The DevGRG PG Research and Travel Award is aimed at those preparing for a PhD in topics related to development geographies. Applicants should be based at a UK institution of higher education, but may be of any nationality. The award can be used to support Development Geography research and fieldwork, including the costs of in-country research assistance (for fieldwork anywhere in the world, including the UK), costs of undertaking archival work overseas, and costs associated with conducting virtual research, as long as they fall within the remit of supporting primary data collection for a Development Geography-focused PhD. The award can also cover travel costs for undertaking international fieldwork. This can include costs related to caring responsibilities that are directly incurred as a result of the applicant’s travel.
The successful candidate is required to provide a short blog-post for the DevGRG Website. This should be sent to Katy Jenkins (katy.jenkins@northumbria.ac.uk), within a year of receiving the award, and should be related to an aspect of your research for which you have received funding.
The award is £800, although smaller awards are sometimes made.
This year’s deadline is 10th July 2023. The criteria for the award are:
- Quality of the project design
- Potential significance of the results
- Support from referee (usually the supervisor)
- Financial need
Guidance on travel and safety in both the home location and the location travelled to must be followed at all times, and the applicant must ensure that they undertake their trip in line with their institution’s own travel risk assessment and health and safety processes.
Please complete the application form available here, including the following information:
Outline of the proposed research (maximum 3 pages – to include full budget)
A 2 page curriculum vitae (including all qualifications and current institutional affiliation)
Full details of all existing or expected financial support.
Please then pass the form to your referee (usually your supervisor) and ask them to complete the reference and submit the completed application by email by the deadline of 10th July 2023.
Please note that incomplete or late applications will not be considered. Completed applications will be judged by a panel of development geographers and the result notified in August.
All applications should be sent by email to
katy.jenkins@northumbria.ac.uk by the deadline of 10th July 2023.
Previous Winners include:
- 1997/1998: Kuheli Mookerjee (UCL) “Resettlements in the Narmada Valley, India.”
- 1999/2000: Meredith Cochrane (Royal Holloway) “Local Agency in a Globalizing South Africa: Opportunities and Obstacles for Small Black Business Owners in Two Port Cities.”
- 2000/2001: Laurence Vagassky (LSE) “Settlement Upgrading in Dakar, Senegal.”
- 2001/2002: Andrea Calantonio (Royal Holloway) “Foreign Direct Investment and the Urban Caribbean: Havana in the Special Period.”
- 2002/3: Felicity Thomas (Sheffield) “The impact of HIV/AIDS on the Livelihoods of Female-Headed Households in Northern Namibia.”
- 2003/4: Suresh Rohilla (Queen’s University Belfast) “The role of ground water in urban development – a case study of Delhi and its peri-urban region.”
- 2004/5: Daniel Turner (Sheffield) “The Dynamic Nature of Care and Support for People LIving with HIV/AIDS in Botswana.”
- 2005/6: Mariela Gaete Reyes (King’s College, London) “Exploring disabled people’s experiences of mobility and movement in the built environment: a comparative study with women wheelchair users from London, UK and Santiago, Chile”
- 2006/7: Anne-Line Rodriguez (SOAS) “Poverty and gender in Senegal in the context of male immigration in Europe”
- 2008: Elodie Marandet (Brunel University) “British AIDS policies in Malawi: a (geo) politics of scale?”
- 2009: Gisela Zapata (Newcastle University) “Developing a novel study of Colombian migrants”
- 2013: Cordelia Freeman (University of Nottingham) The Cultural Geographies of the Chilean Borderlands”
- 2016: Belen Martinez (University of West of England)“Empowering Women through non-traditional economic activities. A case study of a female operated travel company in Ladakh”
- 2018: Kavita Dattani (Queen Mary, UoL) “Digitising Domestic Work: investigating the role of digital technologies and on-demand platforms in the work-lives of Delhi’s domestic workers”
- 2019: Chidinma Okorie (Loughborough University) “The Geographies of Nigerian Commonwealth Scholars and the Migration-Education-Development (M.E.D.) Nexus”
- 2021: Agostinho Pinnock (Loughborough University)”Geographies of Struggle: History, Art and Nationhood in post/colonial and Post-independence Jamaica, (2000-Present)” and Ana Lambert (Manchester University) “A liminal space: boundary organisations at the crossroads of global environmental change in the Amazon”
- 2022: Andrew White (Lancaster University) “Jamaica, China and Power: the political ecology of infrastructure projects associated with development geographies”