Towards guidelines for good practice in supervising Black Geography PhD students

Date and time: 30th June, 11-12am UK time.

Venue: Online - for a FREE link to enter, please register

Chair: Dr Pat Noxolo

Roundtable Participants: Victoria Okoye (University of Sheffield, author of a new report on the supervision of black PhD students in Geography); Dr James Esson (Loughborough University); Dr Margaret Byron (Leicester University) and Dr Angela Last (Leicester University).

Funded by the Royal Geographical Society's Ray Y Gildea Award, and based on interviews with Black PhD students, a postdoctoral fellow and supervisors, this roundtable event will discuss good practice in the supervision of Black Geography PhD students. Despite its crucial role in reproducing academic research, PhD supervision is one of the least-discussed areas of higher education teaching. Yet the low recruitment, low funding and high withdrawal rates of black PhD students, across all disciplines, is well publicised (Williams et al, 2019). In Geography, there is a well-documented need to recruit and retain more black PhD students (Desai, 2017), especially as the discipline’s push towards diversity, including the development of the field of Black British Geographies (Noxolo 2020), becomes more urgent. This roundtable will center the lived experiences and reflections shared by these students, postdoc, and supervisors, along with their recommendations on good practice to support Black students in Geography.

Please join us for a lively discussion about how black PhD students can be better supervised, and ultimately how we can produce a more diverse discipline. If you have any queries about this event, please contact Dr Pat Noxolo (p.e.p.noxolo@bham.ac.uk).