Roddy's thoughts and pictures at the close of the day
Way back in 1990 I went on sabbatical leave to St Mary's College, Durham University, and produced an Atlas of Kenya. I specifically wanted to map where ethnic groups lived at independence (1963) and where they lived in 1979 at the end of President Kenyatta's government. I used the 1962 and 1979 population censuses to... Continue Reading →
Luveshni Odayar is one of my Masters students. Her work is provocatively entitled Post-Apartheid Apartheid and she presented some of her preliminary findings at the Canon Collins Scholars Conference held in Cape Town recently. Here she is, front row left, pictured with some of the scholars attending the event. Her work asks whether the patterns of... Continue Reading →
Things don't usually work out this like this but for once my teaching and research schedules have fitted together really neatly. This past week I've been busy with the IPPE 2015 students at University West introducing them to research principles and practices through recording their Time Geographical activities using Google Drive applications. Then on Thursday... Continue Reading →
We had our latest meeting for the SANORD funded SISU-EDU project at the University of Turku this week. The aim of the Sustainability Education in Southern Africa project is to build an open access education simulation. We met our colleagues from Finland Futures Research Centre this week to workshop how to adapt their getalife simulation to... Continue Reading →
On Wednesday this week we held our World Water Week seminar. It was the culminating activity in a three week course on water resource management in Africa: part of the Masters programme in Science for Sustainable Development at Linköping University. We are teaching on the course as part of our Linnaeus-Palme exchange programme between the... Continue Reading →
Our time at Linköping University is unfortunately drawing to a close. We have just had a long weekend to celebrate Valborg but before then Kate and I held a Futures Studies session with our Sustainable Resources Masters students in Temahuset. It ended with the students workshopping Future Scenarios for Water Use in Africa. The four... Continue Reading →
Friday last week was taken up entirely with the public defence of Per-Olof Hanssons' PhD thesis: New Ways of Learning: Participatory Action Research and Kenyan Runners' Appropriation of Smartphones to Improve their Daily Lives and Participation in m-Learning. I was invited to be the opponent and soon learned that meant I had to make a... Continue Reading →
We have our largest ever number of postgraduates in the Geography Department this year - 42 at latest count - and last Monday I welcomed them with a brief resume about the traditions of the Department. The photo above shows four Geographers that personify the four traditions. They are celebrating Prof. Vernon Forbes’ honorary D.Litt at the 1989... Continue Reading →
Here are some different views of Rhodes University, Grahamstown. The original pictures were taken using my cheap phone camera and then reworked using WordFoto: Rhodes University and Grahamstown are the keywords. These will have to change, of course, and I will need to do more pictures if we ever rename the University and city ….. The... Continue Reading →
Here's a different take on last week's election …. a little arithmetic (using figures from the official IEC website) shows that the ANC's 11.4 million votes is 36% of those that could, potentially, have been cast. Or to put it another way - over six in ten eligible voters did not vote for the ruling... Continue Reading →
Sun Downer Blogs 