Tag: early career

SCGRG Early Career Events

With the success of our SCGRG Early Career Event Series in the last academic year, we are thrilled to announce the first event in our Early Career Event Series: Language and the city: Thinking through Jiehebu, with Dr Yimin Zhao, who will share their recent research and career development experience. 

In the Q&A audiences can interact with our guest to explore the event topic with tips on (early) career development, especially friendly to colleagues new to our event series and planning their research projects and/or career development.

12.00 – 12.40 GMT 13 November ONLINE

Registration: https://forms.office.com/r/atR8W6Z9FW


In this talk, Yimin will first revisit previous reflections on the “translational turn” through the Jiehebu case in Beijing, and summarise why and how our attention to the vernacular names of urban spatialities are with theoretical and epistemological significance. Instead of appealing to “ambiguous markers,” often and mainly written in English, Yimin would like to highlight the meaning of vernacular terms in doing critical urban studies – and human geography more broadly. Yimin shows that we should rethink exteriority and otherness and “shape individual and collective dispositions to acknowledge the claims of others” (Barnett 2005: 5). In this regard, language embodied in the vernacular terms should be foregrounded in decolonial endeavours as a key aspect of (rethinking) subjectivity – and being.

Yimin Zhao is Assistant Professor in Department of Geography, Durham University. His research focuses on urban periphery and the state in China and East Asia, particularly through the analytical lenses of language, materiality and everyday life. After previous investigations of Beijing’s green belts and the Jiehebu area, his current research develops along two lines of inquiry, one attending to the infrastructural lives of authoritarianism and the other looking into the urban mechanisms of “Global China.” He is an editor of City, and a corresponding editor of International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

Upcoming events: early career teaching development

We are pleased to announce an upcoming event for early career geographers, with guest speakers providing insight into their experiences of establishing a career in academia.

When: Wednesday 1 November 17.00 to 18.00 (GMT) ONLINE

Speakers: Aled Singleton, Swansea University, Jamelia Harris, University of Warwick, Anna Guasco, Cambridge University, Chris Herring, University of California Los Angeles

Convenor: Chen Qu

Click HERE to register: https://jbs-cam.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwodu-gpzkiEtEI1KHldEnbSFVRyLaOCrPC#/registration

Aled Singleton worked in community regeneration and local economic development for over a decade. This experience deepened his interests in the attachments to space and place that we all make across the lifecourse. In 2016 he pursued this latter topic through a PhD at Swansea University. Since 2021 he has been a Research Assistant, Researcher Fellow, Research Officer and now a Tutor in Human Geography at Swansea University, Wales, UK.

In this talk Aled balances his experience of both research and teaching, including the experience of applying for funding and FHEA recognition. He also gives some context about teaching and working in Wales.

Jamelia Harris is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Employment Research (IER), University of Warwick. Before joining IER, she was a Research Economist at Fiscus Ltd and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies, Warwick. Jamelia has taught at various universities – including the University of Cambridge, University College London, University of Warwick, University of Oxford, ISM University (Lithuania) and Fourah Bay College (Sierra Leone). She also worked as a researcher at the University of the West Indies (Trinidad and Tobago) and the University of Oxford, and has gained significant policy experience in international development as an economist working on projects in Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and Trinidad and Tobago.

Jamelia will speak on the importance of teaching to academic career development, and how to manage teaching with research.

Anna Guasco: Reflecting on accessibility in teaching and learning: a postgraduate perspective.

Anna Guasco is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation analyses gray whale migration and conservation on the North American Pacific Coast. Her teaching broadly has focused on environment and society topics, including political ecology, food geographies, and Anthropocene studies.

Chris Herring is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California Los Angeles. His research focuses on poverty, housing, and homelessness in US cities. He teaches courses in Urban Sociology, Punishment and Society, and the Sociology of Poverty at the undergraduate and graduate level.

Chris will discuss the division of teaching labour across different types of colleges and universities in the United States, and its role for different types of emerging scholars going on the job market or just starting their careers.

Please email SCGRG@outlook.com for inquires.