GGM225 Cultural Geography

I run half of this 20 credit second year module.  This is a grab bag of different things that I've been interested in over the years, with a skew toward urban geography.  There's a lot of material on architecture and planning, particularly historically.  Material on the use of architecture as propaganda tool for the 1930s-40s National Socialist regime in Germany always seems to be pretty popular because of people's fascination with evil.  This, I guess, is the basis of the History Channel's entire business model.  We have filmed all the lectures and replaced the timetabled lecture slots with seminars.  People working on pedagogic innovation call this 'lecture flipping', which pretty much sums up the problems with pedagogic research

GGM322 Gender, Body & Performance

I sole teach this 20 credit third year module.  The primarily intellectual underpinning for this course are the debates around affect and embodiment - essentially looking at the interplay between the individual body and the world around it.  The module tries to ground this heavy theory through the use of fieldwork experiments in the spirit of the Situationists' use of Détournement. If you see a group of students wandering around the Birmingham campus backwards, that's probably my fault.

Fieldcourses

I've been involved with a number of different fieldcourses over the year (Snowdonia, Coniston, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Berlin).  When in Berlin I have been known to talk about the late and (very) great David Bowie...

I run a specialist local fieldcourse in Birmingham for first year joint honours students.  I try to convince them that GIS is fun, as we map architectural conservation areas, air and noise pollution.  I'm frequently surprised by the enthusiastic response this fieldcourse receives considering that they don't get to go anywhere more exotic than Bournville.