Category: Field trip

Northern Ireland coastline across the water

Winners of our Northern Ireland field trip photo contest

As international travel was restricted this year due to COVID, in April our second year Geography and Environment students travelled to Northern Ireland for a week-long field trip. The aim of these longer residential field trips is to let students practice the field skills they’ve been learning under real-world conditions, and to support them in developing and undertaking their own research projects. But we also know that students spend field trips taking lots of photos to share with friends, family and social media – so this year we decided run a photo contest too!

There were three categories for the contest, each with a prize of a £50 National Book Token. Here are this year’s winning photos, plus some background info from the students who took them: Continue reading “Winners of our Northern Ireland field trip photo contest” →

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Group of people about to get on a boat

Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authority boat trip

MRes Ecology and Conservation student Sarah George, really enjoyed the day spent on the Sussex IFCA boat (Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authority), as part of the Ecotoxicology module.

“The boat trip with the IFCA was a real education and I’m so grateful for this opportunity.  I have not previously experienced aquatic sampling and just being able to be part of the process and see how things were done was fantastic – even down to the clear sequential labelling of samples and being able to visualise how large a sample actually was (much smaller than I’d thought).

Three people on a boat
View from the side of a boat in the water
Group of people about to get on a boat
Person with a line into the water from a boat

Simple things like rinsing the filter with clean water rather than seawater make so much more sense when you’re there as you can visualise how this would alter the sample you’d just collected.  Setting up and operating the sediment grab is something you can only really appreciate by doing it, the idea is simple but actually getting it to work needs hands on experience.   Again, being able to see how the sediment varied from site to site and even from one side of the boat to the other, told a really strong story.

Continue reading “Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authority boat trip” →

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students by the sea on beach

Investigating coastal change

Fieldwork is at the heart of geography as a discipline. In early November, Level 4 students underwent an exciting field trip to investigate coastal change along the South Coast led by Dr. Georgios Maniatis and Magda Grove.

As part of the Academic Learning and Field Skills module, students created a series of beach profiles analysing grain size distribution along Brighton beach and the National Trust’s amazing Cuckmere Haven.

Continue reading “Investigating coastal change” →

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Group of students on the hill over Hastings

Geographies of placemaking, inclusion, regeneration and violence in Hastings

We ran our first-year undergraduate Geography Earth and Environment field skills trips at the beginning of November. All of our first-year students participated in three field trip days – Human Geography, Physical Geography and Environmental Geography. I co-led the Human Geography day with my colleague Dr Paul Gilchrist. Continue reading “Geographies of placemaking, inclusion, regeneration and violence in Hastings” →

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Exterior shot of the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho

Investigating how LGBTQ communities influence urban space

Geography and Environment students visited Soho (London) for a field trip investigating how sex, sexuality, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) communities influence urban space – and are influenced by urban space in turn.

Our students spent their time in the area making ethnographic observations of the streets and the built environment. They considered questions such as:

  1. Where are sex and sexuality present in space?
  2. How do space and place produce a sense of what ‘gay’ is?
  3. What does it mean to be an ‘LGBTQ space’?

Continue reading “Investigating how LGBTQ communities influence urban space” →

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Kayleigh working at the beach

Making the most of networking opportunities to take part in research

Third year Ecology and Conservation student Kayleigh was part of the group of students who joined Professor Hawkins from the University of Southampton on his rock pool surveys earlier this year. Find out how she got involved, what she worked on and more about studying Ecology and Conservation at Brighton, (you can read about Amy’s experience on the project here, too).

I heard about this opportunity through Dr. Corina Ciocan via a Teams group dedicated to rockpool exploration. Which really shows how important networking with your peers/teaching staff is! Continue reading “Making the most of networking opportunities to take part in research” →

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