

My research is on the impact that the 1984/85 miners’ strike had on children and young people at the time in a former mining village in South Yorkshire. This has involved a lot of travelling from Lancaster to Yorkshire, for both archive and interview work. Because I am disabled there was no way I could make that journey every day, and my ethnographic fieldwork relied on me immersing myself for stretches of time in the area. Throughout my studies, and more so since conducting my research, I have found the RTSG support funds crucial in me being able to conduct my research so thoroughly.
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Last month, thanks to the NWSSDTP conference fund, I had the chance to attend the Wageningen Political Ecology PhD Spring School in the Netherlands. It was a 5-day intensive workshop exploring vibrant environmental conservation debates on extinction struggles, neoliberal natures, and new visions for how we can do conservation in more convivial ways. My own PhD research takes a political ecology perspective to explore how different conservation approaches protect biocultural diversity, so as soon as I read the description for this year’s Spring School, I knew I had to go. I was therefore very excited when the DTP approved my application!
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Last month, I was incredibly fortunate to spend just over a week in Honolulu, Hawaii, both attending and presenting a paper at the 2024 American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting.
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Now well into the third year of my studentship, I’m starting to think about life outside the PhD and ways to continue on with my area of research. That sometimes-vague demand for a tangible ‘impact factor’ has also begun to nag at me a bit more with each passing week. My PhD thesis looks at the ways in which different practices of listening, recording and otherwise dealing with sound have shaped the politics of Indigenous identity in central and southern Argentina. Part of this has meant engaging with the fields of Cultural and Sound Studies in order to work out how to approach the links between sound, politics and identity. Having all this time to study ‘theory’ has been a real pleasure, but the question for me is how do I now start to bring these quite abstract concerns outside of my own convoluted university project?
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