Tim Hall

Selling Cities: Promoting New Images for Meetings Tourism

Abstract This paper investigates two related areas, namely the importance of urban image to location decision-making processes and the extent to which provincial former industrial cities in the UK have overcome past images. These cities are amongst the most active in pursuing the meetings industry through their urban regeneration strategies. The survey evidence strongly suggests that the selected towns and cities had been successful in transforming their externally perceived images, although towns and cities with weak images in the past still tend to have weak images, whereas cities with strong industrial images in the past, which have undergone extensive regeneration, have strong, rejuvenated images. Additionally, image is important in the location decision-making processes of meetings organisers, though not as important as other factors. This paper demonstrates that a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between place promotion, urban image and urban development can be achieved.

Fieldwork and disabled students: discourses of exclusion and inclusion

Disabled students form a significant but under represented minority in higher education in the UK. Participation appears to be particularly low in disciplines that contain a fieldwork component. Fieldwork has been recognized as a barrier to the participation of disabled students. This paper emphasizes a critical perspective on fieldwork, highlighting the way in which fieldcourses as currently conceived, enacted and experienced, can exclude disabled students. It discusses a survey of the experiences of providing learning support to disabled students undertaking fieldwork in geography, earth and environmental science departments in the UK. It also considers the various ways in which the images, spaces, practices and cultures of fieldwork may exclude or marginalize disabled students and the different ways in which fieldwork may be made more inclusive.

Listening to students: the experiences of disabled students of learning at university

Summary and conclusions This chapter has presented selected findings from three of the largest surveys of the teaching and learning experiences of disabled students in higher education and the first every survey asking identical questions about the learning experiences of non-disabled students. Although the focus has been on the barriers that they face, many examples of good practices were also revealed by the surveys. With the exception of lectures, over half of the disabled students and often as many as three-quarters have not experienced any disability-related ba rriers with teaching and learning. However, up to two-thirds of GEES students identified barriers with a variety of assessments. Although the surveys found that in many cases only a minority of disabled students faced barriers in teaching, learning and assessment, for those who did, their impact was serious. These findings suggest that using a catch-all category ‘disabled students’ is problematic and that devising generic policies to support their teaching, learning and assessment may not always meet the specific needs of individuals. This emphasises the importance of individual discussion with disabled students, rather than assuming that an impairment indicates the teaching or assessment adjustment that is required.

Geographies of the illicit Globalization and organized crime

The paper notes a growing, diverse and yet somewhat partial and disparate interest among geographers in the illicit. Within this there has been little substantive interest in organized criminality despite it constituting a range of activities comparable in their significance to other aspects of the illicit that have attracted extensive attention from geographers. This paper argues that the development of a geographical perspective on organized crime is timely and seeks to map out connections with both the extant literatures of organized crime and those of human geography.

The Camera Never Lies? Photographic Research Methods in Human Geography

A camera is an essential tool for human geography students. You will no doubt take and use an awful lot of photographs (academic rather than social ones) during your degree. Most students come back...

Reflections on ‘fieldwork and disabled students: discourses of exclusion and inclusion’

We were both surprised and delighted to hear that our paper had won this award. Reading the other excellent, but very different, nominated papers has only compounded these feelings. Writing the pap...

Researching communicated geographies: introduction

The increase in popularity of the scholarship of teaching and learning, and of pedagogic research in geography, is arguably one of the major changes within the discipline in recent years. A key role of the Journal of Geography in Higher Education (JGHE) is to support geographers interested in undertaking such work. Among the key research issues facing scholars of teaching and learning in Geography Higher Education are how to investigate the real character of the messages that geography teaching communicates to learners and how to discover the ways in which these messages can be made more useful, more effective and sometimes more affective. This Symposium focuses on techniques and methodologies for enhancing the development, evaluation and impact of geographical communication and on exploring the interactions between geographical communication and the ways that geographers learn. It derives from a special session at the International Conference of the Royal Geographical Society, which was co-sponsored by the Society’s Higher Education Research Group and by the JGHE as a contribution to the larger pedagogic research methods component of the JGHE’s “Resources” subsection.

Student experiences of multidisciplinarity in the undergraduate geography curriculum

Abstract This paper explores the student experience of multidisciplinarity within the undergraduate Geography curriculum. It considers the drivers that have underpinned this development before considering the findings of research into student experiences in two universities in the south of England. The results suggest that most students view this development positively and recognize a number of advantages that it brings, citing expanded opportunities for learning, working with people from other disciplines, expansion of perspectives and perceived benefits to employability. However, for a minority this development is more problematic. The research points here to issues with specialist knowledge and disciplinary pedagogies, social issues within the classroom and class organization and some reservations regarding groupwork. The paper concludes with a series of recommendations.