The Global Goals
In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. Jon's work contributes towards the following SDG(s):
About Jon
I am Head of the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences.
Most of my time is spent in this management role, but I continue to teach classes and conduct research in my specialist field of the geography of transport, travel and mobility. My latest book, Transport Matters, was published by Policy Press in October 2019.
Teaching
In my career I have taught numerous aspects of human geography. Because my PhD focused on transport and travel issues, I have always been involved in teaching Transport Geography modules, but my time at the University of Idaho in the 1990s gave me a lifelong love of the American West. Over the years I've written classroom-based modules on the USA and set up a field trip to the Pacific North West, a variant of which has run most years since 2002. I also teach political and economic geography.
At the moment I teach on three undergraduate modules:
GGH1203 Culture, Society and Space
This is a wide-ranging module which exposes students to a variety of topics studied by geographers and the different ways we go about studying them. I teach the political and economic geography sections of the module, dealing with ideas of states, nations, territory, governance and state restructuring, electoral geography, firms, labour and world trade.
GGH2207 Transport, Travel and Mobilities
I co-teach on this module which covers different ways of looking at transport, travel and mobility. We identify where people, goods and information go, and explain when, how and why they go there. We go on to look at the significance of a range of everyday experiences of being ‘on the move’. The reasons why and how people move—via private car rather than public transport, for example—can be understood really effectively by examining what people do and feel during the time they spend travelling. Finally, we consider the mobility of specific groups of people and things. The often-competing discourses put forward by politicians and the media regarding the movement of people, products and services, resources and pollution, and ideas and beliefs, have profound implications for how people relate to each other.
GGX2204 Fieldwork in Geography: The Changing American West
The result of having lived in the USA and developing many professional contacts and friendships across the Pond, this module involves between 20 and 40 students boarding a plane to Seattle to experience and learn about the Pacific Northwest for 11 days. We split the trip into two parts: the first week involves students investigating a different geographic theme each day (for example, we investigate 'conflict' in the deserts and mountains around Richland, Washington, and 'society and nature' in the Columbia River Gorge). In the second half of the trip students divide into groups of 4-5 and undertake a project of their own design.
