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lborogeog.bsky.social
Geography and Environment at Loughborough University
@lborogeog.bsky.social
47 followers 160 following 11 posts
🎙️ News, updates, and all the great things happening in the Department of Geography and Environment at Loughborough University.

🏅 5th in the UK for Geography

👩🏽‍💻 Website: https://bit.ly/lborogeog
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Reposted by Geography and Environment at Loughborough University
lborogeog.bsky.social
📢 Next week: A talk on 'Constructing Just Mobility Futures' by our own @trivikrama.bsky.social! Join us in person next Wednesday, 12th November @1:00 PM for what is sure to be an excellent conversation.
Geography seminar series, Join us Wednesday 12th November 1:00 PM in EHB205 for Constructing Just Mobility Futures: Mobility is a key determinant of urban wellbeing. It shapes access to services, opportunities, social safety, care, and community. Mobility today is misaligned with needs of society, worsening inequalities in access and increasing reliance on car infrastructure. In a period of increasing inequality and ageing, as service geographies reorganise, care roles evolve, and environmental pollution worsens, future mobility needs will undergo massive changes. The prevailing “predict-and-provide” paradigm in transit planning is based on past demand patterns and is too narrow. Datasets that quantify travel demand (e.g., Origin-Destination (OD) matrices, travel demand survey, travel diaries) have long mirrored the journeys of a stereotypical male commuter, reinforcing only priorities of formal economic work. Treating mobility as aggregate behaviour then erases barriers faced by many others. As a result, people whose needs are poorly reflected, such as lower income women making chained care trips, older adults seeking community services, those with disabilities, children, and night-time workers on off-peak schedules, are systematically underserved and socially excluded. Optimising solely for economic efficiency deepens inequality and car-dependence, which is environmentally unsustainable and fiscally costly, and happening everywhere in the UK. A futures-oriented approach is therefore required – one that begins from lived constraints and explicit social objectives, and tests alternative pathways under physical and environmental limits. In this talk, I will present some recent work from The Netherlands and South Africa exploring the inequalities that people face in movement, the data ecosystems that allow us to understand them, and participatory methods of constructing just mobility futures for all.
November 5, 2025 at 11:55 AM
lborogeog.bsky.social
Earlier in October, we joined our colleague @sarah-mills.bsky.social for a fantastic discussion on mobile apps, gambling, and the gamification of citizenship to kick off the series—and what a great start! 📲
GEOGRAPHY SEMINAR SERIES Sarah Mills Loughborough University Professor of Human Geography Join us Wednesday 15th October 1:00 PM in EHB205 The Gamification of Citizenship 'Good citizenship' has become a game to play, with real prizes to be won. This talk focuses on the 'gamification of citizenship' through a discussion of digital rewards, participation and volunteering. In recent years, a proliferation of mobile apps have incentivised behaviour change in various contexts such as health and sustainability. I argue that the growth of 'gamification' (using elements of game design in non-gaming contexts) in these popular mobile apps has wider implications for debates on citizenship and raises important questions about the use of gambling style techniques within apps for 'social good'. The seminar then charts some of the latest trends in the US and the UK related to citizenship, volunteering and 'character', reflecting on wider geographies of immigration and the contested politics of volunteering as 'good behaviour'.
November 5, 2025 at 11:55 AM
lborogeog.bsky.social
Before that, we had the opportunity to host Dr Ania Zielonka from the Institute of Nature Conservation and the Polish Academy of Sciences. This was a riveting talk on Dr Zielonka's mountain river experiments and the generation of microplastics.🥤
GEOGRAPHY SEMINAR SERIES Join us Wednesday 22nd October 1:00 PM in EHB205 Dr Ania Zielonka Institute of Nature Conservation Polish Academy of Sciences Mountain Rivers as Critical Hotspots of Secondary Microplastic Production Macroplastic fragmentation in rivers represents a key but poorly quantified process driving the generation of secondary micro- and nanoplastics. Here, we develop an integrated conceptual framework linking macroplastic transport and fragmentation dynamics, with a particular focus on mountain river systems. We distinguish between intrinsic fragmentation controls-related to material properties such as shape, polymer type, and weathering -and extrinsic controls governed by hydromorphological and climatic conditions. It is hypothesize that steep slopes, coarse sediments, and high flow velocities in mountain rivers accelerate mechanical degradation of macroplastics, while exposed channel areas promote biochemical fragmentation via photo-oxidation. These characteristics can transform mountain rivers into efficient "microplastic factories, producing large quantities of secondary particles that propagate downstream. Our framework provides a foundation for experimental and modelling studies aiming to quantify macroplastic degradation pathways and assess the role of mountain fluvial systems in the global plastic fragmentation cycle.
November 5, 2025 at 11:55 AM
lborogeog.bsky.social
Last week, we heard from Research Associate @joshwolstenholme.bsky.social on river sediment transport and flood risk that led to some great questions and further discussion! 🌊
GEOGRAPHY SEMINAR SERIES Join us Wednesday 29th October 1:00 PM in EHB205 Dr Josh Wolstenholme Loughborough University Sediment transport and flood risk: Why is it important and how can we monitor it? One in four people globally are at risk of extreme flooding, a number expected to rise under a changing climate. Yet current flood risk assessments often omit key river processes, notably sediment transport, due to high uncertainty, limited field data, and computational cost. In this talk, I will first present a series of numerical experiments in the upland catchment of Glenridding Beck (Cumbria) that demonstrate how sediment dynamics amplified the impacts of Storm Desmond in 2016. I will explore how increasing storm duration and intensity can trigger thresholds where sediment transport significantly enhances flood risk. Second, I will discuss new work on using smartphone LiDAR to capture small-scale river morphology, showing that it can produce results comparable to traditional survey methods while enabling low-cost, repeatable monitoring for model calibration and validation.
November 5, 2025 at 11:55 AM
lborogeog.bsky.social
📢 Next week: A talk on 'Constructing Just Mobility Futures' by our own @trivikrama.bsky.social! Join us in person next Wednesday, 12th November @1:00 PM for what is sure to be an excellent conversation.
Geography seminar series, Join us Wednesday 12th November 1:00 PM in EHB205 for Constructing Just Mobility Futures: Mobility is a key determinant of urban wellbeing. It shapes access to services, opportunities, social safety, care, and community. Mobility today is misaligned with needs of society, worsening inequalities in access and increasing reliance on car infrastructure. In a period of increasing inequality and ageing, as service geographies reorganise, care roles evolve, and environmental pollution worsens, future mobility needs will undergo massive changes. The prevailing “predict-and-provide” paradigm in transit planning is based on past demand patterns and is too narrow. Datasets that quantify travel demand (e.g., Origin-Destination (OD) matrices, travel demand survey, travel diaries) have long mirrored the journeys of a stereotypical male commuter, reinforcing only priorities of formal economic work. Treating mobility as aggregate behaviour then erases barriers faced by many others. As a result, people whose needs are poorly reflected, such as lower income women making chained care trips, older adults seeking community services, those with disabilities, children, and night-time workers on off-peak schedules, are systematically underserved and socially excluded. Optimising solely for economic efficiency deepens inequality and car-dependence, which is environmentally unsustainable and fiscally costly, and happening everywhere in the UK. A futures-oriented approach is therefore required – one that begins from lived constraints and explicit social objectives, and tests alternative pathways under physical and environmental limits. In this talk, I will present some recent work from The Netherlands and South Africa exploring the inequalities that people face in movement, the data ecosystems that allow us to understand them, and participatory methods of constructing just mobility futures for all.
November 5, 2025 at 11:55 AM