On 2 July 2024 the GSD department held its third Annual GSD PhD Symposium - an event made possible by the Leverhulme Trust - sponsors of our Leverhulme-TRANSFORM Doctoral Training programme.

The event began with presentations from our first year students, with each student discussing their research projects followed by a Q&A session. The interdisciplinary projects presented ranged from ecologically-just urbanism to water, energy and food security in Sub-Saharan Africa, to acupuncture for treating trauma to collective wellbeing in sustainable urbanisation; covering varied research questions around gig education, sanitation security, nature-based solutions and migrant children's play.

In the second part of our event, second and third-year students lead themed workshops that discussed their various methods for conducting qualitative research, the reasonings for their methodology, how their projects have progressed and some of the challenges they encountered.

Our second workshop addressed the navigation of knowledge production and dissemination. It ranged from the sharing of very practical approaches to the selection of journals, conferences and other platforms to showcase work, to examining their epistemological and conceptual reflections around knowledge production.

The symposium offered a great opportunity to come together as a PGR community to find out more about both the content of individual's PhDs and to take a collective look at the methods and approaches which interconnect between researchers and staff.

You can find out more about our PG GSD programmes are here. Profiles of our PGR students and their research can be explored here.