Recent Submissions

  • Looking beyond the visible: contesting environmental agendas for Mumbai slums

    Abbott, Dina; Department of Development Geography, University of Derby (Oxford University Press, 2009)
    Slums are the most immediate, visible symbols of poverty and environmental degra-dation intertwined in cities. They are a constant reminder of national shame and the state’s incapacity or political will to tackle poverty. In cities where the poor and rich share spaces, the rich will attempt to mentally and morally distance themselves from the slums, often regarding these as eyesores, health hazards, and dens of corruption and immoral behaviour. Yet slums are home to millions, from single householders to intergenerational extended families. Within each slum locality, there is intense social networking to safe¬guard common interest, provide informal services for neighbours and enhance the ability to carry out livelihood opportunities. There is a clear contrast in the way slums are regarded by ‘outsiders’, and those who actually live there. Equally there is a difference in which both outsiders and slum dwellers understand environmental needs. A key question for this chapter is, therefore, what is the contested nature of environ-mental agendas in urban areas and who or what defines it? This chapter draws on Mumbai as an example to argue that within shared spaces, whilst there may be commonality of environmental interests, environmental agendas are often shaped by those who are more powerful and vocal.
  • Field geographies

    Abbott, Dina; University Reader in Development Geography, University of Derby (Elsevier, 2012-05-29)
    Epistemological discourses such as those that have emerged from women’s studies (particularly feminism) and development studies have, however, shown geographers that there is a need to challenge the power assumptions embedded in the whole process of research, including methodological choices that can include or exclude. By tracing these discourses and using examples from these two disciplines, this article demonstrates how contemporary geography has taken on board some of the new methodological approaches that have thus transpired. In turn, this has enriched geographical enquiry, which is now, much as the subject itself, seen as a social construct requiring critical reflection and challenge.
  • Development management as reflective practice

    Abbott, Dina; Brown, Suzanne; Wilson, Gordon (2013-06-27)
  • The lived experience of climate change´: creating open educational resources and virtual mobility for an innovative, integrative and competence-based track at Masters level

    Abbott, Dina; Wilson, Gordon; Pérez, P.; Willems, P.; Academics from EU universities: see paper for full affliations (Inderscience Publishers, 2012-05-29)
    This paper explores a new integrative approach to climate change education at Masters level. Drawing on the authors’ involvement in a European Union Erasmus project, it is argued that the diversity of knowledge(s) on climate change are a source of active/social learning. The wide variety of disciplinary, sectoral and lived experiential (both individual and collective) knowledge(s) are all considered legitimate in this exercise, the aim of which is to construct new interdisciplinary knowledge from their boundary interfaces. We further argue for a corresponding pedagogy based on developing transboundary competences – the ability to engage in social learning and action through communicative engagement across knowledge boundaries. We acknowledge that the challenges for enacting transboundary competence are considerable when it requires mobility across epistemological, even ontological, boundaries. The challenges are further compounded when the communicative engagement across space and time requires virtual mobility which is ICT-enabled. Nevertheless, meeting them is a normative goal, not only for this expanded, integrative approach to climate change education, but also for a global resolution of climate change itself.