Tag: PhD Defence

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PhD Defence by Hanna Carlsson

On Wednesday, June 8, 2022, after a Covid-19-related postponement, our PhD candidate Hanna Carlsson, fabulously defended her PhD thesis, on Caring for Older Migrants in Dutch Cities. This thesis and defence were in all respects highly praised, and she graduated with the rarely awarded but well-deserved distinction Cum Laude. This made not just herself but also her daily supervisors Dr Roos Pijpers and Dr Rianne van Melik very proud. I myself as the principal supervisor was also emotionally touched by this achievement, not just of a single person, but of the geography group as a whole, which continuously succeeds in keeping up an inspiring, stimulating and challenging research atmosphere (I referred to this concept of atmosphere in an earlier entry on this blog-site). So it is also the quality of the place which makes the difference.

This specific PhD thesis (if you click on the cover page you can download the thesis) addresses a core issue in the field of Geography, namely, how do we deal with differences and with diversity in our current world. It makes use of a relational approach which is also very topical and vividly debated within our group, assuming that reality cannot be grasped by thinking in a multitude of exclusive categories, containers, or bubbles, but that reality is often much more complex, mixed and interrelated as well as multi-scalar.  So how do we deal with these very diverse and complex situations, in a way that does justice to all objectives and all people involved? Hanna uses Practice Theories of the post-practice-turn kind to conceptualise these processes. If we want to move beyond the essentialisation and beyond the containerisation and beyond the foamy multitude of bubbles of today it is almost self-evident that there cannot be ideal practices, but at best we can try to increase the social justice of our daily caregiving to older migrants in Dutch cities, even though we are aware that this, at best, will be a form of ‘non-ideal’ social justice, as Hanna calls it. This is never finished and will continuously need our critical reflective monitoring. In this respect, this approach indeed goes beyond the woke versions of multicultural idealism and is much more realistic, nuanced and practice-oriented.

This much broader social theoretic approach of how we in practice deal with difference and diversity, and how we can make places, occasions and practices more just or less unjust also clearly shows how this in a more general sense is related to the dynamics of placemaking. A piece of work, we are all proud of…

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PhD Defence of Lidya Sitohang

On Tuesday, March 22, Lidya Sitohang (Co-supervised by Dr Lothar Smith and Dr Martin van der Velde) successfully defended her PhD thesis on ‘Cross-border interaction in the context of development in the Indonesian-Malaysian border region’. A thesis in which she nicely shows, that places are more than just ‘bordered’ regions and that in these places, people are making a living and in their everyday cross-border interactions are the source for development of the region. Also, these examples of everyday border crossings show again that we as human beings are always already beyond our own borders. An issue which I regularly refer to also on this blogsite, both in theoretical and philosophical terms as well as in more empirical terms. Especially her subtitle beautifully expresses the embodiment of cross-border interaction: ‘Garuda is on my chest, but my stomach is in Malaysia’.

To quote her summary (click on picture to the right to download the full PhD Thesis): ‘This study investigates the border crossing of Krayan’s locals into Malaysia as a means of meeting their daily needs, which cannot be met in Krayan because of the poor state of development of the region. People living in the more central areas of Indonesia tend to regard the Krayan locals’ border crossing into Malaysia as a sign of decreasing loyalty, and hence a lack of nationalistic pride, towards the State of Indonesia. In contrast, the Krayan locals feel that their sense of nationalism and loyalty to the State of Indonesia is proven through their persistent wish to live in an area at the very edge of the country’s territory, regardless of the lack of development in Krayan. Living on the border with Malaysia, the locals see themselves as guardians of the sovereign territory of the Republic of Indonesia. Another factor is that in Krayan border crossing has long been part of life and existed prior to the formation of the two states. Crossing the border into Malaysia continues to be a matter of visiting family members, where ‘family’ includes all individuals who have a common cultural background and live on either side of the border. Also, as the respondents explained, the poor development in the region forces them to go to Malaysia and this does not compromise their loyalty to the State of Indonesia. The locals mentioned the expression Garuda di dadaku, tapi Malaysia di perutku (Garuda is on our chest, but our stomach is Malaysia), which aptly depict that they hold Indonesia in their hearts even though their livelihoods are supported by Malaysia’ (p. 260).

Even though the Covid-19 crisis slowly but surely does not restrict us in our travelling behaviour and our ‘border crossings’ her defence also showed that this kind of research is still very much needed for the rethinking of the way we deal with borders, as the Dutch Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND) did not grant her the Visum to defend her thesis live at the University in Nijmegen, 🙁
although especially academic research should by principle be borderless.

But we keep working on it…

 

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PhD Defence by Rodrigo Bueno Lacy

Friday, November 13, for many a curious date, one of our members of the Geography Group, Rodrigo Bueno Lacy, successfully defended his PhD Thesis entitled ‘In the image of Kronos – or how Europe is devouring itself. The iconological construction of EUropean identity, its geopolitical implications for the project of European integration and why it needs to be re-imagined ‘. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the opponents and audience needed to follow the defence at a distance via the live stream connection.

In his thesis he addresses how consciously or unconsciously the European identity and implicitly of course what is excluded from being ‘European’ is socially constructed also by means of cartographic images. The relation to the title of my personal website is obvious. This is a prominent form of Placemaking. Rodrigo strongly criticises how this European identity is superimposed and enforced upon others and how many are also excluded in this way. In his thesis, he develops a ‘critical cartography’. In this defence, he was generally praised for his emancipatory engagement. On the other hand, the opponents almost jointly addressed in how far the imagination of an evil top-down power superimposing a specific conceptualisation of a European identity, does justice to the diversity and layered identities of Europe. In the same way, one could ask who the ‘other’ in this case is? From this discussion, one might also wonder in how far this very engaged view, is maybe also contributing to, instead of emancipating from an ‘us’-‘them’ thinking, which he, in the first instance, intended to criticise.  Reality in this sense might be much more complex and probably needs to be looked at much more from a relational perspective starting with a flat ontology. Nevertheless, addressing this issue in the way Rodrigo did, already contributes to a critical debate about how identity is not naturally given but continuously is part of identity politics and the politics of placemaking. This cannot be stressed too much.

It is again fascinating to see that the basic issues addressed and the theories mobilised in this analysis are very generally applicable in many different fields of Human Geography, Spatial Planning and Environmental Politics, irrespective if it is about borders, migration, integration, tourism, diversity, urban development, mobility, place experiences, economic relationships, armed conflicts or whatever. Especially in human geography, we tend to look for local contexts and the situational aspects of many phenomena and want to unveil the small stories of everyday life, but these more general aspects also show that there are also larger stories to be told. Looking into these general mechanisms of placemaking is also an essential aspect of doing fundamental research in academia. In that respect, Rodrigo’s contribution to the debate is a very valuable one.