Edinburgh University Club of Toronto

The Wreford Watson Lecturers in recent years have been:

• 2025 - Noreen Masud, AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker and Senior Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature at the University of Bristol
• 2018 - Professor Felicity Callard, Professor of Social Research and Director of Birkbeck Institute for Social Research, "2018: The Year that Shook Universities"
• 2016 - Dr. Lindsey Hilsum, International Editor, Channel 4 News, “World without borders: How warfare and WhatsApp are changing reporting”
• 2014 - Professor Danny Dorling, University of Oxford, "Inequality and the 1%: What Scotland might not miss about England"
• 2012 - Professor Will Self, Professor of Contemporary Thought, Brunel University, "Decontaminating the Union: Post-Industrial Landscapes and the British Psyche”, published in Scottish Geographical Journal 129(2013), 59-66: Read a transcript of the lecture
• 2011 - Professor Andrew Ross, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. “Is Urban Sustainability Possible in the Age of Climate Justice?”
• Prior to 2011, speakers have included Doreen Massey, Nigel Thrift, Ceri Peach and David Livingstone.

In India, waste-picking has long been one of the survival strategies of the urban poor. The deficiencies of India's solid waste management have opened up opportunities in the informal sector for scavenging, recycling and sorting waste. However, it is a job that is often looked down upon and met with mixed responses. On the one hand, there has been increased recognition of the environmental contribution of waste pickers. In Delhi, for example, the city's 10,000 metric tonnes of daily waste is reduced by at least 20 to 25% through the recovery and recycling efforts of the waste pickers. On the other hand, waste pickers are often socially stigmatized and face severe discrimination. For example, an alarming number of children are engaged in this occupation. This may be for one or more of a host of reasons, most notable among them being poverty, income inequality and family obligations. This exposes the children to several social and health vulnerabilities. Schooling is often seen as a promise for brighter futures and better life opportunities; however, few studies look into the impacts and outcomes. My PhD research focuses on understanding the transformative potential of schooling, and the extent to which schooling is helping waste-pickers to expand their freedoms and mobilities, particularly amidst the exclusions which they face as India modernizes its cities to become "clean and green". The purpose of this study is to understand the types of freedoms and mobilities that schooling opens up for waste picker children and youth, and how their perceptions of waste picking change.

I used the EDUCT funding, in part, to attend the International Society for Child Indicators conference in Estonia, which was held in August 2019. This was the first time I had the opportunity to present my research to the wider academic community, and to learn from other academics, policy makers and practitioners about different ways to capture child well-being and children's rights. I also used part of the funding to transcribe and translate some of the interviews which I had conducted with waste picker youth. As my research adopts an ethnographic approach, it is these stories and experiences on which I conduct my analysis, and with which I do my best to present a moving narrative for larger audiences to understand and appreciate the lives of the waste pickers.

My doctoral research examines evidence of human adaptation to the impacts of climate volatility and economic isolation in the Norse Settlements in Greenland between the late 10^th and mid-15^th centuries AD.  How this small, isolated society came to an end has been debated since the early 18^th century, when the Danish-Norwegian Priest, Han Egede, arrived in West Greenland in search of the Norse settlers.  In the 300 years since Egede arrived in Greenland, accumulated archaeological evidence has revealed an isolated society that was reliant on the trade of walrus ivory with Europe but highly adept in farming on marginal land and hunting a range of marine mammals.  Evidence of high adaptive capacity has raised questions about how and why society came to an end.  In broad terms, my research has focused on the interplay between cultural capacities and limits to adaptation in Norse Greenland.  More specifically, I have focused on how cultural adaptations that had evolved over centuries to millennia delivered environmental knowledge required to survive in hostile environments but also created path-dependent behaviours that became unsustainable following climate volatility in the mid-13^th century.

Within this context, I have further focused on evidence of cultural path dependence and social learning in Norse material culture.  Child material culture, which includes miniature objects and objects of play (or toys), has the potential to provide evidence of cultural conformity in the form of knowledge passed between generations and social learning about the environment.  Examples include toy weapons, animals and dolls that socialise children with adult activities such as hunting and food production.  The EDUCT Geography Centenary Fund grant has provided much-needed support for the analysis of child material culture at the National Museum of Denmark and for accessing other research resources (e.g., books).  I hope to use the remaining money from this grant for research at the National Museum of Greenland where a significant proportion of the Norse Greenland collections is stored.

International labour solidarity captured by Marx and Engels’ infamous call for ‘workers of the world to unite!’ remains part of most of contemporary labour movements’ discourse. It lingers as an ongoing goal, achieved on a temporary and sectorial basis and continuously conjured, notably so given the increasing neoliberal globalisation of our world. Workers are often pitted against one another – or feel this way – as pressure across places and companies prompts a race to the bottom in terms of rights, wages and working conditions. My research supports and examines a specific effort to increase international collaboration between existing trade unions across a multinational corporation. Analysis of transnational labour solidarity often focuses on international labour bodies and officials, bypassing more in-depth understanding of how local unions and workers negotiate and engage with such efforts. My study focuses on the contradictions and possibilities of international labour solidarity within one corporation, adopting an ethnographic approach as well as an action-research one. This entailed me participating in, supporting and analysing the emergence of a trade union network for three years.

I used the EDUCT funding to attend the first Francophone Global Labour Institute, held near Paris in November 2017. This gathering brought activists, trade union leaders and scholars together to learn from past campaigns, analyse and develop current ones. We discussed various ways to expand the scope of struggles by bringing in community groups and other NGOs to support labour struggles. I presented during one session and chaired several other sessions. Following this, I was asked to be one of the editors of a special issue of Mouvement, a French journal, on International labour solidarity. I was also able to develop strong links with the burgeoning field of French labour scholars, who seek increasingly to set up greater scholar/activist collaborations. This group has facilitated several workshops since and hopes to continue this in the future. Another GLI event is planned for summer 2019, and I will be part of their research committee. I am currently in the writing phase of my thesis.

Tephra (volcanic ash) producing eruptions occur worldwide and have wide-ranging, immediate to long-term impacts on both the environment and ecosystem processes. Our understanding of these impacts is limited, especially across environmental gradients and varying thicknesses of fallout. My PhD investigates two prehistoric Icelandic Holocene eruptions: Hekla 3 and Hekla 4. The tephra layers from these two eruptions have recently been extensively remapped, which has determined their distribution and thickness and provided new estimates of their volumes.  The availability of this information led to this project. The layers form ‘isochrones’, horizons of time-parallel material across Iceland, which provide an excellent opportunity to explore the impact of such volcanic events in the past.

A number of peat and soil sites have been sampled and palaeoenvironmental techniques are being used to reconstruct the environments before and after the eruptions. Vegetation communities and surface processes are being studied, including the effects of the subsequent weathering, erosion, and remobilisation of the tephra, across fallout thickness gradients and contrasting spatial and temporal scales. A high-resolution chronological framework is essential for this research and EDUCT has supported the radiocarbon dating of peat samples from several sites across Iceland. The palaeoenvironmental work is analysed within this framework in order to better understand the environmental changes caused by these large eruptions.

The structure and properties of materials at the bed of glaciers and ice sheets have a strong influence on the velocity and flow dynamics of the ice body. Glaciers are highly dynamic systems and as a result basal conditions can vary significantly over time. Current techniques of remote sensing of the basal conditions involve common offset ground penetrating radar (GPR) surveys, which give a 2D image of subglacial geometries and little information regarding out of plane structures and material properties at the bed. My work is focused on developing novel techniques for the acquisition, processing and interpretation of GPR datasets to further our understanding of subglacial conditions from GPR surveys. This entails two general areas of development: undertaking high resolution 3D and multi-offset GPR surveys and incorporating forward modelling of electromagnetic propagation to aid interpretation of datasets.

Fieldwork was undertaken at two glaciers, Tellbreen and Von Postbreen, in Svalbard in spring 2017 to collect these datasets. Funding from EDUCT was gratefully received to cover the costs associated with hosting a field assistant in Svalbard for 2 weeks to help with field logistics and surveying. This work was hosted by the University Centre in Svalbard and involved travelling to glaciers in the area by snowmobile.  A total of four high-resolution 3D datasets were collected, with associated multi-offset common midpoint survey lines. Data processing and interpretation is now underway, and are expected to give a rare glimpse of small subglacial features in high detail.