Geographies of Social Change

Using a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, we produce leading geographical research on race, ethnicity and migration. Our work on this theme includes the everyday consequences of bigotry and prejudice connected to events such as terrorism and Brexit; theorisation of whiteness and anti-racism; evolving youth identities in light of globalisation and local and regional change; regional and local population change and migration; and the emotional and political impacts of the movement of transnational labour.

• Migration, diaspora and displacement (Blazek, Champion, Finlay, Johnston, Jones, Thompson, Lear)
• Anti-racism and whiteness (Bonnett, Nayak, Barwick)
• Ethnicity, gender and class (Nayak)
• Geopolitics, racism and Islamophobia (Hopkins)
• Geographies of religion (Hopkins, Richardson)

Our research examines changing representations and lived experiences of gender and sexuality across a range of contemporary locations. We are interested in the ways that private relations are fundamental to the expression and enactment of social and political power in other sites. We study changes in the urban lives of women, men and children; shifting masculinities in diverse cultural and place-based contexts; the manifestation of intimate violence across public, private and geopolitical domains; the spatial and political implications of gender non-conformity; and gender and sexual prejudice within institutions including Universities.

• Family lives in the city (James, Jarvis, Stenning, Kelly)
• Gender and the military (Woodward, Cree)
• Masculinities (Hopkins, Nayak, Richardson, Finn)
• Gender-based violence (Pande, Pain, Nayak, Vaughan, Yates)
• Everyday sexism (Hopkins)
• Transgender identities (Hopkins, Ridley)

Members of GOSC have a longstanding reputation for their research on the geographies of youth and childhood. This work ranges from young people’s engagement with national identity and geopolitics in sites including South America and Scotland; education and aspirations among black and minority ethnic youth in the North East; and the intersections of gender, generation and class.

• Children, young people and critical geopolitics (Benwell, Hopkins, Richardson, Barber)
• Youth, race and ethnicity (Hopkins, Nayak)
• Children’s agency (Blazek)
• Children and play (Stenning)
• Youth transitions (Hopkins, Tate, Richardson, Kelly)
• Generations and intergenerationality (Richardson, Stenning)

A key conceptual focus of our work as social geographers is unsettling scale as a hierarchical organising principle, and exploring the potency of the local and the intimate. We do this by, for example, challenging taken for granted assumptions about the nature and form of domestic spaces; examining how family and community life respond to austerity; analysing the consequences of the disposability and displacement of low income homes and households; studying new forms of family and politics created when intimate relations stretch across the globe; and interrogating alternative modes of living, housing and creating community.

• Transnational families (Johnston)
• Austerity and community (Stenning, Ormerod)
• Cohousing and multigenerational reciprocity (Jarvis)
• Memory, nostalgia and alternative living (Bonnett, Megoran)
• Loneliness (Stenning, Jarvis, Kelly)
• Social housing and homelessness (Ormerod, Pain, Chan)
• Household energy use (Powells)
• The home at night (Shaw)
• Geographies of trauma (Johnston, Pain)

Our research on this theme focuses on the broader spatial configurations of justice and wellbeing. We study health, housing, consumption, technology, energy and urban life, asking who gains, and loses out, from contemporary spatial patterns and processes. Our scholarship has a strong emphasis on the development of alternative social forms that challenge inequitable distributions of power, and we study the ways that these are enabled or stymied by different modes of activism and organising.

• Health, health care and wellbeing (Copeland, Jenkins, Jones, Morrison)
• Implications of geospatial technologies for justice and citizenship (Lin)
• Class (Stenning, Mew)
• Environmental justice and green activism (Powells, Herbert, Jarvis, Lee)
• Intentional communities and degrowth initiatives (Jarvis, Herbert, Lee)
• Cities at night (Shaw, Souter)
• Sustainable, ethical and resilient consumption (Hughes, Hocknell)
• More-than-human communities (Hocknell, Lee, Pugh)
• Citizen participation, civil society organising and social inclusion (Lin, Pugh, Sari, Jarvis)

Watch our Newcastle University Collaborative Housing.

In GOSC we use a diverse range of methodological approaches in our research, including both more traditional and innovative quantitative and qualitative techniques. A particular specialism of our cluster is our deployment and development of contemporary participatory and arts-based approaches:

• Participatory action research (Blazek, Johnston, Pain, Pugh, Mew), participatory GIS (Lin), community based volunteering (Jarvis, Mew), and other approaches for the co-production of research
• Novel methods for working with children and youth, and debates on the politics and ethics of research (Benwell, , Hopkins, Nayak, Tate, Woodward).
• The integration of collaborations with artists professionals into many research projects, using an array of media and forms - both as innovative methods for research, and vehicles through which we can represent and disseminate research findings and outputs to diverse audiences. These include theatre (Richardson, Cree), video, storytelling (Richardson), museum exhibition, visual arts, movement and dance (Jenkins) and songwriting.

Our research group staff have significant experience and expertise in analysis of geographies of social change.

Dr Matt Benwell

Professor Alastair Bonnett

Professor Anthony Champion

Emeritus Professor Mike Coombes

Dr Alison Copeland

Dr Alice Cree

Dr Robin Finlay

Professor Peter Hopkins

Professor Alexandra Hughes

Professor Al James

Professor Helen Jarvis

Dr Caleb Johnston

Dr Robert Shaw

Dr Wen Lin

Professor Anoop Nayak

Professor Rachel Pain

Dr Raksha Pande

Dr Gareth Powells

Dr Jonathan Pugh

Dr Michael Richardson

Professor Alison Stenning

Professor Simon Tate

Professor Rachel Woodward

Dr Catherine Walker

Our research projects have included subjects as diverse as the geography of housing market areas in the UK and collaborative housing and community resilience.

• Asian Youth: Religious Identities Islamophobia and Everyday Geopolitics
  Project Leader(s):
  Project Dates: From March 2013 to March 2016
• Caring in Distant Lands: A Performative Enquiry into the Outsourcing of Elder Care
  Project Leader(s): Dr Caleb Johnston, Felix Meyer-Christian, Professor Geraldine Pratt
  Project Dates: 2018- Ongoing
• Collaborative Housing and Community Resiliance
  Project Leader(s): Dr Helen Jarvis
  Project Dates: From November 2014 to November 2016
• Decline in the frequency of people moving home: the UK experience
  Project Leader(s): Tony Champion with Ian Shuttleworth (Belfast) and Tom Cooke (Connecticut)
  Project Dates: 2014-ongoing
• Housing Hope: the place of politics and people in housing governance
  Project Leader(s): Emma Ormerod
  Project Dates: 2018-2019
• Migration, housing and planning in the London region
  Project Leader(s): Tony Champion with Ian Gordon (LSE)
  Project Dates: 2017-ongoing
• Muslim youth and political participation in Scotland
  Project Leader(s): Peter Hopkins
  Project Dates: 2016
• Nanay, a testimonial play: Labour Migration, Precarity, Transnational Families, and Testimonial Theatre
  Project Leader(s): Dr Caleb Johnston, Professor Geraldine Pratt
  Project Dates: 2008-2017
• Overseas Conference Grant
  Project Leader(s): Dr Peter E Hopkins
  Project Dates: From March 2009 to March 2009
• Sexual harassment, rape culture and youthful urban Indian masculinities
  Project Leader(s): Raksha Pande
  Project Dates: 2017 - ongoing
• Tlingipino Bingo: Filipino Migration, Settler Colonialism and State Multiculturalism in Canada
  Project Leader(s): Dennis Gupa, Dr Caleb Johnston, Sharon Shorty, Ricky Tagaban, Professor Geraldine Pratt, Hazel Venzon
  Project Dates: 2016 – 17
• Understanding trauma from survivors’ perspectives
  Project Leader(s): Rachel Pain
  Project Dates: 2018

Our postgraduates are working on a wide variety of power, space, politics subjects. These range from the geopolitical imagination of video gamers to exploration of racist perpetrators in the North East of England.