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Department of Geography

 

Electronic dissertations

A selection of dissertations from recent graduates, and MPhil Conservation Leadership placement reports*, are now available for reading access online.

We regret to announce that paper copies of dissertations submitted prior to 2020 are not included in this service.

Paper copies of dissertations between 2015-2019 can only be viewed upon request in the Geography Library itself – please ask staff for access. Dissertations earlier than 2015 may be available to view in the Manuscripts Reading Room at the UL (again you need to request access in advance to view these). To find out about the availability of paper copies of earlier dissertations, you will need to search on iDiscover by searching using the words ‘Geography’, ‘Tripos’ and ‘Dissertation’. Check the holdings information to see whether they have a note to say ‘Transferred to UL’.

Please note down the file number (in the first column) before you proceed to the online request form, where you can request access to two dissertations per application. It is best to use this form from the Geography intranet.

You can also request a particular dissertation by clicking on the number in the first column of the table, which also takes you through to the request form.

Terms and conditions apply, and you must agree to these before you are given access.

Please note we can only process requests during our staffed hours. Please see the Library opening hours for further details.

*An index of the MPhil Conservation Leadership reports that are available to view are on the dedicated Moodle page for students.

Most recent years are shown first.

Number Title Abstract
UG-23/01 Critical Review Essay
A Critical Review Essay of the Geographies of Pregnancy: The ‘Yummy Mummy’ Discourse and the Neoliberalisation of the Maternal
Emerging in popular culture in the 1990s, the figure of the ‘yummy mummy’ has been heralded as an emblem of ‘successful femininity’ (Littler, 2013). These glamorous mothers seemingly ‘have-it-all’, effortlessly navigating the complex and contradictory maternal landscape. Once a time of modesty, these glamorous mothers have reconfigured the maternal as a time in which women can be public, confident and empowered (Willmott, 2013; Malatzky, 2017; Allen & Osgood, 2009).
Applying the ‘yummy mummy’ discourse to the pregnant body, this critical review essay offers a more pernicious reading of it, arguing that this postfeminist discourse performs political work on maternal bodies. Narratives of ‘good’ neoliberal pregnancies now include both demonstrating a ‘maternal sacrifice’ for one’s foetus (Lowe, 2016), but also perfecting one’s physical appearance to conform with a very narrow vision of acceptable pregnant bodies. Pregnancy has become a project to be optimised (Brewis & Warren, 2001). Through the regulation of three everyday practices – fashion, food and fitness – pregnant bodies are encouraged to self-govern and self-survey with pertains to this model woman. Bodies positioned as outside of this classed, racialised and heteronormative figure are presented as abject and defective.
This critical review essay approaches the pregnant body as both a material and discursive construction. It looks at how the glamorous pregnancy discourse has influenced how the ‘mutable’ pregnant body is seen and understood (Witz, 2000). It considers how this discourse has been constructed in popular culture, particularly the tabloid media, to encourage the surveillance of pregnant bodies. It also considers the ways geographers have attended to forms of resistance to this discourse.
UG-23/02 Socialising through Stocks: Retail Investors in Shanghai Stock Brokerages In recent years, geographers and anthropologists have increasingly drawn their attention to stock markets as sites of ethnographic research. Combatting a trend of abstraction and dehumanisation in the wider economic literature, ethnographic research aims to re-introduce sociality and culture back into finance and discuss their importance in this context (Abolafia, 1998; Maurer, 2006).
Responding to this Polanyist call to create embedded and contextualised understanding of finance, this study aims to use interviews to provide ethnography of the Shanghai stock market thirty years after its re-opening in 1990. Through incorporating an interactionist grounded typology, this study introduces diverse traders on the floor and VIP rooms of stock brokerages. These divisions in physical trading locations help produce communities that interact in unique social circles and exercise distinctive decision-making in the market.
This study finds the social connections emerging from the market accentuate existing inequalities by stratifying the division in information and access. Furthermore, social and economic practices are necessarily intertwined in the Shanghai stock market, and the brokerage hall is an inherently social space. The practice of trading, and the site of the trading hall, must be understood as simultaneously social and economic. This ethnography provides an updated account of the Shanghai stock market decades after the last major ethnographic research and calls for continued recognition of the importance of embedding markets within specific cultural and economic contexts.
UG-23/03 Running Free? How prison parkruns both liberate and discipline The global prison population is growing on an unprecedented scale, with prison workers forced to address issues of worsening conditions and health and welfare crises with shrinking budgets and limited staffing levels. Prison parkruns are a relatively new initiative (first introduced in 2017) that seek to address some of these concerns through the power of sport. This dissertation uses the overarching theme of liberation and discipline to assess the impact of prison parkruns on prison officers, administrative staff and the prisoner experience. It argues that the prison parkrun initiative is highly effective in producing a more positive prison atmosphere, with greater opportunities for interaction between prisoners and an improved prisoner-staff relationship. In terms of ‘liberation’, prison parkrun provides a platform for prisoner agency and a sense of ownership of both the event and their actions. However, this dissertation argues that parkrun brings liberation and discipline in equal measure. Prison officers can observe prisoners at all times during parkrun, and restrict their access to the event based on behavioural metrics, turning the event into a behaviour-based privilege rather than a universal right.
Throughout the dissertation consideration is given to the role of the law, noting that this study comes within the context of struggling prison systems globally. Prison parkrun was at times discussed by interviewees as an expensive luxury, reducing it to a low priority event that cannot occur with any regularity. This opinion on prison parkruns fails to appreciate their evident value to staff in both liberating and disciplining participants, providing a fascinating study area for prison priorities and outcomes.
UG-23/04 Collegiate American Football: Power, Perceptions and Experiences Using a critical sports geographical approach (Koch, 2017), this dissertation explores collegiate American football in the US. It investigates the perceptions and experiences of college football programs, the discourses that are produced and performed within them and the power relations and structures that govern them. The University of Southern California’s NCAA Division 1 football program, the Trojans, serve as my case study. Many previous studies concerning the exploitation of student-athletes lack a specific focus on football (e.g. Beamon, 2008) and rely on large national datasets and specific policies to talk on behalf of student athletes (Singer, 2008). Additionally, studies that have used football student-athlete experiences tend to be outdated and lacking recent developments in student compensation (e.g. Beamon, 2008) or have a narrow focus of investigation (e.g. Porter, 2019) leading to fragmented representations of experiences and perceptions. My study aims to empower the voice of the student-athletes. Therefore, my primary method of data collection was semi-structured interviews with former USC football student-athletes. A questionnaire survey and media exploration were used to supplement analysis. The dissertation tackles these issues by exploring them through a range of themes; the material body of, mental health and well-being of, and financial compensation for, student-athletes. Through my inquiry, I was able to identify ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ through common experiences and perceptions, determine prominent discourses and the power dynamics involved in their creation. I call for a more nuanced approach to studying student-athletes, acknowledging the role of individual experiences.
UG-23/05 Exploring the (in)accessibility of Finnish homeless solutions through the lived experiences of homeless individuals in Helsinki, Finland. In 2008, Finland introduced its Housing-First policy, removing all preconditions to housing for homeless individuals (Kaakinen, 2019). Since then, Finland has proven successful in reducing rates of homelessness, aiming to eradicate homelessness by 2027 (YM, 2022a; 2022b). As a result, Finland’s homelessness solutions are rarely critiqued in scholarly literature. This dissertation explores the pitfalls of Finland’s homelessness policy through participatory methods in which homeless individuals guided research towards locally-defined priorities. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six formerly-homeless individuals who live in a Housing-First unit in Greater Helsinki. Participants identified the accessibility of homeless assistance in Finland as a pitfall of the country’s homeless strategy, which became the focus of this paper.
Stigma played a role in rendering homeless assistance inaccessible by limiting the capacity of welfare services to provide compassionate and high-quality support. Additionally, stigma made participants less likely to reach out for support when it was needed. Sobriety requirements implemented by Staircase-Model homelessness solutions also reduced the accessibility of homelessness solutions by relying on homeless individuals to perform ‘behavioural self-regulation’ (Schinka et al, 2015, p1325), whilst ignoring the restrictions that homeless individuals face to their capabilities. These Staircase solutions pushed some participants into prolonged, chronic, or cyclical homelessness. Finally, limits to the administrative and digital skills, and structural knowledge of participants rendered homelessness assistance inaccessible for several participants, who struggled to locate and navigate homelessness services. Though Finnish homelessness solutions integrate strategies to combat these issues, they were not enough to render homeless solutions entirely accessible for the participants in this paper. Overall, whilst results are not generalisable to the wider homeless population in Finland, this paper demonstrates the value of exploring the lived experience of homeless individuals as a tool with which to analyse the effects of policy on the everyday lives of homeless individuals.
UG-23/06 Atmospheric microplastic deposition in ombrotrophic peatlands: developing a methodological approach. There exists a growing body of research on atmospheric transportation of microplastics to remote environments, but as yet there is a distinct lack of research on the role of ombrotrophic peat bogs as archives of microplastic contamination, largely due to difficulties in isolating microplastics from organic rich matrices. This study investigated how the abundance of microplastics at four ombrotrophic peatland sites in Scotland – Blawhorn Moss, Flanders Moss, Strath Nethy and Forsinard Flows – is impacted by proximity to the city of Glasgow. A new sample preparation protocol involving H2O2 organic matter digestion, sieving, suction filtration and SPT density separation, was developed for this investigation. The author collected both surface and control samples in September 2022. Three surface samples and two control samples were analysed from each site. Microplastic and spherical carbonaceous fly ash particle (SCP) counts were obtained using stereomicroscopy and visual analysis. The results from this investigation were statistically tested using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) test and Spearman’s Rank Correlation Coefficient, and show that the abundance of microplastics and SCPs in ombrotrophic peatlands negatively correlate with distance from Glasgow, which supports existing literature. This suggests that urban centres are important point sources of atmospheric contamination, although this conclusion is limited by the scale of the investigation. A new laboratory methodology for the extraction of microplastics from peat, with recommendations for further adaptations, has been developed during the course of this study, providing opportunities for further research. Microplastics can therefore be extracted from organic rich sedimentary archives, and thus assessed as a marker of the Anthropocene.
UG-23/07 Exploring the discursive effects of religion in Christian Aid’s development narratives. A discourse analysis of public material produced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, March 2020-March 2022. Since the ‘turn to religion’ within development scholarship (Bompani, 2019: 172), literature has increasingly considered the potential of faith-based organisations (FBOs) to produce alternative discourses of development. Scholarship has debated whether FBOs offer truly distinct narratives to mainstream actors, or simply reflect the dominant development paradigm. This research brings together post-development theory and a broadly Foucauldian approach to development as discourse to analyse the effects of religion within Christian Aid’s development narratives. I explore these effects through discourse analysis, focusing specifically on the construction of ‘development’ and associated subject positions within Christian Aid’s public material produced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic between March 2020 and March 2022. Firstly, I find that religion inspires an alternative ontology of poverty and development and provides values underpinning intervention, but that Christian Aid’s model of social change remains narrated through mainstream discourses of partnership and localisation. Secondly, religion shapes the construction of the ‘faithful supporter’, who engages with Christian Aid as a performance of belief, and religious metaphors construct equality between the donor and beneficiary with the potential to challenge longstanding North-South hierarchies in development discourse. I argue that religion offers teachings, metaphors, and values which can construct more egalitarian development narratives, but that the potential of religious ideas to generate alternative discourses of development may be undermined by CA’s adherence to mainstream narratives that reinforce North-South hierarchies. Religious discourses of altruism and commonality may also depoliticise development interventions when recontextualised within a post-colonial politics. I conclude by calling for further engagement with faith-based organisations, and the development alternatives that they propose, to understand their emancipatory potential as we seek a vision of social change for a post-Agenda 2030 world.
UG-23/08 Critical Review Essay
The Weaponisation of Diet: Towards a Critical Approach to Anti-Veganism/Vegetarianism:
“Vegetarians and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans… are the enemy of all that is good and decent in the human spirit”.  Anthony Bourdain (2013: 78)
These are the words of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain in his book: Kitchen Confidential, as he refers to vegans – the offshoot of spiritual humanity’s moral enemy: vegetarians (2013). Dramatic they may seem, echoing a disdain held by many of the western population that this essay seeks to explore (Earle and Hodson 2017). Anti-vegetarian/vegan sentiment has been documented by academics across several fields of study (e.g. Véron and White 2018; MacInnis and Hodson 2017) attempting to explain why a person’s diet elicits such strong feelings of resentment and irritation. This essay seeks to build upon this literature, whilst investigating the crucial influence of gender to this prejudice.
UG-23/09 Representations of Somaliland in China, Taiwan and the USA Somaliland, a de-facto state on the Horn of Africa, has fought for international recognition since it broke away from Somalia, its parent state, in 1991. Recently, the breakaway region has benefited from a convergence of regional developments which have boosted its popularity internationally, gaining support from US policy makers and its allies. Its efforts for recognition, for example, have also resulted in the establishment of a representative office in the Republic of China (Taiwan) in February 2020. This new-found relationship has amplified the small region’s visibility in the international system, gaining a mixture of support and disapproval amongst spectators. Thus, it has emerged as a point of discussion in tabloid media, identified as a key site for the production of geopolitical discourse. Media tabloids in particular produce highly sensationalised imaginations of entities for domestic audiences. By drawing on Chinese, Taiwanese and American tabloids, this dissertation compares the types of representations forged about Somaliland, and argues that they are used to (de)legitimise the enclaves’ claims to statehood. Some focus is then on exploring how these representations maintain the centrality of sovereign state in the inter-state system, and the ways anomalous geopolitical entities may blur the lines between legitimate and illegitimate, especially in the field of diplomacy.
UG-23/10 The Spaces She Fears: Uncovering Lived Realities Hidden by an Imaginary of Gender Utopia in Copenhagen, Denmark Spaces are often described to have a “feel” or an “atmosphere”. Copenhagen public space is no different. This dissertation explores the gendered dimensions of this “feel”, uncovering the complex and contradictory experiences of gender inequality hidden beneath simplistic narratives of Danish gender utopia. Particular focus is placed on how gender inequality manifests in gender-based violence in public space, discussing how perceived and actual threats of violence impacts how women feel in the city. Drawing on atmospheric concepts propagated by Hermann Schmitz, Gernot Bohme, Ben Anderson and Derek McCormack, I conceptualise female fear as an affective atmosphere, enveloping women and propagating a feeling of “dis-belonging” to urban public space.
Via a phenomenological privileging of lived experience, this dissertation draws on the embodied experiences of ten women living in Copenhagen, in dialogue with personal insights as a young, female researcher. Analysis has focused on exploring the affective nature of particular urban moments and encounters: seeking to understand the affective forces that govern women in public space, while simultaneously uncovering the creative and powerful ways that women negotiate atmosphere, and even cause atmospheric change. Mobilising a more-than-representational methodology, I employ a multi-methods approach, which contributes to overcoming the difficulty of capturing the intangibility of affect/atmosphere, while maintaining a focus on the female body as an organiser of experience and a site of agency.
This dissertation concludes with an emphasis of public space as an affective and felt space, highlighting the importance of understanding the affective components of everyday life. Putting a geography of women’s urban fear in dialogue with affect/atmospheres has proven a productive academic pursuit. Politically, a more complex understanding of women’s experience in public space could contribute to working towards more progressive framings of women’s agency in the street, mechanisms to tackle gender-based violence and ultimately improved gender equality in Denmark. I encourage future research to employ a more intersectional lens, particularly along lines of sexuality, race and ethnicity, to further enhance this understanding.
UG-23/11 The Geographies of a Crumbling Hospital: the effects of austerity, rurality and spatial violence on the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Kings Lynn The current NHS is characterised by ‘crisis’ as it grapples to recover from the dual impact of austere underfunding and pandemic pressure. This crisis has a hidden spatial variation as the local geographies in which an individual hospital is situated have the potential to worsen or lessen the impacts. This dissertation uses the example of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Kings Lynn, which is unique due to its remote rural location and the 3433 steel and timber props acting as a failsafe for the roof deemed a ‘structural risk’, to demonstrate how distinctive local factors can heavily influence the everyday experience of both staff and patients within hospital space. By adopting a mixed-methods approach combining data from interviews, NHS Staff Surveys and a Twitter analysis the study was able to analyse how several factors interact to shape hospital space and interactions. Findings showed that the physical deterioration of space can ‘wound’ the people forced to live amongst the decay – in the case of a state­controlled hospital, this can be understood as a form of spatial violence. Results also emphasise the strain placed on NHS staff creates a vicious cycle of decline that can compromise patient outcomes and is exacerbated by the unique situation of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. This study was the first to assess the importance of a relationship between hospitals and their local community to increase resilience and ensure healthcare takes place in dignified worlds. This dissertation concluded that in order for the NHS to truly serve the people, it is essential to understand how people – including staff and patients – experience hospitals and other healthcare facilities differently depending on unique local geographies.
UG-23/12 Critical Review Essay
Evaluating the Success of Management of Recent Effusive Volcanic Crises
As an ever-increasing number of people are exposed to volcanic hazards worldwide, understanding how to effectively manage a volcanic crisis is of growing importance. Approaching volcanic risk requires a holistic understanding of volcanology, including both the geophysical behaviour of a volcano and the social challenges present in proximal communities. This paper reviews the theoretical understanding of all aspects of volcanic risk management, from monitoring of eruption precursors to the current understanding of social vulnerability, scientific and social uncertainty, and risk perception. These ideas are then applied to the contexts of the eruptions of Kīlauea and Cumbre Vieja, two effusive eruptions of similar magnitudes and contexts that produced extensive lava flows, disrupting transport and energy infrastructure, and destroying the homes of thousands. This review finds successes in the geophysical monitoring of both crises, illustrating the value of effective monitoring systems in a volcanic context. Communication between volcanologists, the media, the public and other stakeholders in both cases was also strong. Crowdsourcing of visual data from the public, for example, was employed by scientists, demonstrating a diffusive boundary of communication and involving the knowledge of residents in the scientific process. The eruptions illustrate lessons for the handling of uncertainty and creating regulations to support safe tourist opportunities in the face of crisis. Additionally, the contexts of Hawai’i and La Palma demonstrate the complex push and pull factors present in volcanic regions that cause residents to move to or continue living in volcanic areas despite knowledge of the risk, presenting an additional challenge to volcanic management in these regions. A review of the literature around the two eruptions also reveals a gap in current research on social vulnerability and local risk perception at these locations, indicating an avenue for further research in both these cases and others around the world.
UG-23/13 Queer Gentrification in the East End: The Creation of Pseudo-Inclusionary Spaces of Expression Over the last two decades, the Docklands redevelopment, and the Olympic Games have significantly altered the built environment and the demographics of East London. Gentrification is a complex form of neighbourhood change with multiple social and economic ramifications on local populations that has been documented in East London (Butler, 2007; Watt, 2013). Under deliberate place-marketing strategies of cosmopolitanism promoted by the 2012 Olympics, underpinned by implicit homonationalist discourses, the East End is increasingly framed as an inclusive space for queer people (Brown, 2006; Hubbard & Wilkinson, 2014). Precedents of white queer experiences of urban change and notions of “queer gentrification” are documented in different contexts, following the Castro District in San Francisco (Castells, 1983; Lewis, 2013). This dissertation addresses a deficit within gentrification literature, by centring a “queer of colour critique” (El-Tayeb, 2012), to highlight conflicts faced by queer people of colour (QPOC) in East London, from both queer and ethnic communities, and its repercussions on feelings of safety and belonging. I argue that lived realities of safety and queerness are radically different for QPOC, primarily due to intersections of marginalised identities. Secondly, experiences of gentrification are articulated in relation to their intersectional identities, exposing contradictions in notions of cosmopolitan urbanism where exclusive, homogenous queer spaces are reproduced in the East End. Lastly, the politics of belonging in East London are realised as pseudo-inclusionary for QPOC, with some movement towards progressive spaces through radical nightlife. This informs gentrification to be conceptualised as a plural process, manifesting disjunctively on different individuals.
UG-23/14 Building a city image: investigating how the UK news media has represented The Line in Saudi Arabia. Urban development projects have become increasingly prominent as globalisation has enhanced the need for cities to compete at the global scale and as such, they have received greater attention in the academic literature. This dissertation contributes to the academic literature, spotlighting the under-studied role of the media in urban development projects and substantiating the literature on representation in development. Using 142 articles from popular UK news sources and interviews with journalists, this dissertation investigates how The Line in Saudi Arabia has been represented in the news media, contributing to its city image. Concepts from urban geography, development studies and notions of city image are employed to explore the city’s discursive representations and how these are constructed. The dissertation’s findings reveal the image created for The Line in the news media is intertwined with ideas about the model city, particularly in terms of trends towards smart cities, infrastructural prowess and challenges, and politics. Ultimately the different images presented of The Line are found to contribute to sceptical framings of the project’s feasibility and artificiality, which compound widespread discourses concerning Arabs and Middle Eastern urban development projects. The construction of The Line forms part of a series of plans proposed by Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Mohammed bin Salman, in an attempt to reform the country and prepare for a post-oil future, thus situating the dissertation in a potentially pivotal moment of national transformation.
UG-23/15 A multi-method investigation into information diffusion on Twitter, in relation to the 2022 UK energy crisis Since Twitter launched in 2006, the social media platform has changed the way people communicate, now hosting almost 450 million users worldwide. With the aim to give everyone an instant voice, it has been heralded for flattening traditional social hierarchies through innovative features such as hashtags and retweets. But in this relatively new landscape, there is still little consensus as to how information flows on Twitter and whether traditional theory on public discussion can be applied to this new space. This piece seeks to fill these gaps by exploring the Twitter discourse surrounding the UK 2022 energy crisis. Employing novel multi-method analysis on a study sample of the 105,000 tweets posted over the time the energy price cap was unveiled in August, this research delves into the inherent geography of Twitter. As a salient everyday issue, the study site is well-suited to addressing theoretical questions of Habermas’ public sphere, as this space was traditionally conceived to debate daily events. Additionally, this study methodologically represents a benchmark for future research as big data analysis becomes more important and Twitter as a platform instigates a host of changes.
UG-23/16 Long-term phenology of autumn raptor migration along the East African-Eurasian Flyway in relation to climate change. Climate change has already led to dramatic phenological shifts in the timing of bird migration, transforming ecological processes and population dynamics. Examining shifts in raptor migration are especially important, given the crucial role of many raptors as apex predators within ecosystems. The East African-Eurasian Flyway is a globally important flyway for raptor migration, yet phenological shifts in autumn raptor migration have never been studied along it. Using historical migration count data from Batumi, Georgia this study has analysed how the timing of post-breeding autumn migration has changed along this flyway in ten raptor species from 2008 to 2022. For six of these species, autumn migration timing has been examined from 1990 to 2022, using historical migration count data from the Northern Valleys, Israel. By relating these trends to historical temperatures in breeding grounds, the relationship between raptor migration timing and climate change has been explored. In contrast to previous research into raptor migration, this study reveals that most species of raptor along the East African-Eurasian Flyway have shown no change in the timing of post-breeding autumn migration, despite increases in temperature in their breeding grounds. The lack of phenological shifts is attributed to low phenotypic plasticity in migration timing, due to most species in this study being long- distance migrants with long generation times. Several species have shown delays in migration timing though, often on a scale larger than what has been observed before in raptors. These shifts are theorised to be due to shorter migration distances in these species, allowing them to extend their breeding season in response to climate change. Importantly, this study suggests that climate change is altering predator-prey interactions in many of the raptor species in this study, regardless of their response, disrupting the ecological structure and dynamics of ecosystems.
UG-23/17 Unlocking the City: Addressing social and environmental inequalities through shared micromobility in Cambridge This dissertation explores the potential of the ‘Voi Technology’ shared micromobility scheme to alleviate social and environmental inequalities and enable previously marginalised groups to access transport in Cambridge. Shared micromobility is an increasingly salient form of public urban transport consisting of lightweight personal vehicles including electric scooters (e-scooters) and electric bikes (e-bikes) (Sustrans, 2019). These novel means of transportation were introduced to England via a series of trial schemes by the government beginning in 2020 (DfT, 2022). Shared micromobility schemes are marketed as a potential long-term solution to current social and environmental problems prevalent across transportation models across British cities (Olabi, et al., 2023; Asensio, et al., 2022). Cambridge was one of 17 British cities to participate in the initial wave of shared micromobility scheme trials operated by ‘Voi Technology’. (Cambridge City Council, 2020). The city has the highest levels of socio-economic inequality in Britain and a disconnected transport system. This dissertation explores whether the introduction of Voi has helped Cambridge to overcome these inequities (Luxon, 2020; Ferguson, 2020). This study presents data sourced from 10 semi-structured interviews with current users of the scheme; 4 interviews with key stakeholders; questionnaire data garnered from 77 users and 82 non-users of the scheme, and photographs taken by the author that reinforce the discussion. This dissertation concludes that there are considerable benefits including convenience, pleasure, social cohesion, sustainability and the reduction of bike theft that enable improved access to the city. However, the data also reveals significant barriers obstructing the success of the scheme such as affordability and irresponsible use. Thus, this dissertation raises questions about the future of mobility and connections between citizenship studies and transport and can provide recommendations for Voi Technology and similar micromobility startups going forward.
UG-22/01 The Mutable Body: Exploring the Changeable Everyday Experiences of Living with Type 1 Diabetes Approximately 400,000 individuals in the UK are currently living with Type 1 Diabetes; an incurable chronic condition that occurs when the body is unable to produce insulin which is the hormone responsible for controlling the level of glucose in the body’s bloodstream (JDRF, 2022a). Nevertheless, while there exists considerable geographical literature exploring the space of ‘the body’ and the factors that influence the everyday experiences of bodies with various illness and impairments (Longhurst, 1997; Moss and Dyck, 2003; Mol, 2003; Crooks et al., 2018; Andrews, 2019), such geographical work relating explicitly to the Type 1 diabetic body remains limited (Lucherini, 2016; 2019). This original dissertation contributes to existing literature on ‘geographies of health’ and ‘geographies of the body’, and, more specifically, the ‘Type 1 diabetic body’. By completing eighteen in-depth semi-structured interviews with individuals living with Type 1 Diabetes, it uncovers how the Type 1 diabetic body and its everyday experiences are products of not simply the body’s biological materiality, but also its relations to various materials, other human bodies and popular discourses associated with Type 1 diabetes. More specifically, it indicates how the ways in which the Type 1 diabetic body changeably interacts with these relations, in different everyday spaces at different times, work to render the body’s everyday form, functioning, emotions and behaviours liable to change. Hence, the Type 1 diabetic body may be described as ‘mutable’.
UG-22/02 A Ticking Lyme Bomb? An analysis of the influence of climate change and (sub)urbanisation on the incidence of Lyme disease in Pennsylvania, USA. Lyme disease is the most prevalent tick-borne infection in the United States, and is becoming more common, with an estimated 476,000 cases annually. Growing recognition of the potentially serious health impacts of Lyme disease infection, alongside the rising associated economic costs, have prompted greater research in recent years. This has identified climate change and (sub)urbanisation as key drivers in the emergence, geographic spread and rising incidence of Lyme disease. However, there remains a lack of adequate analysis of the role of seasonal climate across the lifecycle of the tick vector of Lyme disease, alongside clear empirical evidence linking (sub)urbanisation with rising incidence in a geographically-constrained area. This dissertation seeks to address these gaps, whilst also investigating whether variables identified as significant elsewhere appear to be drivers at this scale and geographic location. This dissertation focuses on Pennsylvania, the state with the highest recorded cases annually, yet an area under-represented in previous studies, at the county-level. A variety of climate and land-use variables were assessed, to analyse both the spatial and temporal patterns of Lyme disease incidence across Pennsylvania. Overall, compelling evidence of climate change and (sub)urbanisation-related land-use changes being primary drivers of the spatial and temporal patterns of Lyme disease in Pennsylvania are found. In particular, spring precipitation in the year prior to infection and forest cover are key predictors of interannual spatial variation. Changes to spring temperatures and land-cover are shown to be drivers of differential incidence increases across the state. In the counties experiencing the greatest increases in Lyme disease incidence, (sub)urbanisation is a significant factor behind this rise, while in counties with little change in incidence, none of the variables tested here are responsible, demonstrating the spatially heterogenous influence of environmental factors to Lyme disease, and hence the importance of context-specific public health approaches in the future.
UG-22/03 Care on-demand: Expanding gig to account for a feminised experience of platform work The growth of “non-standard” work in recent years has ignited discussions over the role of work in peoples’ lives and what the future of work might look like. Exemplifying these concerns, the gig economy, which is technologically facilitated and systematically circumvents labour protections, has become the epicentre of debates over the future of work. Analysis has begun into the implications of flexible app-based work although, as this study seeks to rectify, the experiences of women in female-dominated sectors have largely been missed from the research. This study is a starting point at rebalancing the voices represented in the gig literature. Drawing primarily from interviews with women working in domestic roles organised via platforms this research provides an account of gig work in domestic spaces. This account is critical, demonstrating the ways in which current theories and ideas about the gig economy are incompatible with the experiences of those in feminised sectors. Employing a multi-disciplinary and feminist approach this study presents the unique, and often gendered, tensions felt by women working in intimate roles; their experiences of time, commitment, autonomy and their gendered, working identities have yet to be captured in accounts of gig work. This study finds that domestic gig work pushes at the edges of what is known about gig work in several ways, suggesting a variety of new challenges and opportunities yet to be explored in the future of work.
UG-22/04 Deserving Subjects: An Analysis of Migrant Selection and Neoliberal Citizenship in Singapore In Singapore, migration is a pressing and highly divisive political issue that has received much scholarship attention. This dissertation builds on the existing critical literature by training academic attention onto the portrayal of migrants through discourse analysis. Using data from a corpus of 36 newspaper articles, parliamentary debates, political speeches, and policy briefs, this dissertation investigates how the political discourses of migrants reveal the countervailing economic, political and security objectives of the state. Drawing on concepts from political geography, citizenship studies, mobility studies and the geographies of threat and security, this research traces the discursive representations of two groups of migrants – foreign workers and foreign talents – and consider both the material and discursive implications of their representation. This dissertation will highlight how neoliberal discourses of deservingness and common vocabularies of threat are mobilised in different ways for each migrant group to articulate the complex interplay of the economic, political and security objectives of the state. Findings show that although these two groups of migrants share the same corporeal city, their embodied, spatial and social experiences of the city are very much different. This dissertation comes at a watershed moment where immigration policies in Singapore are in constant flux. With a paradigmatic shift to a points-based system of assessment on the horizon, this has a considerable impact on discussions on the lived realities of migrants in Singapore.
UG-22/05 The ‘Führer City Linz’: The Role of Architecture in Embodying the National Socialist German Workers’ Party’s Ideology This dissertation aims to understand how architecture was used to embody Nazi Party ideology, including their community ideologies and their imaginary of an immortal Third Reich, through the use of neoclassical styles and community architecture. This dissertation uses a triangulation framework of visual and textual analysis of speeches, memoirs and letters from leading Nazi Party figures, interrogations led by the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Historic Monuments in War Areas and the models and plans for the Linz City Project in Austria. A qualitative approach was used, through thematic coding, to extract reflexive themes linking to the research questions and existing literature. The dissertation had a threefold aim: to reflect on why Linz was a significant location for a Führer State; explore how architecture was used to embody the ‘community’ ideology; and analyse how architecture was utilised to create the imaginary of an immortal Third Reich Empire. This dissertation contributes to the literature on the city projects taking place in the Führer States: Berlin; Munich; Hamburg; and Nuremberg, where architectural methods have been recognised as contributing to the production of an ordered and ‘pure’ German culture and society as their landscapes and architectural styles are ‘representative’ of the Volk (Taylor, 1974). Key architectural styles that have been drawn out of the current literature and further analysed in this dissertation are: size; rectangular spaces; lines of sight and direction; and immortality (Gell, 1998; Taylor, 1974). This dissertation offers a unique study area, as it is outside Germany’s borders and was arguably the project Hitler felt most emotionally attached to. I conclude that architecture was a tool to embody the power and desired ‘clarity’ of the Aryan volkisch community, with ordered large boulevards, rectangular spaces and lines of sight and direction, manifesting this ideology to all those in the landscape. I also conclude that to embody the imaginary of an immortal Third Reich, architectural styles were used to stage both the past and the future, using the Doric order and scale of buildings respectively.
UG-22/06 Relational landscapes along a more-than-human railway: Settle-Carlisle, 1875-1930

The field of landscape studies has evolved from a discipline concerned primarily with landscape as it was constructed textually, to a more holistic discipline which recognises the agency of other-than-human objects in these relations. Not only can landscape be constructed, it also ‘is’, and it becomes (or performs as) part of a distinct atmosphere around the observer. Landscape is therefore ‘more-than-representational’. However, literature on this topic often fails to address the influence of more-than-human – particularly technological – actants as mediators of the affective atmosphere between observer and the landscape. Achieving this recognition is the focal point of this paper.

In order to address these concepts, I shall consider how they apply in practice to railway passenger-landscape relations. Historically, railways and landscape have oft been studied in tandem, but primarily only in reference to the representations generated following the arrival of the railway, and rarely, if ever, considering the more complex web of social-technological-natural relations which are present.

In this paper, I move discussion beyond the theoretical realm by analysing these concepts in practice, focusing on the early history of the Settle – Carlisle line as a case study. I apply a ‘historical re-enactive’ methodology to develop a more-than-representational overview of the train’s role as a mediator of passengers’ experiences. I identify particular features of the train which are situated ‘between’ the passenger and the landscape, explain how those features related to the atmosphere that passengers found themselves in, and then show the consequences of embodied relations between those features, passengers, and the landscape. I conclude by emphasising the importance of attending to mediating technologies, and the value of synthesising relationality, materiality, mediation, and atmosphere to better understand landscapes as more-than-representational.

UG-22/07 Belief in the meritocracy? Children’s imagined futures in a stratified world. An intimate perspective. This research seeks to explore children’s imagined futures in a time of ‘austere meritocracy’ (Mendick et al., 2018) as they are being encouraged by government promoted narratives of meritocracy to have ambitious, economically productive goals whilst living in a highly unequal society where social mobility is increasingly challenging (Owens and de St Croix, 2020). It seeks to understand whether young people are aware of this tension, or whether they are engaging with meritocratic narratives. Data was collected by speaking to 18 primary school students, aged 10 or 11, across three socio-economically diverse schools. Students conducted creative tasks to establish their socio-economic status, imagined futures and awareness of potential barriers to achieving their goals. Gender, class and place were found to significantly influence young people’s imagined futures. Girls across the socio-economic spectrum showed awareness of barriers they were likely to face in the future as a woman and working class children showed awareness of economic barriers they were likely to face. Middle class children showed the least engagement with discourses encouraging them to become economically productive citizens and were the only group that aspired to more creative, rather than academic, jobs. This research shows that government promoted discourses of meritocracy and aspiration within the education system are not influencing all children equally, and most are aware that our society is not entirely meritocratic.
UG-22/08 Two Decades of Retreat of Bylot Island Glaciers Globally, most glaciers are experiencing retreat due to continued global warming (IPCC, 2021). Arctic amplification is enhancing this warming in the Arctic creating concern for the future health of the Arctic’s glaciers. This study presents new estimates for the changes to the extent of glaciated area and the margin retreat of the 16 largest glaciers on Bylot Island, Nunavut, Canada. Area changes were calculated using a new semi-automated classification method, the Automated Glacier Extraction Index (AGEI), proposed by Zhang et al (2019). It marks a slight improvement on the existing NIR/SWIR method. Estimates for margin change were calculated using the GEEDiT and MaQiT tools developed by Lea (2018) which enable rapid digitisation of margins and quantification retreat. All Bylot Island’s largest glaciers retreated between 2001-2021 at an average rate of 28.85 m yr-1 over a two-decade period. The extent of the island’s main ice cap decreased by 250.6 km2 over a 15-year period (2001-2016), taking the total ice loss since 1958/61 to ~503.6 km2. Annually resolved measurements of margin change reveal that glacier characteristics and margin setting exhibited an important control on glacial retreat. In total, 8 glaciers were identified as potential surging glaciers. Of these, one advanced during the first decade (2001-2011).
UG-22/09 Modelling Germination Level Soil Temperature for the Study of Subarctic High Latitude Treeline Movement Rapid warming in the Arctic is projected to cause widespread ecological change, especially at the boundary between boreal forests and the Arctic tundra, known as the treeline. Models of treeline movement often do not account for soil temperature due to limited direct measurements of soil temperature at treeline sites, using air temperature instead. This is not ideal as there is a growing body of literature supporting the biological importance of soil temperature for tree recruitment. This study builds a one-dimensional semi-infinite solid heat transfer model of soil temperature in the germination zone using remote sensing and reanalysis data. Daily and site-to-site variation in soil thermal properties are accounted for through the integration of the analytical heat transfer model with statistical models of key parameters. The model is validated using direct soil temperature measurements at 27 pan-Arctic sites at depths between 5 and 20cm. Overall, the model is found to be a better fit for soil temperature than air temperature. Finally, the soil temperature based growing season length is calculated at the treeline and the potential value of estimating soil temperatures for future studies of treeline movement is briefly considered.
UG-22/10 Remembering to Forget How memories of the Teneguía (1971) eruption shaped the response to the Cumbre Vieja (2021) eruption, La Palma (Canary Islands). La Palma, Canary Islands, is one of the most volcanically active islands of the archipelago, with three eruptions occurring within living memory (Carracedo et al., 2001). In September 2021, La Palma gripped the world’s media as a fissure eruption began on the 19th of September, after fifty years of quiescence (Longpré, 2021). The eruption quickly became the most destructive in La Palma’s history; with 1,676 buildings destroyed by lava flows, the level of destruction was unprecedented and left deep psychological scars for those who lived through it. The last eruption to occur in La Palma was the 1971 eruption of Teneguía, a strombolian eruption that occurred near the sparsely populated town of Fuencaliente (Araña, 1974). The Teneguía eruption caused minimal damage and was thus fondly remembered for the natural show of a lifetime it gave locals and tourists who flocked from across the globe to view the spectacle (ibid). This dissertation aims to draw upon previous work in disaster risk reduction research (e.g., Longo, 2019 and Madson & O’Mullen, 2013) and apply the lens of memory and identity to the 2021 Cumbre Vieja eruption. By conducting interviews with civilians and elites combined with discourse analysis of newspaper articles, this dissertation found a substantial relationship between memories of Teneguía, the Palmero identity and the response to the 2021 eruption. As La Palma moves into the recovery phase and begins to look to the future of volcanic hazard management, this dissertation could not be more critical. However, further work on collecting interviews throughout the recovery phase and attempts to apply Taylor et al., (2020)’s methodology of ‘Messy Maps’ would enhance volcanic risk assessment and hazard management in the Canary Islands.
UG-22/11

Critical Review Essay

A fung(u)ide to addressing the problems of the modern world: towards a critical geography of the mushroom

What can we learn by thinking like – or thinking with – mushrooms? Fungi form complex networks through series of entanglements with other fungi as well as other species, forming symbiotic relationships. Thinking through entanglements, both entanglements with other humans, as well as the more-than-human, can inform geographical thinking about living through the Anthropocene. In more-than-human geographies, animals have had their moment, and even plants; it’s more than time to consider the potential of fungi for understanding the modern day. To do so, we can think through entanglements, the more-than-human, geographies of affect and the microbiopolitics of fungal life. Fungi are amazing and unique organisms that have the potential to transform landscapes and environments from within the ground. The practice of fermentation can offer an ontology whereby we begin to understand the importance of fungi in our lives, as well as being a philosophy for delivering change. It also becomes fruitful to increase the scale of investigation through addressing how the philosophy of fermentation have practical approaches as a method of metabolising waste and the negative effects of the Anthropocene. Finally, discovering how these practical effects can be applied to real-world circumstances offers a guide to living with and through the Anthropocene via fungal connections. Moving up in scales in such a way shows how significant fungi are to many functions: from the individual body to a systems-scale. Investigating such themes will answer the question: what can we learn from mushrooms?
UG-22/12 Critical Review Essay
A Critical Review of Energy Justice: Is there room for the more-than-human?
This critical review essay examines the concept of energy justice in its current state and aims to address whether an incorporation of more-than-human theories would make it a more effective tool for policy makers. It provides an overview of energy justice literature, highlighting the importance of such a concept in the context of global energy system transitions that could provide an opportunity for enacting socio-economic and environmental change. More-than-human theories are suggested as a method to address two of the main criticisms of energy justice, its anthropocentric nature and its reliance on Western knowledges. There is a challenge to the Western perception of the environment as a resource for human use and control, towards non-Western and Indigenous understandings of natures intrinsic value, promoted by more-than-human and post-development theories. Reflecting on these emerging examples of non-human agency, a case study of a proposed development in the UK energy system is analysed first through energy justice in its current state, compared with an alternate energy justice that aims to value more-than-human agency. The proposed Woodhouse Colliery in Whitehaven is chosen as a contemporary example of the major debates within the energy system, between the need for jobs and environmental action. The analysis finds that although there are many of the tools necessary to achieve procedural justice for more-than-human actors, the challenge lies with justice of distribution and recognition. For energy justice to be effectively implemented there will need to be a radical shift in Western understandings of the environment, from a passive object to an active subject. Although there is some evidence this shift may be beginning, with some non-human agency making its way into policy, there have also been recent examples with much less success in enacting social and environmental reform, such as the proposal of a Green New Deal in the UK and USA.
UG-22/13 Can Buildings Heal? The therapeutic potential of biophilic urban design This dissertation aims to investigate how biophilic design in the built environment can support and improve human well-being, with a focus on emotional restoration. One purpose-built (Oldham) and one interim (Cambridge) Maggie’s centre are used as case studies to explore how relationships with and emotional responses to the built environment emerge in spaces with different degrees of biophilic design. Visual content analysis and thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews were conducted. The analysis revealed that patterns and aspects of biophilic design could be detected at both centres, yet much more powerfully at Maggie’s Oldham, due to the purposeful inclusion of natural design elements like wooden materials into the integral structure and function of the space. The results also showed how this presence of biomimicry fostered positive emotional responses that helped visitors feel calm, happy, and comfortable. This dissertation demonstrates the affective power of the built environment, when utilising biophilic design, in the ways in which natural features contributed to supra-individual ‘architectural atmospheres’ (Martin et al. 2019) through the construction of fields of collective emotional energy that shaped the capabilities of individuals and encourage positive emotions. Meanwhile, it is shown that this architectural affect constitutes just one element of a broader ‘ecology of place’ (Thrift 1999) in the centres, operating alongside the interactions of hu-man and non-human actors. This dissertation emphasises the importance of networks of human interaction and support at both Maggie’s centres, to high-light how emotions are mediated socio-spatially through relations both with people and environments. This dissertation concludes by paying attention to the overlapping and intertwined nature of the built and social environments, which co-constitute the intersubjective force-fields of emotion and affect within the Maggie’s centres. It argues that the biophilic urban space at Maggie’s centres effectively acts as an emotionally resonant foundation, as a ‘silent carer’ (Butterfield and Martin n.d.) that actively underpins and supports the healing practices and social interrelations that occur upon it.
UG-22/14 The impact of ice mélange buttressing in Neny Fjord (W Graham Land, Antarctic Peninsula) on Neny and Remus Glacier Ice mélange has been recognised as a proglacial factor influencing glacier dynamics through mechanical backstress at the calving front of marine-terminating outlet glaciers. However, observations of the interactions between ice mélange and glacier terminus are limited in number and geographical spread. This study investigates ice mélange processes in a fjord on the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula and their impact on the glaciers terminating in that fjord through buttressing effects. Image classification methods are applied to Landsat data in order to derive area measurements of ice mélange cover at different points throughout the daylight season. Significant interannual variations in ice mélange area are evident between 2001 and 2018. A dramatic difference in the timing of ice mélange disintegration is discovered between the austral summers of 2016-17 and 2017-18; this occurrence is explained as a result of the coupling of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation and the Southern Annular Mode, which drive variability of surface air temperatures and, more importantly, ocean temperatures via the upwelling of warm Circumpolar Deep Water onto the continental shelf off the southwestern Antarctic Peninsula. The insights into ice mélange behaviour are then related to surface velocity data of the three glaciers terminating in the fjord. The results are mixed, yet there is indication that the proglacial ice mélange exerts significant backstress on their calving fronts. It is found that seasonally resolved velocity data are needed to test the hypotheses made about the relationship of ice mélange buttressing and glacier velocity.
UG-22/15 Critical Review Essay
Revisiting the Enlightenment: mapping influences on geographical thought

The origins of modern geography are often traced back to the imperial antics of a number of European states, and, as a result, geography rather quickly became “the science of imperialism par excellence” (Livingstone 1992: 160). However, a budding literature that emerged towards the end of the last century places geography as originating in the period of time we have come to know as the Enlightenment.

Following the seminal text by Livingstone and Withers, Geography and Enlightenment, this critical review essay will explore in greater depth how Enlightenment was geographical, as well as exploring in further depth geography’s “perennial obsession with the far away, with mapping the world, [and] with exhibiting classi?ed knowledge” (Livingstone and Withers 1999: 2) through chapters on exploration, mapping, and classi?cation, as well as using the biographies of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) and James Cook (1728-1779).

Particularly in line with the focus of decolonial literature, this essay will also examine the relationship both of these entities have with empire: perhaps what Livingstone and Withers were alluding to when they wrote of geography’s interest in “the imposition of European ways of thinking” (ibid). However, the essay will show Enlightenment as neither entirely emancipatory nor entirely imperial: that Enlightenment thinkers put forth critiques of imperialism at great personal risk, but were not capable of eliminating imperialist impulses.

Ultimately this essay will show that geography, Enlightenment, and empire alike are each complex and variegated enterprises, complicated even further when considered in relation to one another – and that this does not weaken the discipline, but, rather, that acknowledging the complexities is indeed a symbol of a strong discipline.

UG-22/16 Visceral Temporality (Not) Eating, Embodiment and Disordered Time Listening to the stories of nine individuals with (histories of) eating disorders, this dissertation unites the theoretical frameworks of queer phenomenology and visceral and affective geographies to explore the temporal intimacies, practices, and embodiments of living with, and through, an eating disorder (Lavis, 2016). Orientating myself towards ‘mad’ scholarship and feminist epistemologies that question claims to objectivity and warn against co-optation of narratives, I seek to empower my participants and their lived knowledge. As such, the complementary methods of photo elicitation and semi-structured interviews were employed for their emancipatory potential and to elicit rich narratives. I move beyond biomedical psychiatric and Foucauldian feminist interpretations of eating disorders that consider the body to be passive, exploring the visceral and affective complexities and liveliness of eating disordered bodies (Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy, 2020). My focus on temporality supplements existing research on eating disorders which largely attend to materiality and relationality (Warin, 2010; Gooldin, 2008; Eli & Lavis, 2021; Lavis, 2013, 2017). While I do not neglect the material and relational intensities of eating disorders, my dissertation argues these are co-constituted, mediated, enlivened, and dulled by temporality: both in the way temporality is experientially registered but also actively mobilised and performed as a coping strategy for those with eating disorders. Crucially then, this dissertation finds time is not a deadened ‘just happening’ but holds visceral potential as those with eating disorders feel their subversion of normative time and social rhythms. Consequently, for individuals with eating disorders, temporality is affectively textured through habits, more/less-than atmospheres of anticipation or (dis)comfort, and the entanglement of the future presenced and living present (Anderson, 2010). This dissertation reveals the need for geography, especially health geographies, to dedicate time to time. Scholarship must conceptually attend to temporality beyond linear teleology, instead acknowledging its embodied, situated, and relational capacities. The effectivity of an interdisciplinary approach alongside ‘mad’, feminist epistemological and methodological orientations for future studies of temporality and mental health is further underscored.
UG-22/17 Towards a historical ecology of Vestland, Norway: a palaeo perspective

The reconstruction of palaeoecological change is crucial to understanding the dynamic and multiple trajectories of environmental change over the 21st century and beyond. In order to accurately understand these potential trajectories, background information on ecosystem dynamics and variability are needed. Historical palaeoecological studies covering the ‘geologically recent’ period provide this missing link between palaeoenvironmental change and modern ecological dynamics. This is particularly important in high-latitude temperate forest environments where forest and shrub expansion are altering carbon cycle dynamics and atmosphere-soil-vegetation feedbacks to amplify modern warming.

This study utilises historical ecology as a methodology to reconstruct the palaeoecological histories of two lake catchments, Lontjørnane and Stoylsvatnet, in west Norway over the last millennia. These cultural landscapes provide rare records of dynamic ecosystem variability in response to evolving disturbance regimes, predominantly agricultural activity and environmental change. By reconciling the palynological records with historical documentation, the dominant and directive control of anthropogenic activity on ecosystem structure, composition, and dynamics in these ‘wild’ landscapes is revealed. Both sites record vegetation histories consistent with early agricultural activity followed by late forest re-growth in response to land abandonment and modern warming after centuries of cumulative disturbance. These palaeoecological histories provide the information needed for situated conservation frameworks and projections of future ecological change in Vestland, Norway.

A robust tephrochronological framework is built at both sites in order to effectively constrain and interpret the temporal dynamics of palaeoecological changes. This chronology is constructed from key Icelandic cryptotephra isochrons and 210Pb dating. In addition, this study reports the first identification of distal cryptotephra deposits from the 1625 AD eruption of Katla and only the fourth identification of distal deposits from the 1477 AD Veiðivötn eruption – the latter of which presents a potential chronostratigraphic tiepoint for the onset of the Little Ice Age.

UG-22/18 ‘A difficult line to walk’ Austerity and the Divided City: How do foodbanks navigate political polarisation and segregation in Belfast, Northern Ireland? This dissertation explores the ways in which foodbanks navigate political polarisation and ethnosectarian segregation in the city of Belfast, Northern Ireland. To do so, I first ground my investigation within the relevant literature on theories of civil society, urban segregation, and austerity. However, despite there being a growing body of geographical scholarship dedicated to investigating the dramatic rise and rise of foodbanks in the context of austerity Britain, there have been few attempts to examine these within the devolved region of Northern Ireland. This investigation is an attempt to both fill this gap, and answer Strong’s (2020) call for a closer engagement with the “everyday spatial politics of foodbanking” (pp. 212). To do so, interviewed a range of food bank managers working throughout the city in order to produce a qualitative account understanding of food poverty and austerity in the region. By focusing on the perspectives of foodbank managers within organisations across Belfast, this investigation devotes warranted attention to what Williams et al. (2016) call the “neglected politics articulated within foodbanks themselves” (pp. 2292). To unpack the themes of this ‘neglected politics’ I uncovered, I performed a discourse analysis on my interview transcripts using NVivo coding software. This investigation provides insight into how civil society organisations, like foodbanks, navigate austerity within the context of a divided city. Primarily, my findings illustrate how the foodbank managers and volunteers, who are locally embedded within the communities they serve, are an invaluable resource. However, my findings suggest that they are not a finite resource and volunteer burn-out is a potentially destabilising force within the austere, post-conflict city.
UG-22/19 Beaver Biopolitics and Human-Beaver Entanglements in Ladock, Cornwall Beavers are highly contested creatures who have been perceived throughout history both as useful, hard-working animals and troublesome, dangerous pests. As species reintroductions become increasingly popular in conservation, beavers are being brought back to Britain, from which they have been absent for around 500 years. In August 2021, I attempted to conduct four-and-a-half weeks of more-than-human anthropological field research to explore the lives of the beavers reintroduced under the Cornwall Beaver Project (CBP). Drawing on Michel Foucault’s theorization of biopower and Maan Barua’s understanding of nonhuman labour, this dissertation argues that the reintroduced beavers are being positioned as service providers in a more-than-human division of labour. It understands the CBP as a neoliberal biopolitical regime, governing beaver lives so as to maximise the performance of more-than-human labour and the generation of encounter value. This project finds that beavers do not passively acquiesce to human control and frequently undermine biopolitical management. However, the beavers cannot always escape the violence associated with neoliberal inflections of biopower. This suggests the need for reflection on the ways in which beaver reintroductions are occurring in Britain.
UG-22/20 Extinction Rebellion: Dutiful or disobedient? A Twitter analysis of April’s 2019 London protests Extinction Rebellion are a social movement who use civil disobedience tactics to endeavour to change state policies to prevent climate and ecological breakdown. In April 2019, Extinction Rebellion held an eleven-day protest in London causing major disruption. This study investigates public opinion on Extinction Rebellion through the platform of Twitter using the lens of citizenship. It first uses manual sentiment analysis to determine whether Twitter users suggest Extinction Rebellion were dutiful or disobedient in its actions in April 2019. It then explores the importance of tweeters’ beliefs on climate change and how change can be made to state policies, to better understand individuals’ tensions between a duty to respect local civil society and a duty of protection to a global civil society. This study has methodological contributions to the field of sentiment analysis and provides evidence that a social movement which performs civil disobedience and cause disruption can be perceived as morally dutiful.
UG-21/01 Roads to Improvement: The Construction of “Destitution Roads” by the Edinburgh Section of the Central Board as a response to Highland Famine, 1847-1850 Recent work in historical geography has investigated the ‘governmentalisation of famine’ in the nineteenth century (Nally, 2008; Sasson and Vernon, 2015). This literature has drawn on Foucault’s (2007) concept of governmentality to argue that famines were considered legitimate sites of intervention and that relief responses were designed to conduct specific societal outcomes. This dissertation explores the governmentalisation of famine further by examining the under-investigated Highland Potato Famine. Administrators of eleemosynary aid between 1847 and 1850 viewed famine responses as an opportunity to reconfigure and ‘improve’ Highland society. With elements of internal colonisation, relief programmes aimed to stimulate agrarian capitalism, a free market, and the transition of Highland cottars into landless, proletarianized labourers who were forced to sell labour and purchase food in that free market. This governance arguably made Highlanders more food insecure. Considering the efforts of the Edinburgh Section and the destitution road project, however, this research queries the overly-paradigmatic nature of Foucault’s (2007) theorised shift from sovereign-territorial power to a governmental-population regime, and its application to the governmentalisation of famine. Contrary to this paradigmatic interpretation, territory does not disappear from governmental concern but is considered in a new way. The Edinburgh Section’s governmental intervention through road construction within the boundaries of their relief area entailed the transformation of Highland land into a territory which could be governed according to the Section’s capitalist political ideologies. As such, territory was a ‘political technology’ in the governmentalisation of famine (Elden, 2013). The destitution road project calculated and managed networks and flows through Highland terrain, which made a Highland territory that was a coherent ‘spatio-political object’ for the Edinburgh Section’s governing policies and ideologies (Painter, 2010: 1104). In particular, control over Highland territory enabled networks of free market trade to circulate the Highlands, encouraged flows of waged labour and the proletarianization of Highland labourers, and stimulated new territorial property regimes and agricultural organisation for profit. Control of territory encouraged a shift from a tenancy system in which Highlanders possessed the means to subsistence towards a capitalist system that that was based on waged labour and commoditised food. This dissertation, therefore, concludes that the calculation and management of territory, as well as populations, must be considered in research into the governmentalisation of famine.
UG-21/02 An exploration of processes of de/politicisation in the French Citizens’ Convention on Climate Citizens assemblies on climate change are growing in popularity at the local, national, and even global scale. They are lauded as a way to bring about ambitious climate action, bringing citizens’ voices to the forefront on climate change, an issue where policymaking is often dominated by inaction from politicians and overly technical issue frames. However, this form of ‘deliberative democracy’ is also highly criticised by some for ‘depoliticising’ climate change, creating exclusions through consensus-seeking processes and preventing thinking beyond dominant societal paradigms, thus foreclosing visions of alternative futures. This dissertation seeks to explore processes of depoliticisation and politicisation of climate change within the French Citizens’ Convention on Climate (CCC), focusing on three core axes of reflection: consensus, the discursive framing of climate change, and expertise. It carries out a discourse analysis of videos of the Conventions sessions and the Convention’s final policy proposal document, as well as supporting documentary material. It shows that, contrary to those who argue that deliberative approaches are strongly depoliticising (Machin, 2013; Pepermans and Maeseele, 2016), both depoliticisation and politicisation of climate change take place within the CCC. It also highlights that framing climate change as not only a technical, but a social justice issue, is a core driver of politicisation, allowing citizens to challenge expert framings and understand society as contingent, enabling citizens to think beyond dominant societal paradigms. This dissertation suggests that future work should study depoliticisation and politicisation in citizens’ assemblies, providing policy relevant insights and informing ongoing debates about whether it is best to tackle climate change through politicisation or depoliticisation.
UG-21/03 An investigation of trends in fire occurrence and recurrence, burn severity, and vegetation health in the (Indigenous) Bolivian Amazon. Due to the small percentage of Amazonian forest in Bolivia, fire in the Bolivian Amazon generally receives less coverage than in other countries. Despite this, large portions of the country have recently faced greater fire outbreaks. The causes of these fires are anthropogenic; however, not all forest users contribute to this equally. Indigenous communities have been hailed as successful forest users of fire.
Thus, an investigation into the spatial variation of fire outbreaks and effects focusing on the difference between Indigenous lands and other lands may offer helpful insights. Using remote sensing products and vegetation indices, this study investigates the spatial distribution of fire occurrence and recurrence, burn severity, and vegetation health, focusing on land-cover and land tenure. The results show a significant difference between expected and observed frequencies of fire occurrence across land-covers and a significant difference between fire occurrence in Indigenous lands and other lands in five land-cover types. No statistically significant results could be drawn from burn severity trends; however, Indigenous lands appeared to suffer less severe burns. Statistically significant trends were identified in four land-cover change time series and one NDVI time series.
UG-21/04 Putting the Brakes on Fast Fashion: Investigating Barriers to the Growth of Slow Fashion Fast fashion is a $1.6 trillion dollar industry that is responsible for some of the most pressing social and environmental crises humanity faces. These include, inter alia, climate change, modern day slavery, precarious working environments and gender based violence both in the developed and developing world (Hoskins, 2014; Anguelov, 2015). However, since the late 2000s, an alternative paradigm has emerged – one that represents a departure from decades of socio-environmental decay under the incumbent fast fashion business model. This alternative enterprise is known as ‘slow fashion’, and it is steered on a foundation of climate positivity and social empowerment. The slow fashion movement has gathered some momentum over the last few years with positive change happening both at the institutional and consumer levels. However, despite the interest in slow approaches to fashion amongst academics, companies, consumers and the media, significant barriers to full-scale adoption remain.
This dissertation aims to unpack the roadblocks which stand in the way of slow fashion’s growth. The study triangulates data from interviews conducted with 7 CEOs of UK-based slow fashion companies and questionnaire data garnered from 110 young adults from various parts of the UK. I propose that there are three different types of barriers facing slow fashion: (1) demand-side barriers; (2) supply-side barriers and; (3) systemic barriers. In turn, this dissertation helps to reveal that in order to transition the fashion industry to a more sustainable future, interventions are not only needed at the level of the consumer and the firm, but they are also needed at the level of the political economy. These findings consequently enrich previous studies on the barriers to slow fashion and highlight areas of action for policy makers and future researchers.Key words: fast fashion, slow fashion, sustainability, sustainable fashion, neoliberal capitalism.
UG-21/05 Unequal foodscapes of plenty – An investigation into the socio-spatial food provisioning
strategies of low-income migrant mothers in Sham Shui Po, Hong Kong
In Hong Kong, urban food insecurity is a pressing issue that low-income families must overcome every day. Using data from a survey and 21 semi-structured interviews, this dissertation investigates how and why low-income Chinese migrant mothers living in the Sham Shui Po district use a variety of socio-spatial strategies to provide food for their families. Drawing on concepts from both feminist and food geographies, the research traces the women’s embodied, social, and spatial experiences with food provisioning starting from food acquisition to preparation and consumption. Findings highlight how their food provisioning strategies are characterised by dynamic forms of mobility between and within the public urban space and the private domestic space. Food acquisition occurs via three key avenues: personal purchase, formal charity food assistance, and informal networks. Decisions to utilise these avenues are governed by cost, food quality and quantity; the women also needed to simultaneously navigate embodied and temporal constraints imposed by childcare responsibilities. Strategies for food preparation involved negotiating domestic spatial constraints and food preferences of family members that subsequently govern differential modes of food consumption. The study also emphasises the value of social networks as a vital source of knowledge and material food exchange within the women’s food provisioning strategies. Ultimately, these women have the resourceful and adaptive ability to selectively deploy social and/or spatial food provisioning strategies across various sites to obtain affordable and quality food tailored to the needs of their family members. These strategies require navigating various constraints which are shaped by their class, gender, and the wider urban context. The study’s outcomes contribute towards research efforts seeking to understand the context-specific manifestations of, and coping mechanisms against urban food insecurity for low-income families.
UG-21/06 Use of a remotely sensed landform assemblage on a Svalbard glacial
forefield to determine the cause and nature of Little Ice Age glacial advance and subsequent retreat
This project uses a landform assemblage approach to determine the glacial history of Von Postbreen in western Spitsbergen, Svalbard. Landforms in Von Postbreen’s forefield are identified and interpreted using elevation data from the open access ArcticDEM and multi-swath fjord bathymetry. These data are supplemented with map sources and Landsat imagery that mark the glacier’s changing extent through time. The landforms identified are used to analyse Von Postbreen’s history. Aspects investigated are the likelihood of a Little Ice Age surge of the glacier, the nature and speed of its subsequent retreat, and differing landform preservation potentials between the submarine and terrestrial areas of the forefield. The landform assemblage at Von Postbreen was compared to a model, and is indicative of a surge during the Little Ice Age, in particular due to the presence of crevasse-squeeze ridges in the terrestrial forefield. The glacier has since undergone grounded retreated of 7.35km, at varying speeds through time, including a period of confluence with the adjacent glacier, Tunabreen. The landforms in both submarine and terrestrial environments have probably undergone alteration, by melt-out of ice-cored landforms in both environments, draping by sediments in submarine areas, and fluvial and aeolian erosion in terrestrial areas.
UG-21/07 Learning to Be Affected at the IDEAL Society Ecovillage: An
Embodied Education for a Posthumanist Economic World
Through the lens of the Diverse Economies literature, this dissertation investigates the diverse more-than-capitalist economic practices, ontologies, and educational systems of the IDEAL Society ecovillage in British Columbia, Canada. As we head towards environmental and climate crisis, it is becoming increasingly clear that the capitalist mode of production is failing to adequately protect both people and the environment. The ontologies underpinning the capitalist economy render the more-than-human world as a passive resource for humans to exploit – it calls for new ways of thinking that rework the relationship between economy and ecology, so that we can produce economic actors who choose to perform a fairer, more sustainable economic world. Cultivating more ethical economic subjects relies upon interrupting capitalist identities and instilling ontologies that create a moral imperative for us to act in the interests of the nonhuman world as well as our own. The ecovillage model is a prominent way in which groups are trying to develop a radically new economic ethics. People around the world are generating alternative lifestyles based upon revising the human relationship with interdependent ecosystems through communal living and emotional development. Here, I examine the ways in which the IDEAL Society’s educational model makes use of affective encounters to cultivate and to instil such an ethics. Engaging with Latour’s (2004) concept of ‘learning to be affected’, this dissertation uses visual methods as well as interviews and textual material to investigate the opportunities and encounters afforded by this model to be affected and transformed. After first tracing the performance of the economy of the IDEAL Society, I analyse the modes of engagement with the environment that its members are actively constructing, before uncovering the affective and somatic experiences through which these are maintained and taught to others. Although it is unclear whether the ecovillage itself is capable of long-lasting, performative change outside of its boundaries, in amplifying the potential of its practices, this work supports an urgent call for transformative research so that such groups can help guide towards a solution for a more ethical, sustainable economic world in the future.
UG-21/08 Surface velocity mapping of the Larsen C Ice Shelf: assessing the ice dynamic response to the A-68 calving event The impact of ice shelf change on ice sheet dynamics is an important area of research due to the buttressing effect which ice shelves provide to grounded ice, regulating ice discharge and therefore ice sheet contributions to sea level rise. Widespread ice shelf collapse on the Antarctic Peninsula since the late twentieth century has resulted in the acceleration and dynamic thinning of previously buttressed outlet glaciers, contributing to a regional mass loss of 23.8Gt yr-1 between 1979 and 2017 (Rignot et al., 2019). Studying the effects of ice shelf mass loss on ice dynamics is therefore important in enabling improved predictions of rates of ice sheet decline. This study assesses the ice dynamic impacts of a major iceberg calving event which occurred in July 2017 on the Larsen C Ice Shelf (LCIS). Through applying offset tracking techniques to Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar imagery, surface velocity mapping was used to detect dynamic responses to ice shelf mass loss in the three months following the calving of iceberg A-68, across both floating and grounded ice. The results indicate that velocities in the centre of the ice shelf increased by up to 112.2m yr-1 following calving, though this figure likely encompasses the effects of ocean tides on satellite-derived measurements of ice shelf movement. Surface velocity measurements along nine tributary glaciers to the LCIS indicated no clear dynamic response in the three months following iceberg calving. As such, these results provide empirical support to previous model-based studies, which have suggested that the A-68 calving had little impact on the buttressing transmitted by the LCIS to grounded ice (Fürst et al., 2016; Borstad et al., 2017).
UG-21/09

Punishing the Periphery?

Exploring the lived impacts of contemporary austerity on domiciliary care services in rural Norfolk

Through examining the impact of contemporary austerity on the provision of domiciliary care in rural Norfolk, this study takes austerity studies out of their traditionally urban setting. The dissertation combines qualitative research interviews with health and demographic statistics to explore how national neoliberal austerity policies can filter down to have everyday impacts on those giving or receiving care in rural homes. Findings show how through systematic cuts to Norfolk County Council’s funding from central government, austerity was able to add further strain on already pressurised care systems. This has had a range of embodied impacts across those involved within domiciliary care, demonstrating that rural austerity is very real.
UG-21/10 Tracing Past Atmospheres of the Arbroath Abbey Pageants, Scotland, 1949-1956

This dissertation traces the affective atmospheres of the historical pageants held annually at Arbroath Abbey between 1949 and 1956. The Arbroath Abbey Pageants were historical re-enactments of the signing of the Declaration of Arbroath. In particular, this dissertation examines the staging of atmosphere by illumination at the Arbroath Abbey Pageants. Two major contributions are made to the study of affective atmospheres. First, I conceptualise ‘atmospheres of enchantment’ as having filled the Abbey during the pageant performances, captivating pageant attendees. These atmospheres are found to have been co-produced not only by illumination, but by meteorology, accident and the agency of individuals present. Second, a Spinozian reading of affect elucidates the feeling of ‘national potential’ that emerged from the Arbroath Abbey Pageants. Specifically, the lighting of a beacon in the Abbey ruins is credited with suffusing the scene with a feeling of potential, possibility and forward movement. This dissertation concludes with a series of methodological and epistemological reflections on the possibility and promise of ‘tracing’ past atmospheres. Whilst the Arbroath Abbey Pageants from 1949 to 1956 are evidenced to show that past atmospheres can be traced, a series of limitations of an historical study to atmospheres are offered. It is hoped that these reflections can inform future efforts to trace past atmospheres in geography and, more broadly, across the social sciences.

Key words: Affect, Atmosphere, Enchantment, Historical pageantry

UG-21/11

how do homeless people in Haringey, London experience austerity?

exploring the experiences of Tessa and Lukas

Since UK austerity policies began in 2010, homelessness across the country has risen rapidly, with particularly high increases in London. This dissertation uses ethnographic photoelicitation research with two participants, Tessa and Lukas, to understand homeless experiences of austerity in Haringey, London. To do this, the dissertation coins the term “homeless austerity”, which refers to a distinct experience of austerity for homeless people that characterises life in the austere city. Through a feminist relational understanding of the everyday, this dissertation argues that homeless austerity is a differentiated and unequal experience, but one which can be resisted through everyday practices. This dissertation finds that, in the first instance, homeless austerity is characterised by exclusion from benefits through the inaccessibility of Universal Credit. Crucially, this exclusion from state support, wherein neither Tessa nor Lukas received benefits while they were rough sleeping, significantly impacted their everyday experiences. Indeed, this dissertation finds that experiences of austerity for Tessa and Lukas are varied and differentiated, characterised by experiences such as worry and exclusion. Furthermore, these experiences are unequal as they are premised on intersectional inequalities, where the overlap of race and gender leads to processes of home (un)making in shelter spaces. Yet, crucially, these differentiated and unequal experiences can be resisted through quietly political practices which are crucial to Tessa and Lukas getting by during homeless austerity. This dissertation reveals the need for economic geographers to broaden their epistemologies and methodologies to incorporate economic experiences at microgeographical scales to add nuance to larger-scale understandings of the economy.
UG-21/12 Investigating the effect of supraglacial debris-cover on modelled ablation using an enhanced positive degree-day approach: Mer de Glace, French Alps. Many retreating glaciers are characterised by increasing supraglacial debris-cover, but the effect of debris-cover on surface ablation rates is rarely included in models of glacier evolution. This study investigates how supraglacial debris-cover affects ablation rates using a positive degree-day approach, which is more widely applicable than physically-based models due to low in-situ data requirements, alongside satellite remote sensing and numerical modelling. This is conducted on the debris-covered tongue of Mer de Glace, France’s largest glacier. This study finds supraglacial debris-cover increased at 0.76-78p.p./yr between 1985 and 2020, from about 45% to over 70%. This rapid increase emphasises the importance of understanding how debris-cover affects ablation rates. Derived degree-day factors for clean and debris-covered ice are 5.8 and 3.3mm d-1 °C-1 respectively, suggesting debris-cover strongly reduces melt rates at the point-scale. Accounting for potential direct solar radiation (PDSR) is insignificant, likely because there is little summer-long variation in PDSR receipts across the tongue. Debris-cover reduces modelled glacier-wide summer ablation by 18.3% (1985-94) and 24.5% (2003-12), suggesting a substantial and increasing glacier-wide melt-reducing effect of debris-cover. Modelled ablation is most sensitive to temperature change, closely followed by debris-cover change, and relatively insensitive to glacier retreat and thinning. Overall, modelled mean summer ablation increases by 0.30m w.e. between the two periods. This study concludes that supraglacial debris-cover on Mer de Glace substantially reduces modelled melt rates at the point- and glacier-scale, reducing mass balance sensitivity to climate change, but this is insufficient to prevent increasing melt rates as temperatures rise. This suggests models may overestimate mass balance sensitivity to climate change unless they adequately account for debris-cover. However, further study is required to establish how supraglacial ponds and ice-cliffs and spatially variable debris thickness affect glacier-wide melt rates, which could not be considered here due to a lack of in-situ data.
UG-21/13

THANK GOD IT’S THURSDAY?

Critically exploring the work-life balance business case of the four-day week

This dissertation explores the work-life balance business case of the four-day week (4DW) in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the UK. This dissertation finds that implementation of the 4DW has increased dramatically in CEO-led SMEs in the UK over the last two years, specifically in creative and fast-paced industries. Flows of information about the model have proliferated between firms in similar geographies and industry spheres. Despite the model’s rising use, business motivations for adopting the 4DW, alongside impacts on employees have not been properly addressed. This dissertation utilises a work-life balance (WLB) business case lens to a) assess business motivations for, and impacts of, adopting the model and b) uncover how the model impacts everyday employee experiences of WLB. This dissertation finds that business leaders adopting the 4DW must foresee financial reward (through recruitment, productivity and better job performance). Secondary to this comes their altruistic desires to improve the WLB of their employees. Amongst employees, there is almost universal support for the model, but for various reasons. The impacts of the 4DW were dependent on life-course; individuals with significant work-life conflict used the model for better balance, but most workers used their day off to take on extra paid work. Therefore, the relationship between the 4DW and improved WLB is not linear: this finding should be considered by actors advocating for and implementing the 4DW going forward.
UG-21/14

Navigating (Il)legal Art

Producing Street Art in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets

Situated in the rapidly growing street art scene of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, this dissertation attempts to unite literature of legal geography and gentrification to offer a critical geographical analysis of the production of street art in East London. A recent policy introduced by Tower Hamlets Council effectively legalises what it terms to be ‘street art’: employing a policy analysis, complemented by ten interviews with artists, local residents and the lead policymaker, as well as a bespoke derivative of photo elicitation that draws upon the work of Andron (2017; 2018a), I adopt the analytical schema of legal geography to interrogate the construction of ‘street art’ on legal terms. I organise my findings into the conceptualisation of three frontiers. Firstly, I find that legalisation semiotically and discursively demarcates a legal frontier (Blomley 2003a) between street art and graffiti such that graffiti contests property and street art complements property. Secondly, I find that legalisation produces street art by actively favouring work that is perceived to have economic value, mobilising a gentrifying frontier between street art and the graffiti that threatens street art. Finally, I draw upon radical spatial theory to contend that legalisation operationalises these frontiers spatially, to produce the ‘right’ spaces for street art in the context of the late-capitalist, postmodern city. Overall, this dissertation finds that the legally objective production of ‘street art’ is a form of legal reproduction, casting a spatial objectivity sometimes in contention with artists’ re-imaginings of urban space. I argue that legal geography can perceptively account for the production of street art in such a way, but that more research is needed in the geographical discipline to form a sustained engagement with the contemporary governance and production of late-capitalist urban aesthetics – I call, that is, for a legal geograffi.
UG-21/15

Critical Review Essay

Pristine Landscapes, Deep Ecology, and More-than-neoliberal Conservation: The Contested Construction of Douglas Tompkins’ Wilderness Parks in Chilean Patagonia

This critical review essay explores the variety of ideologies and practices which have influenced conservation efforts in recent years. It traces the development of the conservation movement over the 19th and 20th centuries, with an emphasis on how early protected area management was motivated primarily by a desire to construct and preserve an imagined wilderness. It then highlights the dominance of current conservation literature by a ‘neoliberal conservation’ approach which argues that modern conservation is defined by the commodification, enclosure, and privatisation of natural resources, the supremacy of markets, and the rollback of the state. However, it seeks to draw attention to the limitations of such an approach which obscures the more varied and place-specific means by which humans value nature and engage in conservation efforts. To do so, it identifies Chile as one of the most fundamentally neoliberal states in the world yet one which continues to interact with conservation in diverse, unpredictable, and often contradictory ways. Specifically, it demonstrates how the legislative and administrative bodies of the Chilean state continue to play an active role in private conservation through their regulation of its market economy and property regime. Finally, it outlines the case of Douglas Tompkins to highlight the continued plurality of approaches to conservation which Chile’s neoliberal model invites and the profound local and national conflicts these can generate. It concludes that while some aspects of conservation have certainly been neoliberalised, this has not been a universal experience, nor one which justifies the absence of other ways of valuing and conserving nature from contemporary conservation literature.

UG-20/01

The 9 year aftershock: The long-term impacts and effect cascades triggered by recovery efforts following the 2011 Christchurch earthquake

This study investigates the recovery process in Christchurch following the 2011 earthquake.

Specifically, it will investigate how recovery efforts over the past nine years have propagated the direct effects of the earthquake and triggered secondary impact cascades – a novel approach within post-disaster research. It will analyse the social dynamics of these cascading effects, and how they can lead to lasting change within communities. In order to effectively carry out this analysis the following research questions will be explored:

(1) Where has the focus of recovery been?

(2) How have recovery efforts caused and propagated cascading effects?

(3) Post-disaster Christchurch – business as usual or the new normal?

Primary data was collected through semi-structured interviews with those who have been directly involved in the recovery process, and coded in order to draw out themes that contribute to the current literature.

Overall, this study will show that there is a general lack of understanding with regard to the social dynamics of recovery-induced effect cascades in the aftermath of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. It highlights that the effects caused and propagated by recovery strategy, and decisions made at government level, can have lasting effects on communities if they are not realised. This study intends to provide a foundation for future work within the field of post-disaster recovery and cascading disasters. It advises that the complexities and impacts of recovery in practice need to be better understood by both the research community and by authorities, in order to achieve more effective long-term recovery and prevent lasting damage to vulnerable communities.

UG-20/02

Hybridised citizenship in an off-grid community: A study of citizenship formation and practices in Scoraig

In recent years, new concepts have emerged in citizenship studies such as ‘post-national citizenship’ and ‘everyday citizenship’ to explain the quickly evolving state of citizenship. The traditional understanding of citizenship as the relationship between an individual and the nation-state, defined by a set of rights and obligations, has been unsettled in recent decades by global trends of neoliberalism, migration and globalisation. Simultaneously, individuals and groups becoming disillusioned with the current socio-political setting are seeking out alternative ways to live, and creating alternative communities in order to do so. This dissertation studies one such alternative community, based on the peninsula of Scoraig in Scotland, to investigate how rejecting the mainstream and choosing an alternative lifestyle impacts citizenship. Based on 3 weeks of ethnographic research in Scoraig, this dissertation investigates first how and why members of this off-grid community identify as alternative, then explores the construction and embodiment of their citizenship using the lenses of the community and the everyday. It aims to understand the complexities of Scoraig citizenship by considering the agency of residents in its production, in order to deconstruct the binary understanding of mainstream and alternative citizenships. Based on these areas of investigation, this dissertation argues that Scoraig citizenship is neither mainstream nor alternative: rather, it is a hybridisation of aspects of both of these types of citizenship.

UG-20/03

A tribute to my mother – Investigating invisibilities and ‘sandwiched’ mothers in austerity – Gateshead

Listening to the stories of ten mothers aged 45 – 65 living in Gateshead, I explore how austerity reinforces the gendered, demographic, and neoliberal pressures they face. Their stories of survival, resistance, acceptance, and love echo the experiences I have witnessed as a daughter living in the area throughout my life. ‘A Tribute to My Mother’ documents the stresses this cohort face by investigating the conscious, and unconscious, weaponisation of their care work by the austere state. Using the care ecology framework by Bowlby and Mckie (2018) I discover how a mother’s individual caring-scape can heighten and limit, but also fail to address, the embodied violence of austerity (O’Hara, 2014). Finally, I make a case for more personal and intimate research in which the participants’ connection to the researcher is one of value and necessity in uncovering highly personal data. Only then can we make visible how national and international change affects people and societies at their roots. Through this process, previous invalidities become valid considerations for investigating ‘sandwiched’ mothers and the pressures they endure.

UG-20/04

“Heavens below”: Excavating Roland Paoletti’s underground spectacle of (post?)modernity on London’s Jubilee Line Extension

This dissertation seeks to evaluate how spectacular underground urban spaces can be produced, through a detailed examination of the “heavens below” of the Jubilee Line Extension project [‘JLE’]. Drawing from the increasing interest amongst geographers in volumetric urbanism and subterranean geopolitics, as well as established urban theory on architecture and postmodernity, this research investigates the role of volumetric underground excavation in the ability for architects to deliver ‘bold and beautiful’ public designs. Through 15 in-depth elite interviews with JLE project members, as well as extensive written and photographic field notes from the stations today, an evaluation is undertaken as to how such spectacular urban spaces successfully arose.

Firstly, it will analyse how disruptive Thatcherite reforms to London Regional Transport led to the geopolitical employment of a new urban expertise from Hong Kong’s MTR authority – an engineering expertise bringing with it to London a distinct, volumetric culture of excavating urban space underground. Alongside this, it will then analyse the philosophy of flamboyant modernism underlying chief architect Roland Paoletti’s radical vision for the 11 stations, evaluating the extent to which this aligns with Levenson’s (2002: 233) contention that millennium architecture in London 2000 represents “complicated tones of modernism-within-postmodernity”. Finally, it brings these cultures of engineering and architecture together to assess the extent to which volumetric urbanism facilitated or not Roland Paoletti’s vibrant architectural vision for underground urban fabric. Collectively, these demonstrate that delivering such ‘bold and beautiful’ modernist designs isn’t just influenced by political and cultural moments in civic history, but also by a discrete subterranean geography of the city.

UG-20/05

Measuring retreat of the Penny Ice Cap, Southern Baffin Island, since the Little Ice Age

This project uses the new Arctic DEM dataset of 2 m resolution Digital Elevation Model (DEM) imagery to identify 98 Little Ice Age (LIA) moraines around the Penny Ice Cap (6300 km2), Southern Baffin Island. Using Landsat imagery, outlines of the ice cap are created for different years (1985, 1997, 2006 & 2019) by automatic delineation of ice, from which the retreat distance can be measured. When combined, the two provide an estimate of the spatial and temporal variation in rates of retreat around the Penny Ice Cap over the last 140 years. Averaged across the icecap as a whole, the rate of retreat was calculated as 6.4 m yr−1 for LIA-1985, 8.3 m yr−1 for 1985-1997, 15.0 m yr−1, for 1997-2006, and 14.3 m yr−1 for 2006-2019. Further analysis of the spatial variation shows rate of retreat to be highest for glaciers in the south and lowest for glaciers in the west. Much of this variation likely relates to the behaviour and characteristics of valley glaciers compared to ice cap outlet glaciers and their spatial distribution around Penny Ice Cap. The results also show rate of retreat to be highest for larger valley glaciers measured by area, size of drainage basin, and length.

UG-20/06

Social Contact & the Social Contract : Understanding the Reality of Refugee Integration Policy & Practice in Stockholm, Sweden

In the advent of the 2015 so-called ‘migrant crisis’ geopolitical tensions have captured the imaginations of citizens, political institutions and the media alike, altering the political landscape of Europe. Long heralded as an ‘inclusive and welcoming country’, in 2016 Sweden took in more refugees per capita than any other European country. This dissertation assesses the reality for refugees following arrival in Stockholm, highlighting the barriers that pose a challenge to effective and long-term integration. Through an ethnographic study comprising of interviews, participant observation and ethnographic walks, this paper emphasises the unintended consequences of state policy and societal norms on refugee integration.

Drawing on observations of civil society projects a discussion of their crucial role in mitigating integration barriers demonstrates NGOs unique and beneficial positionality, particularly in relation to the perception of integration as a ‘two-way process’. The research highlights grassroots initiatives as crucial, encouraging meaningful social interaction which teaches the unsaid ‘social contract’. This knowledge works to empower refugees, providing the resources and networks needed to access their rights and enact their right to the city. The importance of utilising this status to build trust and meaningful social connection between refugees and the host society is emphasised. Advocating a more holistic approach to refugee integration policy and practice this dissertation demonstrates that the multi-faceted and complex nature of integration demands a more cohesive and collaborative dialogue between state and civil society to enable integration policies of effect, reach and longevity.

UG-20/07

If it bleeds, it leads: the changing nature of Red Nose Day appeal videos from 1985 to 2019

Debates about visual representations of international development have received much scholarly interest. Controversy over the use of images of suffering is a long-standing and emotional dispute that calls into question the commercialisation of pain and the pornography of poverty. This dissertation builds on the well-established literature, by turning academic attention to Red Nose Day appeal videos for the first time. The changes in the videos from 1985 to 2019, with regards to the uses of celebrity advocates, representations of children and presentation of development solutions are investigated through a content and discourse analysis. This dissertation comes at a watershed moment for Comic Relief and for Red Nose Day appeal videos. Recent debate and discussion about representations of development is contextualised and explored through a Twitter analysis of the #StaceyDooley row. There have been significant shifts in the Red Nose Day appeal videos since 1985 and an acceleration of such changes in recent years. With a transition from sad to glad appeals, a celebrity step-back and an acknowledgement of complexity, Comic Relief enters a new representational regime. This has considerable implications for wider and related discussions, including compassion fatigue and the white saviour complex.

UG-20/08

How green is the Green Line? An investigation into air pollution in the London Underground

This investigation aims to study the air quality to which commuters are exposed when using the London Underground system. Pollutants PM2.5 and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) are used as key indicators of air quality, with the former chosen due to its size fraction relevance to deep lung penetration and respiratory disease (Xing et al., 2016), and the latter for its prevalence in pollution discourse. The study characterises both spatial and temporal aspects of personal air quality exposure along the route of the morning commute and throughout the working week. Two key influences are considered: the ‘carriage effect’ and the ‘commuter effect’. The carriage effect produces an internal micro environment within the carriage, creating a sealed environment which can either act to increase or reduce air quality compared to that outside of the train. Commuter behaviour results in the speculated ‘commuter effect’ with individual passengers acting as both sources and redistributors of PM2.5.

UG-20/09

Creating an atmosphere in space: architecture and sound in the production of affective atmospheres

People colloquially speak of a building, stadium or lecture theatre as having an atmosphere; public space is no different. Urban literature has thus far failed to look beyond the positivist sensibilities of public space, overlooking its affective qualities; meanwhile, atmospheres are yet to be extensively analysed from a constitutive perspective, choosing to focus instead on their political implications. By focusing on Millennium Park, Chicago, this dissertation considers the ways in which a shifting flow of atmosphere is generated by architectural design, spatial arrangements, acoustic attunements, and bodily interactions. This dissertation therefore explores the emergence and staging of affective atmospheres in Millennium Park, bringing architectural and acoustic literatures of atmosphere into dialogue to offer a contemporary reading of affect. Driven by Böhme (1993) and influenced by Anderson (2009), affective atmospheres are understood as the spatializations of affective qualities and explored via multimodal research methods. I utilise mobile methodologies and integrate audio-visual methods into the writing process to attempt to capture and translate the inherently fleeting, ephemeral nature of atmospheres. This dissertation finds that attempts to engineer affective atmospheres only succeed at ‘stabilising’ affect. While the Park’s design provides the spaces for specific atmospheres to emerge, such that it is filled with the potential to affect, unpredictable actions, sounds and interpretations mean that the Parkshapes, butdoes not determine the atmosphere. Of particular importance is the arrival of human bodies who are shown to charge and reorientate atmospheres in ways that eschew design intentions, reiterating its fragile and provisional nature. Secondly, atmospheres are found to be compositional, emerging at the intersection of multiple stimuli as a product of many sensations woven together and sensed holistically. Architecture and sound are shown to be important but partial generators of atmosphere. I therefore call on further research to adopt similarly multi-sensory analysis and emphasise the need for experimental methods.

Key Word(s): affective atmosphere; affect; architecture; sound; phenomenology.

UG-20/10

An examination of the role of place in influencing terrorism fears – Manchester Victoria Station

This dissertation explores how terrorism fears are influenced by place, with the research focussing on Manchester Victoria Station. The station was host to a terror attack on New Year’s Eve 2018, whilst also being heavily impacted by the terror attack at the neighbouring Manchester Arena in May 2017. Thus, the station can provide an interesting locus in which to explore the relationships between place and terrorism fears. Using data from sixteen in-person interviews with station users, station shop owners and key stakeholders involved in the station’s security operations, I find that terrorism fears are strongly influenced by place features, situated experiences and identities at Manchester Victoria. I demonstrate that the visibility of securitised features and the publicness of the concourse are important in shaping fear, whilst the Arena attack memorial can conjure various geographical imaginations and forms of socialisation that affect fear. I also show that the relative visibility of terrorism and everyday crime in people’s experiences at Victoria can influence vulnerability perceptions, whilst situated identities can be significant for how the station users understand, respond to and resist fear-inspiring events. Overall, the findings illuminate the operation of a number of common yet competing imaginaries of the station that influence people’s terrorism fears. Thus, this dissertation provides an empirical focus for feminist geopolitics scholarship, responding to calls for research to explore how people experience place in the aftermath of terrorist incidents.

UG-20/11

Breaking laws, breaking norms? – An investigation into post-feminist performances of female identity and empowerment in an age of rising knife crime.

Drawing on the experiences of 12 young women, and insights from 6 adults in the youth services profession, this dissertation seeks to explore whether conventional gender identity norms are being overturned by women’s increasing involvement in knife crime. It deploys a Foucauldian-feminist theoretic of power to consider female criminality as both a submission to and subversion of male control over the body in public space. Acknowledging the female body as a site of contested gender realms, this dissertation starts by analysing the rise in women’s knife crime as a form of feminist resistance against idealised versions of femininity and male power. Looking beyond existing literature on feminist materiality, it draws attention to the knife as a new feminist artefact and the agency it has in advancing the contemporary feminist agenda. Alongside a rising feminist agenda, it traces the scalar nature of institutionalised patriarchy to demonstrate the persistence of disciplinary techniques dictating appropriate gender performances in what has been termed the ‘Victorian Present”. While knife crime offers opportunities for resistance, it becomes evident that long-established gender relations continue to structure the lives of the young women interviewed. Their identities are shaped in contradictory ways and this tension works to highlight the complex nature of contemporary gender politics. Whilst it is commonly accepted that we are living in an increasingly feminist era, literature is yet to study this through the contemporary rise in female knife offenders; through a unique approach to feminist geographical study,this dissertation seeks to add to activist scholarship, recognising the need within both academia and policy for deeper discussions about gender culture.

Content Notice: Physical violence, knife crime, gang violence and exploitation, explicit language.

UG-20/12

Transformation or Embodied Violence? – The Impact of Contemporary Austerity on Worcestershire Library Service Employees

This project examines the impact of contemporary austerity on employees of Evesham, Redditch, and The Hive libraries in Worcestershire. Semi-structured interviews are used to investigate how austerity has affected Worcestershire Library Service employees’ roles and emotional experiences in their job, putting these voices in critical conversation with local, national and international logics of austerity. In contrast to neoliberal logics of austerity which describe library service changes as promoting necessary efficiency and positive ‘transformation’, frontline staff perspectives highlight: ever-increasing workloads and responsibilities; increasing numbers and needs of vulnerable service users; declining wages and workers’ rights; increasing feelings of discomfort, frustration, stress and distress; and melancholic and pessimistic affective atmospheres. This reinforces contemporary understandings of austerity as violent, and extends these theorisations to emphasise the important embodied, emotional aspects to this violence, and the nuanced role of public servants as perpetrators, protectors and victims in these violent conditions. An emphasis on Worcestershire highlights the important, often overlooked, impacts of austerity in rural areas, and areas where cuts have been less severe. It is argued that in order to tackle the continuous revival of austerity as a powerful economic idea, the quiet politics of WLS staff must be made loud and austerity must be reframed as a form of embodied violence.

UG-20/13

Bodies, borders and bugs: a discourse analysis of the Zika virus in news media

No abstract available.

UG-20/14

Investigating trends in thermokarst lake cover in the continuous permafrost zone: A new remote sensing approach.

Arctic environments are an urgent area of scientific research, due to their high sensitivity to rising global temperatures. Thermokarst lakes are a crucial element of Arctic environments, as they modify the stability of permafrost and release greenhouse gases. Shifts in thermokarst lake cover have been identified across many Arctic ecosystems, and are often attributed to climate change. However, future shifts in thermokarst lake cover are largely unpredictable, because observations to date have been based on infrequent sampling intervals. This is due to long standing methodological issues, including data availability and long processing times. By implementing a new methodological approach based in Google Earth Engine, this study investigated trends in thermokarst lake cover in two continuous permafrost regions at an annual resolution. At the Tuktoyaktuk Peninsula, lake area showed negligible change over the 2013-2019 period, whilst lake number decreased (-12%). At Central Yakutia, both lake area and number increased (+24% and +22%, respectively) over the 2013-2019 period. At the Tuktoyaktuk Peninsula, interannual variability in lake area was significantly related to interannual variability in snowfall (R-squared 0.73). This was attributed to the effect of precipitation on the water balance and surface ponding. At Central Yakutia, interannual variability in lake area was related to interannual variability in temperature (R-squared 0.31). Furthermore, it was suggested that lake area may not be exclusively controlled by the climate. This study was one of the first to investigate thermokarst lake area change at an annual resolution, and continued investigations under this new methodological approach could aid our ability to predict future changes in thermokarst lake cover. This could help us constrain the contribution of thermokarst lakes to the global greenhouse gas budget, and revise emissions targets to mitigate the effects of global warming.

UG-20/15 An Historical Geography of Tap Dance: Tapping into American Culture, Identity and Race Relations This dissertation examines a widely unexplored field in geographical scholarship – tap dance in America. It analyses ‘an’ historical geography of tap dance, as there are many ways in which this narrative could be told and many voices which are often excluded and left unheard. From a cultural and historical perspective, this dissertation traces tap dance back to its colonial origins, through its evolution into popular culture in the 20th Century, and analyses tap’s unique position in contemporary society today. Tap dance offers a lens into America’s complex history of colonialism, race, class, and gender to name a few, as tap dancers and historians argue tap represents American identity, forming America’s ‘indigenous’ dance. This study examines an intriguing historical geography through three scales: the body, sites and spaces and racial performance/performing race. The body has become a well-established focus in cultural geography, tying bodily movement and dance into non-representational theory and the broader social, cultural and political contexts in which bodies move. Simultaneously, the bodies of tap dancers have been included and excluded from particular sites and spaces in which tap has been practised and performed. This illustrates a variety of place-based geographies across the American North and South, in America’s urban centres, and more recently, across the globe. Finally, tap’s history in America cannot be analysed without reference to race. I argue tap has been shaped by historical race relations, such as conforming to the ‘racial performance’ of stereotypes, e.g. blackface minstrelsy, whilst in other cases contesting race relations to create a more inclusive community, through ‘performing race’ in the everyday. This study concludes that tap dance is a unique bodily movement which has played an important role in America’s history, predominantly working as a force to bring people together from different countries, ethnicities, genders, classes and socio-economic backgrounds, rather than just as a product of these complex geographies.
UG-20/16 “It still feels like a pit village” – Affective atmospheres of mnemonic duration and perturbation in the post-industrial landscape of Clipstone Village, Nottinghamshire

Post-industrial landscapes have a feel. A feel of the past. Clipstone Village, North Nottinghamshire, is no different. To analyse this feeling, this dissertation will construct a heuristic framework from a Bergsonian conceptualisation of the co-existence of past and present in duration, in dialogue with Deleuzian and Guattarian understandings of affect as hazy and atmospheric. I use the terms ‘affective mnemonic intensities’ to capture the affective register of duration, and ‘affective atmospheres of duration’ to capture their diffusity. I mobilise vital methodologies to embrace, rather than obfuscate, the inherently unpredictable, ‘not-quite-graspable’, ephemeral affective mnemonic intensities, attuning to their atmospheric perturbations. These methods offer a non-superficial glimpse into the nonrepresentational ‘background’ of lived experience. With such insight, I argue that an affective atmosphere of duration is operative in Clipstone. Following Schmitzian notions of dynamic gestalt (Gestaltverläufe), my interlocutions confirm that a Bergsonian habitual memory pours out spatially and circulates around the village. The feel of the past is one of contracted virtuality and refrained affect. However, this is in tension with the excessiveness of the virtual past, always cutting in. Such excessiveness creates affective mnemonic intensities that perturb affective habitual refrain in the form of either: i) traumatic ‘pure memory’ actualization of the 1984-84 miners’ strike or redundancy; or, ii) emancipatory ‘involuntary memory’ (mémoire involontaire). Affective mnemonic perturbations form ‘pockets’, dyadic ‘spheres’ or assemblages of enclosed atmospheric disruption which splinter and fragment collective flow. Affective atmospheres of duration are therefore operative at an osscilative threshold: between affective co-constitution and perturbation. Habitual contraction of the virtual flow is always unsettled by encounter. This is the organization of affective life and duration in the postindustrial landscape of Clipstone. This is how the past inheres, folds and gnaws into the present, affectively (dis)organizing/(un)structuring life as it flows. I conclude by reflecting on the ethical implications of these findings for future research.

Key word(s): affect, affective memory, affective atmospheres, post-industrial landscape

UG-18/01 Anticipating ‘The Big One’: Everyday Perceptions and Understandings of Earthquake Risk in San Francisco

Situated alongside the infamous San Andreas fault network, the city of San Francisco is prone to experiencing earthquakes. Most frequently, these are of a low magnitude and hence result in minimal impacts. However, forecasting models suggest that there is a high chance that the city and the wider Bay area will experience a magnitude 6.7 or higher earthquake within the next thirty years, with some seismologists and the media also alluding to the possibility of a future earthquake of magnitude eight: ‘The Big One’. This dissertation will explore the extent to which earthquake risk has become an accepted and normalised part of everyday life for residents in the city and will examine whether the population of San Francisco are physically, structurally and socially prepared for a potential ‘Big One’.

The extent of individual earthquake risk preparedness has been shown to be closely tied to risk perceptions, which vary widely amongst residents. As such, this dissertation will explore three key factors which influence this spatial variability: earthquake experience, subconscious risk acceptance or denial, and cognitive understanding of seismic processes. Ultimately, not one single factor can be used to explain all of the observed variability, with risk perceptions being highly complex, and different factors affecting members of the population in varying ways. Effective communication is essential to guarantee risk awareness amongst the population and ensure preparedness actions are adopted.

UG-17/01 Morals and Mignonette, or the use of flowers in the regulation of women, children and the working classes in late Victorian London This dissertation explores the deployment of flower missions, flower shows, and window gardening in late-Victorian efforts to elevate the moral and material condition of London’s working poor. Through an archival investigation, predominantly of pamphlet literature from the 1860s-90s, I extend Foucault’s anthropocentric conception of ‘biopolitics’ to encompass all life in the consideration of flowers as non-human agencies, constitutive of environments and their inhabitants through their human attachments. This dissertation identifies three themes key to the understanding of the use of flowers in this period: moral, pedagogic, and civic botany. The construction of a ‘moral botany’ in early-nineteenth-century literature popularised the notion that flowers could carry meaning beyond their ornamental value and thus become useful. This attribute was widely utilised by social reformers who employed flower shows as biopolitical instruments in order to discipline the desires, habits, and behaviours of the working poor and their children as ‘future citizens’. I argue that these projects were heavily gendered as a result of the traditionally ‘feminine’ associations of flowers, as well as the perceived position of women as ‘closer to nature’, with the effect of placing responsibility for the moral defence of the family upon the shoulders of the woman. Floral reform movements were also influenced by late-nineteenth-century fears of racial degeneration. As such, the promotion of floriculture amongst the working classes not only worked at the scale of the individual body, but also in the improvement of the condition of the population as a whole. It concludes that the mobilisation of flowers played a vital role in the moral regulation of women, children, and the working classes, necessitating the inclusion of plant life in conceptions of biopolitics.
UG-16/01 Tephra retention and changing vegetation structure in Iceland

Recent studies of tephra layers (deposits of pyroclastic fragments produced during a volcano) suggest that the morphology of preserved layers can act as high resolution proxy records for ancient vegetation patterns. Tephra layers provide isochronous markers within time sequences and their form reflects the surface stability, height and spatial patterning of the vegetation on to which it fell. This dissertation will explore the relationship between tephra deposition and vegetation structure at the boundary between open grassland and closed woodland in Iceland. Tephra depth, vegetation characteristics and edge conditions will be investigated to model how changing vegetation structure predicts tephra depth.

Preface:
This project has shifted focus slightly from the original abstract. My original aims have not changed substantially, but during the fieldwork, it became apparent that I would be unable to investigate edge effects and transitions in vegetation type as intended because no suitable sites were located. This meant that my analysis became more comparative; investigating the relationships between and within sites of different vegetation structure rather than across vegetation transitions.