Geography Department PhD student, Camilla Royle, recently travelled to Edinburgh to attend the British Ecological Society Conference using the Geography PhD Small Grant.
I’m a part time student with no funding so the Department PhD Small Grant allows me to go to conferences and do fieldwork that I would not be able to afford to do otherwise. In December I used the grant to travel to Scotland to do an interview for my thesis and to attend the British Ecological Society conference.
I’m a social scientist really but, since I’m interested in ideas in biology, it was a great opportunity to go to a conference like this and get a sense of what the debates are in ecology. I heard talks about citizen science, urban ecosystems, rewilding and invasive species- and came away with lots of ideas for things to add to my thesis and topics I could write about in future. I went to a debate about ecosystem services which I thought was particularly interesting because it gave a sense that people who work in wildlife conservation are often wrestling with similar questions as environmental geographers- can we put a price on nature? Should we value nature only if it provides a service for humans? Which humans are benefitting and who is losing out? One thing that surprised me and made me think was that for an environmental conference there was relatively little discussion of climate change- at least in the talks I saw. One of the speakers suggested that the recent Paris COP21 talks might solve the problem. I think most critical human geographers would be a bit more sceptical about that.
I also discovered that ecologists have a lot of fun at their conferences. There was a Christmas jumper competition, a somewhat chaotic attempt at ceilidh dancing on a very packed dance floor and even an exhibit about birds of prey at the conference where you could stroke a barn owl.
On the last day in Scotland I did an interview for my thesis with someone I was really pleased to get a chance to speak to. It was definitely worth arranging such an interesting interview and I have quoted from it since in article publications.
Camilla Royle is a PhD Student in the Geography Department at King’s and a member of the Spatial Politics research group.
To find out more about the Geography PhD Small Grant please go to https://internal.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/stu/geog/pgr/index.aspx