it, but it drove me a little mad sometimes as well. I also knew that deciding to stay in academia would not necessarily be an easy option. However, I had really enjoyed the research and all the things that go with it (like conferences and meeting proper famous geographers), and I had loved all of the teaching opportunities as well, particularly teaching in the field. I applied for several jobs and worked in Queen’s for a few months on the School of GAP’s Athena Swan bid (an initiative which recognises moves towards greater gender equality in academia). I was also offered a post in the Northern Ireland Civil Service, which I turned down because I had a feeling that something better was just around the corner – some people thought I was a little crazy given that I had been trying hard to get a job. This included my friend and office-mate Catherine who tried to convince me otherwise but to no avail. I was certain that something else was coming, and literally a few weeks later I was offered my job in GEES. The last eight months have been amazing and I have no regrets whatsoever (although I do get homesick sometimes). Things have been a real whirlwind, I have taught my own research-led module on transnationalism and have had my first paper published in Area. I cannot wait to see what the next year at Hull has to offer me, and I am really excited to see what happens thereafter!