If I were to visit the area where you live, what would I be interested in?

This was posed to illustrate the kinds of questions which applicants to read Geography at Oxford might get asked. It’s a great question at any level, because it gets you thinking aout your home area, and how you might represent it to other people. Very often, I suspect, we overlook the attractions of our neighbourhood, becuase they are common, every day. We drive or walk past them every single day. Yet no place on earth is without some kind of interest; from the smallest village to the most anonymous suburb. The exotic and the mundane are interchangeable concepts; it’s a matter of perspective.Joe Moran, cultural historian at Liverpool John Moores specialises in the everyday; he credits his own interest in taking note of what normally goes unnoticed to the I-Spy books he read as a youngster. His books are admirable social histories and local geographies, focusing on the geography of the everyday; roads, motorway service stations, roundabouts and traffic lights, or celebrating the Queue and the Great English breakfast. Dr Moran writes a great blog, too.: http://joemoransblog.blogspot.com/

Perhaps much of geography is the study of the things we take for granted; the central business district of a town, farms, rivers and factories. It is from a myriad of little, small scale activities and patterns tah we can piece together the larger story, the regional pattern and the large scale global processes that inform the subject. After all, our motto is surely “think global, but act local”

Trial

This week’s online edition of the Ecomomist carries a review on Africa’s popuolation. It talks about the changes in fertility and the growth of an urban middle class who wnat fewer children. It also bears out the great differences between the ageing populations of Europe and the extremely youthful structure of Africa, as the pair of population pyramids above show.

We think of Africa as utterly in thrawl to nature, beset by drought and famine, but consider: “Only 4% of the continent’s farmland is irrigated. Double that amount, add in fertilisers, seed, credit, information and proper metal warehouses (in some places a quarter of the harvest may be lost to rot and rats), and Africa might not just fill its own 2 billion stomachs, but export farm produce as well.”

The lecture programme for the day reflected that, starting with Professor Jim Rose on “Glasgow’s role in shaping quaternary science”, then there was a profile of current research interests. I was fascinated with Paul Bishop’s account of earth surface dynamics research whereby the density of cosmogenic nuclides are being used to date surfaces and correlate with existing data on post glacial processes. This is geomorphology at the microscale, dependent on high tech accelerators, but the results, from places like Jura and Croftamie are very exciting. This technique has been used to verify the dates of the parallel roads of Glen Roy, linking them clearly with the Loch Lomond stadial.

Next John Briggs outlined key areas of research in human geography. He stressed the importance of theory, notwithstanding the need for empirical research, too. I was taken with his emphasis on democratic urbanism and the conflicts around public spaces which arise from competing demands. He noted the dichotomy-and tension-between representative and participatory democracy; whose space is it, and who makes the decisions? It was timely that this was on a day when two so called “guerrilla gardeners” were at Court to defend an action brought by Glasgow City Council over the use of the North Kelvinside meadows;  classic example of contested space.

Made mental note to look at how we can engage with the Department in our Comenius Project, which is a celebration of urban environments

What about the polling clerks in Kabul, the police guards, the women in burkas defiantly raising their fingers in indelible ink, risking amputation, or worse. The female candidates looking for a more liberal approach? Or the officials sorting out the ballot papers tonight? Each candidate, each particpant in today’s election runs a huge risk; to be mangled or incinerated by a roadside bomb ot a suicide attack. The young, committed  voters could be dead tomorrow because they could be bothered.  If so called “peasants” in baggy trousers can be bothered to queue, to risk everything to vote today, if 200 + soldiers from the UK alone, not to mention local soldiers and police and translators can lose their lives, then perhaps they don’t count democracy in this backward, war weary, impoverished country so cheap as many of our own folk seem to do.

When old age shall this generation waste,  
    Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe  
  Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,  
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all  
    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

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