About the Project
What should a learning geographer know, and how might it be possible to keep telling “small stories” of geographical knowledge production from the bottom-up? This PhD studentship is an opportunity to think critically about the modern intellectual and pedagogic history of geography through two traditional elements of undergraduate degree studies: the fieldwork-based dissertation and the examination paper.
Context:
The geography dissertation is regarded by academic lecturing staff as a conclusive or defining test of independent ability, undertaken in the concluding phases of undergraduate degree studies. As a defining statement, the dissertation is also reflective of wider student learning, encompassing cultures of fieldwork activity, data gathering, processing and interpreting, and presentational design. Evidently, every student’s geography dissertation has a singular story to tell, and is representative of the undergraduate voice in university geography. Cumulatively, dissertations also speak to greater questions of disciplinary trends, character, range and change, and the ways in which diverse worlds, peoples and places, have been collected and documented by learning geographical researchers.
The examination paper has, for over a century, been accepted as a standard form of assessment in university geography degree studies. The design of examination papers and the formulation of specific questions reflect academic expectations about student abilities of knowledge acquisition and written expression. Changing styles of exam paper and question can also be reflective of trends and tastes in the discipline, either locally or as a greater scholarly community. In spite of its significance and centrality as a means of testing ability and classifying student performance, the examination paper remains all but unexamined in scholarship on the history of geographical education in higher education.
Approach:
Based on an archival-interpretive approach, studentship activities will centre on a large, unified collection of undergraduate geography dissertations and degree examination papers held by the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow. The School retains a near-complete run of hard copy dissertations (regional; physical; human) submitted by final-year undergraduate Geography students, c. 1959-2016. Once chaotic and only semi-catalogued, Glasgow’s dissertation collection has been recently re-housed and newly organised with a searchable database, making properly accessible a unique archival resource spanning almost sixty years of intellectual and pedagogic change in academic Geography through the praxis of undergraduate students. Similarly, the School holds a significant archived collection of the question papers sat by student classes in examination diets at University of Glasgow c. 1913-1980. (Additional, supplementary archival holdings collected by the School include: student expedition photograph albums; student fieldwork reports; Drumlin, the annual student magazine).
Framed by scholarship in historical geography, the history of geography and geographical education, the project can variously address questions of knowledge production, spaces and scales of learning, scholastic conventions, local traditions, trust and credibility, cultural representation, cartographic literacy, and disciplinary integration and fragmentation. Ultimately, the studentship seeks to understand how the exercise of learning to become a geographer at University of Glasgow has, variously over time, reflected or resisted canonical disciplinary narratives.
Applicants:
Applications are welcome from students with interests in, variously: the history of geography; historical-cultural geography; histories of geographical education; histories of higher education. Applicants must have an undergraduate degree in Geography (2:1 or better), and a Masters degree in Geography, or a cognate subject area in the social sciences, or arts and humanities. Applications will be considered from individuals holding an undergraduate degree in Geography (2:1 or better), and a professional career history in geographical education likely to compensate for research training at Masters level.
This project belongs to the Conceptual thematic cluster. The successful candidate will be supervised by Prof Hayden Lorimer and Prof Christopher Philo (Geographical and Earth Sciences).
Application Process – Candidates interested in applying for funded PhD study on this project are encouraged to make informal contact with the Supervisor(s) in the first instance.
For full details please visit our website:
http://www.gla.ac.uk/colleges/arts/graduateschool/fundingopportunities/leverhulmetrustscholarships/#d.en.389826
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