Jasmin Leila Award

About the Award

The Jasmin Leila Award was established in 2008, in celebration of Jasmin Leila Sidaway. The award is given as a £250 supplement to one of the projects supported under the Society’s Small Research Grants scheme or as an independent award.

In tribute to Jasmin, the project to be recognised by the award will have a focus on either:

• Medical and health geography

• Performance (especially any aspects of music, theatre, fashion and/or dance and their geographies)

• Transnational communities

Deadline: 3 February

Apply now

The Jasmin Leila Award is given through the Society’s Small Research Grants scheme. All prospective grant applicants are encouraged to read our Advice and Resources pages, which include more information about the grants programme, its conditions, how to apply for a grant and what is expected if your application is successful. Please read this information carefully and send your application, or any enquiries, by email to grants@rgs.org.

Previous recipients

2022: Rosie Knowles (Royal Holloway, University of London): Re-imagining Liminal Therapeutic Landscapes

Since the 1990s health geographers have explored the relationship between health and place through the framing of therapeutic landscapes. These studies have focused on the categorisation of ‘blue’, ‘green’, or more recently, ‘brown’ landscapes. This project questions these understandings of nature and landscape to explore the multifarious colours and sensory experiences of three industrial or post-industrial ‘liminal’ landscapes in Wales and London, and whether they have the potential to be ‘therapeutic’. This research grapples with the differing urban nature relationships, cultural histories, memories and embodied everyday experiences of these landscapes and whether therapeutic effect can be understood through affective attunements.

2021: Dr Maddy Thompson (Keele University): Space of ADHD: a study into women with ADHD

Growing numbers of adult women are diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), although this group remains marginalised compared to men and boys with ADHD. Whereas men and boys tend to be impacted most in education and employment settings, research suggests women are impacted most in the home. As COVID-19 pushes work, education and access to health into the home, women with ADHD stand to be particularly affected. Through orienting focus to the geographical spaces of the home and online ADHD support spaces, and using participatory photovoice methodology, this project gives women with ADHD the voice to represent their experiences.

2020: Casarin Giada (University of Bristol): Social mixing in schools and neighbourhoods. A comparative study of Italy and the UK

Social mixing policies have been adopted across Europe to tackle urban problems such as residential stigma, social marginalisation and school segregation. Research has focused upon the success of such policies at the time of implementation. This project goes further in assessing the impact of social mixing policies over the longer term, by adopting a specific focus on the socio-spatial mobility of children from different socio-ethnic backgrounds. It is a comparative case study project focusing on two disadvantaged and ethnically segregated neighbourhoods – Ponte Lambro, Milan and Lawrence Hill, Bristol – which experienced similar social mixing interventions in the early 2000s.

2020: Lorena Gazzotti (University of Cambridge): Containment beyond deportation. Governing migrant children in the Spanish enclave of Melilla

Since the 1970s, Western countries have increasingly resorted to deportation as a technique of border surveillance. Although deportation is receiving increasing scholarly attention, little is known about what happens when the state cannot lawfully remove an alien from its territory. Building on
literature on space as containment, this project will start filling this gap through a case study of migrant children in Melilla, a Spanish enclave at the border with Morocco. Separated children have rights which oblige states to grant them protection and care, thus radically restricting legal grounds for
deportation. Using qualitative methods, this project will analyse how the state reorganizes border surveillance around this group of legally protected (but politically undesirable) foreigners.

2018: Dr Sophie Cranston (Loughborough University). 'Invisible International Students: British migrant children attending UK universities'

Although research on international student migration to the UK is long established, there remains a group of young people who are ‘invisible’ within this: the children of British migrants. This is a group of young people who are British by passport, but have spent a significant amount of their lives living abroad. This research, following British migrant young people from just before they arrive in the UK for higher education, through to the end of their first year of university, will look at how they negotiate competing British and global identities.

2017: Dr Charlotte Veal (University of Southampton). 'Choreographing military bodies: Aeromobilities, embodied geopolitics, and dance-based combat training with the British Parachute Regiment'

The project examines the micro-bodily regimes of British Parachute Regiment personnel during training at Ringway Aerodrome in the mid-1940s. It combines research into military- and aero-mobilities, with work on embodied geopolitics, and the emerging geographies of dance literature, to explore the making of the airborne militarised body. The project will draw upon archival material held across London and Surrey, including letters and diary entries, alongside photographs and videography of parachute training.

2015: Dr Allan Watson (Staffordshire University). 'Knowledge sharing and networking in regionally-scaled creative economies: the economic geography of north west England’s musical economy'

The overall aim of the proposed research project is to use the music industry in north west England as a lens through which to address significant gaps in our understanding of regionally-scaled creative economies. The key innovation of this research will be to critically examine the extent to which the north west music industry, centred upon the cities/city-regions of Liverpool and Manchester, represents a genuinely networked regional creative economy - one which is both intra-regionally linked and externally connected – and to develop an in-depth understanding of its economic geography.

2014: Dr Matej Blazek (Loughborough University). 'Life trajectories and experiences of young Somali women in the UK: subjections, subjectifications and the routes to citizenship'

Somali migrants in the UK face a range of challenges, including high rates of poverty and unemployment, barriers to education and ostracisation of Islam. Young Somali women are a group that remains largely overlooked in research and policy even in comparison to the rest of the community and with additional factors of marginalisation. This research explores how young Somali female migrants in the UK become citizens and political subjects with a particular focus on the role of individual migration histories and intersectionality of gender, religion, age and race.

2013: Dr Helen Wilson (University of Manchester). 'Intercultural dialogue and diversity training in Europe: examining the mobilisation of a US intervention model - London, Zurich, Bern and Basel'

In 2008, the Council of Europe launched a new agenda for intercultural dialogue which placed emphasis on the provision of non-formal learning opportunities for the development of intercultural competencies. This placed dialogue at the heart of efforts to reduce conflict, increase tolerance and prevent ethnic, religious and cultural divides in European cities. This research focuses on related projects of cultural learning and community intervention that have been mobilised across European cities as best-practice examples.

2012: Dr Caleb Johnston (University of Glasgow). 'Performing Citizenship: politics, tactics, and adivasis rights in Ahmedabad'

Through theatre the research assessed the possibilities (and challenges) of collaboration in a post-colonial, trans-cultural exchange; the development of innovative research practices in human geography; and the potential of performance to expand the terrain of public debate in Ahmedabad.

2011: Dr Justin Spinney (University of East London). 'Travel choices and parenting practices: consumption, culture and mobility'

This project studied the changes and continuities in household travel patterns of first-time parents in London (UK). The research explored and theorised how parenting imposes a new suite of materialities, affective capacities, time constraints and practices, which in turn inform daily travel choices.

2009: Dr Ruth Evans (University of Reading). 'Young people caring for their siblings in child and youth headed households, in Tanzania and Uganda'

Participatory approaches to feedback and dissemination are seen as a way of enabling the voices of marginalised groups to prioritise research findings and engage in policy dialogue. This project sought to engage young people living in sibling-headed households affected by AIDS, community members and NGO stakeholders in active feedback and dissemination activities in Tanzania and Uganda, following initial pilot research in the research locations in 2008.

2008: Dr Claire Herrick (King's College London). 'The qualitative and comparative links between obesity and alcohol research in health geography'

This project aimed to carve out a new conceptual and empirical research agenda within health geography from two previously distinct domains of interest - obesity and alcohol - in order to develop a future major grant proposal.