Research activities
Research activities in the Cultural and Historical Geography research group.
Our work encompasses historical inquiries into the archived past, interpretations of cultural landscapes, ethnographic studies of everyday experiences, and planning for low-carbon energy futures, sustainable environments and healthy communities. Whether theoretical or applied, policy-informing or practice-based, our research reflects a shared commitment to social, political and environmental engagement.
Some of our current projects include:
Current projects
Dr Krithika Srinivasan is leading an interdisciplinary team for a Wellcome Trust funded research project on One Health and rabies. The 4-year project investigates why rabies persists as a public health problem in India. Dog-mediated rabies in Asia and Africa is a priority in transnational public health, and One Health approaches have scientific consensus as being key to its prevention. India has the highest burden of human rabies globally despite long-standing initiatives, including One Health programmes, on rabies elimination.
This project addresses this impasse, building on pilot research that suggests that the answer might lie in insufficient understanding of everyday people-dog relations. Challenging the (post)colonial One Health conceptualisation of street dogs as out-of-place disease vectors, the team combines human geography (University of Edinburgh), history (Liverpool University), behavioural ecology (University of Technology, Sydney), and social psychology (University of Western Australia) to study people-dog interactions, dog ecology, and rabies prevention efforts in urban and rural India.
Through this, we will generate lessons on making One Health initiatives more effective and ethical, and partner with public health practitioners to develop rabies prevention interventions that are socio-culturally appropriate. Through this fresh approach to rabies, we will reframe how One Health is theorised and pursued, and reconfigure it to enable more equitable approaches to health in a world characterised by multispecies risk and vulnerability.
Dr Marisa Wilson is leading a project that is seeking to re-connect Caribbean youth to their elders through activities that encourage young people to reflect on their own food practices, how they may differ from older people and why these changes matter in the context of climate adaptation, resilience, and justice for Caribbean peoples of African descent.
This project is called 'Recipes for Resilience' and forms part of a UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and Arts Humanities Research Council (AHRC) series of investments that will encourage 14-18 year olds to engage with and contribute to important climate research.
As in other places, neoliberal policies and strategies in the Caribbean have increased consumer demand for imported and fast foods and further narrowed the range of locally-produced, nutrient-rich foods such as yam, cassava, plantain, and breadfruit, which could play a role as climate-resilient foods. The project will include a series of workshops that use sensory methods, storytelling, games, role play, song and youth-led research. Young participants will conduct sensory oral interviews with their elders about traditional ways of eating, cooking, commensality and gardening. Together with research partners, the researchers will collect, map, and sing about stories of Afrodescendant food heritage, past and present, and the climatic threats that undermine community resilience. Resulting story maps and songs will be shared publicly through an open educational resource.
The research is being conducted in collaboration with the University of West Indies, and includes a partnership with the Caribbean Youth Environment Network (CYEN), and invited Caribbean and British Caribbean youth.
Dr Marisa Wilson is working with colleagues and performance artists from the West Indies and Scotland on a project called 'Living Histories of Sugar'. This project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and is centred on the following themes:
Sugar stories
Marisa's work applies an immersive performance to enable people with generational links to slavery or sugar work to re-work or contest existing historical narratives about sugar, sugar work and enslavement. This project uses sensory oral histories and other methods to elicit local memories and experiences of the sugar and shipping industries in Greenock and the Inverclyde area of Scotland.
The outcomes of this work will be used shortly in an online exhibition in collaboration with Inverclyde school children.
Read about the online teaching and learning activities for schools in the Inverclyde area
People-led agri-food systems development
Ongoing work seeks to uncover how the global food system's historical and geographical injustices shape everyday understandings and practices of food production, exchange, and consumption. The project uses ethnographic, oral history and visual/digital methods to increase understandings of who gets what, why and wherein the context of (post)colonial legacies, such as the sugar plantation.
Alternative agri-food futures
Marisa has an active interest in practice-led alternatives to industrial capitalist agri-food systems and has focused most of her research on Cuba's alternative food network, asking questions such as who is included, who is excluded from this network, and how alternative economic spaces are shaped by histories of political economic and cultural change.