Field trips

This development geography field trip to coastal Kerala, India, is challenging and exciting. For three days you will work in groups of three with a local student counterpart acting as a guide and translator on an individual group project that you will have designed before arriving in Kerala.

Student projects are the backbone of the field experience and will have you quickly immersed in local culture, language and development challenges. This will be through interviews, focus group discussions and informal observation at a range of locations from schools, fish markets, churches and prawn or coconut plantations to community groups and local governments.

Projects are framed by three observation days focusing on urban and rural livelihoods and change and a transect into the Western Ghats. Watch out for elephants – these can be distracting!

This field trip to Hong Kong explores urban and economic development and change in two of East Asia’s most dynamic city-regions. The focus of the week-long trip is independent research projects on contemporary issues of urban geography in Hong Kong, including high-density living, relationships with China, legacies of British colonialism, and the cultures of globalisation.

Several tours enable students to explore Hong Kong’s housing, architecture and culture, while a hike up Victoria Peak will provide amazing views of Hong Kong and the surrounding bays and islands.

We spend seven days in San Francisco, United States, looking at the politics, economics and cultural geographies of this iconic city. The trip intersperses group-based project work (supervised by one of the staff members) with a walking tour of the city, a boat trip around the Bay, and a trip over the Golden Gate Bridge to Muir Woods National Monument.

In recent years, student projects have focused on gentrification; urban cycling; queer San Francisco; alternative food movements; and earthquake risk and policy. Skills acquired range from the ability to work with archival and visual sources to interviewing and survey-based skills.

This 10-day fieldtrip to Morocco starts in Marrakesh and then takes a transect southwards over the spectacular Atlas Mountains, down the Draa River valley, following this vital water resource through oasis villages until it dissipates into the sand dunes of the Sahara.

Along the way, we will explore the changing climate, from the Mediterranean through to semi-desert mountains, to the arid Sahara. As we do this, we will investigate the effects of a changing climate on the geomorphology, ecology and human subsistence.

The trip includes discussing these issues at numerous locations, as well as practical studies of the aquatic biodiversity of the Draa River and methodology to estimate its past discharge.