Virtual Library

Our staff and postgraduate students are innovative, creative scholars.

Much of our research takes final form in high-impact articles or books. But a considerable amount of our activity takes place in other mediums. There is no single formula for communicating research that operates at different speeds and rhythms, and we are committed to sharing our research in all its forms, from the fine-grained steps of partnering in community initiatives through to the high-resolution experiences of virtual reality and drone mapping.

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33 Countries and 236 institutions have been our partners in publication since 2014

A Global Partner Funded projects with 44 UK and 82 overseas higher education institutions since 2014

Athena Swan Silver Award in Gender Equality

111 Collaborations with non-academic partners since 2014

New Podcast on Oil Transformations

What exactly do we mean when we talk about oil? How is our relationship with it changing? And what would stopping oil really look like? Gavin Bridge and colleagues have a new podcast series on transformations in the oil sector.

The oil industry has historically operated in relative invisibility. Mysterious offshore rigs hundreds of miles out to sea can appear like images of a foreign land; refinery chimneys rising beyond the edges of some of our biggest cities are easy to mistake for just another factory; and bustling offices, the site of monumental decisions affecting generations to come, are just as faceless as the next. Out of sight – and often out of mind.

Listen to the podcast here!

Living Digitally Like a Migrant - PhD Student Hannah Morgan publishes in Progress in Human Geography

Digital technologies, like cell phones, are changing experiences of (im)mobility into and within Europe. Hannah Morgan examines how, for irregular migrants, the smartphone has become a vital digital tool for mediating everyday experiences of hostile environments.

Read the full article here!

Jonny Darling on BBC's Thinking Allowed

Asylum and 'home' - the impact of asylum dispersal and Syrian refugees' quest for home. Laurie Taylor talks to Jonathan Darling, Associate Professor in Human Geography at Durham University, about the system of housing and support for asylum seekers and refugees in Britain, from the first outsourced asylum accommodation contracts in 2012 to the renewed wave of outsourcing pursued by the Home Office today.

Listen to the full episode

DON'T TOUCH TARIQUÍA: The Resistance of Chiquiacá

Dr Penelope Anthias's new documentary on Bolivian women organising against oil and gas development in Tariquía National Reserve of Flora and Fauna

Read Anthias's book: Limits to Decolonisation

Carlos Tornel's new article on energy justice

Decolonizing energy justice from the ground up

Carlos Tornel expands energy justice by considering the struggles over coloniality and cultural identity in the Global South in Progress in Human Geography, .

Read the article here!

Congratulations to Colin McFarlane on his new and forthcoming books

Global Urbanism: Knowledge, Power and the City

With Michele Lancione, Colin McFarlane has co-edited an exploration of how urban scholars and activists make sense of, and act upon, the foundational relationship between the ‘global’ and the ‘urban’.
Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds

Forthcoming this October, Colin McFarlane examines the social, material, and spatial fragments of cities and how they come to matter in the experience, politics, and expression of urban worlds.

Global Urbanism: Knowledge, Power and the City

With Michele Lancione, Colin McFarlane has co-edited an exploration of how urban scholars and activists make sense of, and act upon, the foundational relationship between the ‘global’ and the ‘urban’.

Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds

Forthcoming this October, Colin McFarlane examines the social, material, and spatial fragments of cities and how they come to matter in the experience, politics, and expression of urban worlds.

Navigating the Field: Durham Postgraduates Co-edit and Author New Book!

This book collates postgraduate fieldwork experiences in social research and "provides a platform for early career researchers (ECRs) to be open about the hidden labour of doing postgraduate fieldwork." Written and edited by ECRs, it is relevant to "researchers of all levels and across disciplines."

Major melt water event during last deglaciation dominated by North America

Durham Geography's Yucheng Lin led a new study in Nature Communications comparing the major meltwater sources that explain sea level rise at the end of the last deglaciation.

Durham Geographers Yucheng Lin, Pippa Whitehouse, Sarah Woodroffe, and Ian Shennan have co-authored a new article in Nature Communications showing that sea level rise from the largest melt water pulse of the last deglaciation was dominated by North America. Together with colleagues at University of York, Australian National University, and the University of Sheffield their sea-level based results reconcile field-based ice-sheet reconstructions of this major event.

Read the article here (open access)

Figure from article showing meltwater pulses after last deglaciation

Turbulent Waters in Three Parts

Jessica Lehman, Phil Steinberg, and Elizabeth Johnson discuss their new article in Theory and Event. If you have any trouble with the embedded video you can also watch it on YouTube here.

Read the article at Theory & Event

A year of pandemic: time to look back (and celebrate!) recent books by our staff

Louise Amoore has written Cloud Ethics with Duke University Press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/cloud-ethics

Professor Anna Secor co-edited A Place More Void with Nebraska University Press: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496222633/

Df Elizabeth Johnson co-edited Blue Legalities with Duke University Press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/blue-legalities

Research Ethics book by Darling and Wilson

Dr Helen Wilson and Dr Jonathan Darling co-edited Research Ethics for Human Geography with Sage Publishing: https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/research-ethics-for-human-geography/book251312

Dr Andres Luque-Ayala co-authored Urban Operating Systems with MIT Press: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4994/Urban-Operating-SystemsProducing-the-Computational

From earthquakes and mangroves to geopoetics, Anthropocene cities, and more: search out the latest in our first publication mixer!

• Kingsbury, P., and Secor, A. J. (Eds.). 2021. A Place More Void. University of Nebraska Press.

• Padgett, J.S., Engelhart, S.E., Kelsey, H.M., Witter, R.C., Cahill, N., and Hemphill-Haley, E., in press. Timing and amount of southern Cascadia earthquake subsidence over the past 1700 years at northern Humboldt Bay, California, USA. Geological Society of America Bulletin, doi:10.1130/B35701.1

• Aya Nassar. 2021. Geopoetics: Storytelling against mastery. Dialogues in Human Geography. doi:10.1177/2043820620986397

• Kincey, M.E., Rosser, N.J., Robinson, T.R., Densmore, A.L., Shrestha, R., Pujara, D., Oven, K.J., Williams, J.G., and Swirad, Z.M. 2021. Evolution of coseismic and post-seismic landsliding after the 2015 Mw 7.8 Gorkha earthquake, Nepal. Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, 126.

• Harriet Bulkeley. 2020. Climate changed urban futures: environmental politics in the Anthropocene city. Environmental Politics, online advance.

• Rahman, M.S., Donoghue, D.N. and Bracken, L.J., 2021. Is soil organic carbon underestimated in the largest mangrove forest ecosystems? Evidence from the Bangladesh Sundarbans. CATENA, 200, p.105159.

• Oliver Belcher and Jeremy J. Schmidt. 2021. “Being Earthbound: Arendt, Process, and Alienation in the Anthropocene.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 39(1): 103–20.

• Phil Steinberg wrote the preface to the recently published book: The Urbanisation of the Sea: From Concepts and Analysis to Design.

• Miles, B.W.J., Jordan, J.R., Stokes, C.R., Jamieson, S.S.R., Gudmundsson, G.H. and Jenkins, A. 2021. Recent acceleration of Denman Glacier (1972-2017), East Antarctica, driven by grounding line retreat and changes in ice tongue configuration. The Cryosphere, 15, 663-676.

• Hill, E.A., Gudmundsson, G.H., Carr, J.R., Stokes, C.R. and King, H.M. 2021. Twenty-first century response of Petermann Glacier, northwest Greenland to ice shelf loss. Journal of Glaciology, 67 (261), 147-157.

Why and how do borders matter? How do we engage borders to make a difference in the world?

Professor Phil Steinberg, IBRU Director

IBRU: Centre for Borders Research

Read the Spring 2021 IBRU Newsletter