Committee

 

The 2023/2024 Committee is:

Dr Kalpana Wilson, and Dr Katharina Richter, Co-Chairs

Dr Regina Hansda, Treasurer

Dr Anna Laing, Equalities, Diversity and Inclusion Officer

Dr Jayanthi Lingham, Committee Member (Dissertation Prize Co-ordinator)

Dr Guy Crawford, Committee Member (Communications Co-ordinator)

Dr Sarah Peck, Committee Member (Joint Travel and Research Prize Co-ordinator)

Dr Cláudia  Santos, Committee Member (Joint Travel and Research Prize Co-ordinator)

Kene Onukwube, Committee Member

Harry Quealy, Joint PG Rep

Cole Virk, Joint PG Rep

Ruhamah Thejus, Joint PG Rep

The 2022/2023 Committee was:

Dr Kalpana Wilson, and Dr Katharina Richter, Co-Chairs

Dr Regina Hansda, Treasurer

Dr Charlotte Ray and Dr Sophie Blackburn, Joint Secretaries

Dr Anna Laing, Equalities, Diversity and Inclusion Officer

Prof. Katy Jenkins, Committee Member (Travel Prize)

Dr Jayanthi Lingham, Committee Member (Dissertation Prize)

Dr Raksha Pande, Committee Member

Dr Shreyashi Dasgupta, Committee Member

Cláudia  Santos, Committee Member (Early Career Network)

Kene Onukwube, Committee Member

The 2021/2022 Committee is:

Dr Kalpana Wilson, DevGRG Chair

Kalpana is a Lecturer in the Geography Department at Birkbeck, University of London. She previously held positions at the LSE Gender Institute, and at SOAS. Her research explores questions of race/gender, labour, neoliberalism, imperialism and reproductive rights and justice, with a particular focus on South Asia and its diasporas.

Kalpana’s work addresses the previously under-researched question of racism and racialisation in international development, examining the relationships between race, capital, embodiment and resistance in transnational historical and contemporary contexts. Secondly, building upon long-term research on rural labour movements in India, she is looking at contesting understandings of women’s agency, in the contexts of neoliberal development interventions, and left-led social movements. Her current research explores the ongoing movement against microfinance indebtedness in India.

Dr Raksha Pande, Treasurer

Dr Charlotte Ray, Secretary

Dr Shreyashi Dasgupta, Committee Member (David W. Smith Memorial Prize)

Dr. Shreyashi Dasgupta is an Associate Professor at the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy, O.P Jindal Global University, India. Shreyashi has an MPhil (2015) and PhD (2020) from the Centre of Development Studies, University of Cambridge. Her research interests include urban and labour geography, political ethnography, housing and infrastructure in cities of the Global South. Shreyashi’s doctoral dissertation, “The Accommodation City: Private low-income housing and urban space in Dhaka and Mumbai” explores the emerging forms and processes of temporary accommodation (dormitories, mess housing, work-residence rentals and paying guests/room-sharing) for low-income workers. Using an ethnographic approach, her work seeks to understand how accommodation matter ‘in’ and ‘for’ cities. Shreyashi has co-founded the Cambridge Urbanism in the Global South interdisciplinary working group. She is currently a co-convener of this group. She is also a committee member of the Development Geographies Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) and manages the David W Smith Memorial Prize for sixth form students. 

Dr Aysegul Can, Committee Member (Dissertation Prize)

Aysegul Can holds the positions of lecturer at Istanbul Medeniyet University, Istanbul, Turkey and visiting post-doctoral scholar in Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung Foundation. She received her PhD degree in urban studies from the University of Sheffield, the UK. Her research interests include gentrification, housing policy, urban resistance movements, social injustice in marginalized areas, and precarity in higher education. Her latest project is called ‘Being an Istanbulite: The Value of Resistance during a Time of Urban Governance through Massive Projects’ and she is part of the authoritarian urbanism research cluster in Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung Foundation.

Prof Katy Jenkins, Committee Member (Care & the Academy and Travel Fund)

Dr Anna Laing, Committee Member 

Dr Sophie Blackburn, Committee Member (Decolonising Development Resource Library)

Sophie is Senior Lecturer in Development Geography in the School of Social Sciences at Oxford Brookes University. Before joining Brookes in September 2019, she held an Early Career Development Fellowship in Liberal Arts and Geography at King’s College London (2017-2019). Sophie’s research examines how forms of social-political exclusion and citizenship experiences shape geographies of disaster risk and climate change adaptation. Her PhD developed social contracts as a lens on evolving relations of trust and expectation in risk governance in the Andaman Islands, South India. She is currently Co-I in the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) Urban Disaster Risk hub ‘Tomorrow’s Cities’.

Cláudia Santos, Committee member (early career network)

Cláudia Santos is a doctoral student in Climate change and Sustainable Development Policies at the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS), University of Lisbon. Her current research focuses on climate change perceptions, development and migration in Guinea-Bissau. 

Kene Onukwube, Committee Member

The 2020/2021 Committee was:

Dr Jessica Hope, DevGRG Chair

Jessica is a Lecturer in Sustainable Development in the School of Geography & Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews. Prior to St Andrews, she held positions at the University of Bristol, University of Cambridge and UCL. Her PhD is from the University of Manchester.

Jessica’s current research uses political ecology with geographical approaches to materiality and infrastructure to critique contemporary iterations of sustainable development. Funded by an RGS Environment and Sustainability Grant, she recently researched the take-up of the SDGs in Bolivia, a site of intensive fossil fuel and mineral extraction. Her Phd research offered a political ecology of post-neoliberalism in Bolivia, focusing on the experiences and claims of indigenous territorial movements. 

Dr Raksha Pande, Treasurer

Dr Charlotte Ray, Secretary

Dr Shreyashi Dasgupta, Committee Member (David W. Smith Memorial Prize)

Dr Aysegul Can, Committee Member (Dissertation Prize)

Prof Katy Jenkins, Committee Member (Care & the Academy and Travel Fund)

Dr Anna Laing, Committee Member 

Dr Sophie Blackburn, Committee Member (Decolonising Development Resource Library)

Cláudia Santos, Committee member (early career network)

Kene Onukwube, Committee member

The 2019/2020 DevGRG Committee was:

Jessica Hope, Chair, University of Bristol

Gemma Sou, Secretary, University of Manchester

Raksha Pande, Treasurer, Newcastle University

Cordelia Freeman, Website and Social Media, University of Exeter

Hannah Smith, Postgraduate Rep, Coventry University

Simon Malyon, Postgraduate Rep, Royal Holloway

Kavita Dattani, Postgraduate Rep, Queen Mary, London

Shreyashi Dasgupta, Postgraduate Rep, University of Cambridge

        Aysegul Can, Committee Member, Istanbul Medeniyet University

Kate Maclean, Committee Member, Birkbeck

Committee Member Biographies

Jessica Hope– Chair Jessica is a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Bristol, where she is researching how development is conceptualised and promoted in response to climate change – as the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 2015 Paris Agreement come into being. Specifically, she is investigating how social movement agendas are treated and included by international NGOs and how climate change/development politics in Latin America are represented to the Global North in ways that influence understandings of sustainability and change. She has just returned from 2 months of fieldwork in Bolivia, for an RGS funded project that examines  reiterations of Sustainable Development, analysing the contours and limits of sustainability discourse through the ways that global development organisations work with social movements in Bolivia to acknowledge, include and address development and environment issues as key to sustainability. Jessica finished her PhD in 2015 and has since been a lecturer at the  University of Cambridge and a  Teaching Fellow at UCL. She has been on the DevGRG committee since doing her PhD.

Gemma Sou- Secretary Gemma is Lecturer in the Humanitarian and Conflict Response institute at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on postcolonialising disaster studies. In particular she is interested in the everyday lives and experiences of people living with disaster risk, as well as the policy-making processes of disaster risk management. Her research focuses in the Caribbean and cities in the global south. She also works on the media representations of human vulnerability, and am interested in the representational practises of alternative technologies.

Raksha Pande- Treasurer I am a lecturer in critical development studies at Newcastle University.  My research interests are focused on the interface of social, political and development geographies. At a conceptual level, my interest lies in exploring the intersections between postcolonial and feminist approaches within geography. These theoretical concerns are grounded in empirical research in India and the UK. I am the DevGRG treasurer.

Cordelia Freeman- Postgraduate Travel Prize Co-ordinator, Website & Social Media I am a lecturer in the geography department at the University of Exeter. My work is broadly on borders, mobility and violence and to date has almost entirely been in Latin America. I am currently working on a research project looking at abortion im/mobilities across Latin America. My role at DevGRG is to co-ordinate the PG travel prize, manage the twitter account, update the DevGRG website and to help organise undergraduate and postgraduate events.

Hannah Smith- PG Rep I am a PhD student in the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations at Coventry University, conducting research into the income-generation activities of community-based NGOs in The Gambia. I am interested in utilising a participatory approach to working with local NGOs to collate and share knowledge around best practice in both programme design and organisational management. Prior to beginning my PhD, I worked in university fundraising and was a Trustee of UK-based international development charity, Village Aid.

Kavita Dattani- PG Rep Kavita is a PhD student at Queen Mary, University of London. Her research looks at the role of digital technologies in the work-lives and non-work lives of low-income women in India. She has also completed an MSc in Development Studies at SOAS, University of London and an MRes in Global Development Futures at Queen Mary, University of London. Prior to beginning her PhD, Kavita worked in research and programme management roles in the international development sector for the Self Employed Women’s Association of India, Ahmedabad Women’s Action Group and The British Asian Trust. She is also a keen linguist and has spent two years in China studying intensive Chinese.

Shreyashi Dasgupta- PG Rep Shreyashi Dasgupta is the Jawaharlal Nehru Cambridge PhD scholar at the Centre of Development Studies, University of Cambridge.  She also supervises undergraduates in the Department of Geography.  Her current work concerns the transitory spaces in urban housing and examines the emerging forms and processes of temporary accommodation for low-income workers in Dhaka (Bangladesh) and Mumbai (India). She has co-founded the Cambridge Urbanism in the Global South interdisciplinary working group. Prior to her PhD, Shreyashi has worked on a wide range of developmental issues that centered on water and sanitation, housing, land-use, spatial planning and urban governance in India.  She is the incoming postgraduate representative for DevGRG

Simon Malyon- PG Rep I am currently in the third year of an ESRC funded PhD in Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. My research is focused on the experiences of migrant workers in the platform sector (delivery work) in Beijing, China. The platform economy has grown rapidly in China yet fewer research outcomes have considered the working experiences and labour relations of those employed in this sector, and I am currently collaborating with Chinese researchers in undertaking fieldwork through networks developed on a Newton fund PhD grant. Outside of the PhD I have completed projects for Save the Children, the British Council and the Rights Practice and am a competent Mandarin speaker.

Aysegul Can Aysegul Can is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning in Istanbul Medeniyet University. Her current research interests stem from her experiences as an urbanist in the last 10 years. She spent a lot of her time and effort in understanding changing world economy since the 1970s, what does that mean for Global South and North, and, in particular, how does these economic changes affect the changing processes of gentrification all around the world. She paid attention to processes of gentrification through private housing market and state-induced urban regeneration projects, transformation of the cultural identities of the neighbourhoods during these processes, the conflicts that may arise because of this transformation and how the inhabitants and local and national government handled this change in an ever-expanding city like Istanbul. Her most recent research interests beyond her PhD focuses on developing new theory and/or conceptualizations of affordable housing with a focus on informal settlements in Global Southern cities so as to counter the colonialism of Euro-American theory.

Kate Maclean  I feel that my teaching and research fit very well with DARG’s profile, and I have the administrative experience to be able to fulfil the expectations of the role. Since completing my PhD in 2008, I have taught a variety of development courses at undergraduate and masters level. These have included courses on my particular focus – broadly ‘gender and development’ – as well as core courses on environment, development, and livelihoods. I have also taught methodology at MA level for students on development courses. My academic work is in the development context and I have published in both development journals as well as broader geography publications. Specific projects include microfinance in rural Bolivia, informal markets and the used clothes trade in El Alto, Bolivia, and urban regeneration and violence in Colombia. I have taken on a range of administrative roles, including Director of Undergraduate Studies at King’s and I am currently Director of the BSc Social Sciences at Birkbeck – the school’s largest degree. My experience in both research and teaching has given me a very clear idea of the specificities of development geography, and how this subject area sits within geography. In both my previous position (at King’s College London) and current position at Birkbeck, I have been active in clarifying the distinctiveness of the field of development geography and the specific needs of students and researchers in this area.