Month: September 2021

The inaugural (2021) History and Philosophy of Geography Engagement Award  goes to Harriet Walters who is completing a PhD in English literature at the University of Birmingham for her project ” Mapping Winterbourne: Digital Tours of the historic garden”.

The still ongoing design project, a collaboration between Walters, Winterbourne House and Gardens Museum, and the University of Birminghams’s Higher Education Futures Institute (HEFI) is to an create interactive, virtual Garden History tour of Winterbourne Gardens, with the aim of making historic garden-making practices and changing garden spaces digitally accessible to visitors to the site. Using navigable 3D photography, the virtual “tour” is intended to provide a user-friendly, complementary guide to the history of the garden’s making; offering visitors the opportunity to compare the way the garden space has changed from 1902 onwards.

The jury was impressed by the project’s potential to highlight the relevance of geographical knowledge in an interdisciplinary setting. Moreover, it is a good example of how rigorous research can be joined up with digital technologies and societal partners. The potential for this project to further grow is significant and the HPGRG will be curiously watching this come to future fruition. Harriet’s project provides a model which might assist the design of others’ research projects as well as methods of communicating existing scholarship.

If you are interested to know more about the further development of this exciting project, you can follow Harriet Walters and the Winterbourne House and Gardens on Twitter. 

The HPGRG is pleased to announce that the 2021 HPGRG Undergraduate Dissertation Prize has been awarded to Chiara Ruggieri-Mitchell for her dissertation titled “The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same: Trends in Conservation Focus, 2010-2019”. The dissertation, completed for a degree at Royal Holloway University, London (https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/research-and-teaching/departments-and-schools/geography/) provides a longitudinal in-depth analysis of the field of conservation studies publications.

Dr Emily Hayes (Oxford Brookes University), the HPGRG Awards officer and one of the assessing panel consisting of three HPGRG Committee members describes the thesis as:

“an amazingly diligently executed study of three leading anglophone conservation journals. The dissertation is a biogeographical study which investigates the locations of conservation studies, the animal subjects discussed, and the location and the genders of the authors of the articles published in these three journals over a nearly ten-year period. It forms the basis for many important historical and philosophical questions about conservation, research, publishing and geography.”

The dissertation was completed in difficult conditions because of the pandemic: Chiara was obliged to abandon her original plan of conducting practical field-work for this study of meta data analysis. The thesis is under embargo and therefore not downloadable from the HPGRG website at this point. However, we are delighted that Chiara has plans to publish her research. We will therefore update our site once the embargo is lifted or when the study’s findings are successfully published.