RSA Professional Development Webinar Series

More information and about the webinar to follow soon.

Webinar Chair: Marcin Dąbrowski (TU Delft, The Netherlands)

Louise MacLeod is the Multimedia Manager at Taylor & Francis Group in Oxford, UK. Her background is in Film and Television. She has worked on major feature film to micro production projects, ranging from Harry Potter to Midsummer Murders. She currently runs the YouTube channel for Taylor & Francis Journals and produces branded content for other Social Media platforms too. Louise is an animator, videographer, editor, director, scriptwriter, and producer.

David discusses why and how engaging with the media can help your academic career and shares some tips to bear in mind when getting started. He will also discuss how to keep conversations going through social media and the basics of writing a simple blog from your research papers.

Webinar Chair: Marte C.W. Solheim (University of Stavanger Business School, Norway)

David Bailey is Professor of Business Economics at the Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham, UK and an ESRC ‘UK in a Changing Europe Senior Fellow’. He has written extensively on industrial and regional policy, especially in relation to manufacturing and the auto industry. He has been involved in a number of recent major projects including the Horizon2020 RISE project MAKERS where he led the Work Package on Industrial Policy. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Regional Studies and Chair of the RSA Europe Think-Tank and policy forum.  His latest co-edited book ‘Industry 4.0 & Regional Transformations’ (with Lisa De Propris) has just been published by Taylor & Francis in the RSA book series, and ‘Carmageddon? Brexit & Beyond for UK Auto’ was published earlier this year by Bite-Sized Books. David is a regular media commenter and newspaper columnist. Tweet him @dgbailey

This session will focus on the nature of the changes introduced for qualitative research during COVID lockdown. Lucy will share her experiences of preparation, running, and data management of virtual focus groups, and discuss the value and challenges of moving qualitative research online. This event has been organised as a result of feedback from the RSA Women’s Network.

Webinar Chair: Stefania Fiorentino (The Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, UK)

Lucy Natarajan is a Senior Teaching Fellow at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. Her current research work focuses on public participation in spatial planning. Previously, she has run major academic research projects, and policy research programmes for the UK government, the UK’s Royal Town  Planning Institute, and the Commonwealth Association of Planners.

The number of academic journals grows each year and it can be hard to know which to submit your manuscripts to. This webinar will discuss why this is important, factors to think about when making this decision and tips for making the right choice.

Webinar Chair: Klaus Dodds (Royal Holloway University of London, UK and Editor-in-Chief, Territory, Politics, Governance)

Dr Madeleine Hatfield is the Director of Yellowback, which provides editorial services to learned societies, authors and publishers. Madeleine has worked on many academic journals including Regional Studies Association titles. She has also contributed to policy briefings, how-to guides and workshops on academic publishing.

This webinar will provide hints and tips for each stage of the publishing process, including:

• How to identify the right journal to submit to?
• How to prepare your manuscript to give it the best chance of being published?
• What journal editors are looking for and how they reach their decisions?
• How to engage with the review process (including how to deal with the infamous Reviewer 2)?

Webinar Chair: Madeleine Hatfield (Yellowback, UK)

John works at Loughborough University in the UK. He is a regional geographer interested in the planning and governance of cities and regions in globalisation. John has been an Editor of Regional Studies since 2013, first as its inaugural Early Career Editor and then section editor for ‘Urban and Regional Horizons’.

His recent publications include the Handbook on the Geographies of Regions and Territories (with Anssi Paasi and Martin Jones), Doing Global Urban Research (with Michael Hoyler) and Metropolitan Regions, Planning and Governance (with Karsten Zimmermann and Daniel Galland), and he is currently co-editing a forthcoming special issue of Regional Studies on Planning Regional Futures (with Mark Tewdwr-Jones and Daniel Galland).

Communicating science to policy makers is an essential skill to maximise the impact of your research. It requires finding the right angle, hook or entry point that can catch attention. It should link to current policy debates and issues. The message should be simple, but not simplistic. Lewis Dijkstra will share some of his insights drawing from his 20 years experience at the interface of science and policy. 

Webinar Chair: Lisa De Propris (University of Birmingham, UK)

Lewis Dijkstra is the Head of the Economic Analysis Sector of the Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy in the European Commission. He is the editor the Cohesion Report, which analyses economic, social and environmental issues in EU regions and cities. He is also a visiting professor at the London School of Economics.

He works closely with the OECD, the UN, the World Bank, the European Environmental Agency, the Joint Research Centre and Eurostat.

His recent work covers topics such as a global definition of cities and rural areas, measuring transport performance, the geography of EU discontent, quality of government and gender equality.

He holds a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from Rutgers University, New Jersey, an MSc in Urban and Regional Planning from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA in Political Science from the University of Ghent, Belgium.

The webinar will cover the following questions and topics, when it comes to getting your first academic job:

• What Are You Looking For?
• Application components:
• What to Emphasize in the Application?
• What are search committees looking for?
• Bigger Picture

Webinar Chair: Stefania Fiorentino (The Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, UK)

Martin (Deputy Vice Chancellor and Professor of Human Geography, Staffordshire University) works at Staffordshire University, with responsibility for Research, Academic and Strategic Planning, the Student Experience, and SU Academy Trust. Martin joined the University in May 2017 from the Department of Geography at the University of Sheffield, where he was Director of the White Rose Social Science Doctoral Training Centre and Professor of Urban and Regional Political Economy.

Prior to this Martin worked at Aberystwyth University as the Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Co-Director of the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD).

Martin is an interdisciplinary researcher, working in the broad area of society and space and specifically on the interface between economic and political geography through economic development and governance. His current research, funded through WISERD and the ESRC, is looking at city-region building and the Foundational Economy in Wales and England. He has been a member of the Regional Studies Association for 25 years and is the originator and co-editor of the journal Territorial, Politics, Governance.

During his career Martin has been a member of some 300+ interview panels, chairing some 150 of these, appointing to  a wide range of teaching, research and professional services positions, and ranging from those in the early stages of their careers to executive postholders.

Presentations are an essential (and unavoidable) component of the research process. This webinar covers presentation basics and provides a checklist for effective communication in a range of settings.

Webinar Chair: Vanessa Guerra (Virginia Tech, USA)

Further reading:

• Ten simple rules for giving an effective academic job talk
• Giving an Academic Talk
• Taking presentations seriously
• 10 tips for speaking like a Ted Talk pro

Rachel Franklin is professor of geographical analysis in the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS) at Newcastle University, as well as fellow of the Alan Turing Institute and visiting scholar at the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University. She is the current editor of Geographical Analysis, and prior to joining Newcastle in 2018, she was the associate director of Brown’s initiative in spatial structures in the social sciences (S4). Her research focus is in spatial demography and the interplay between spatial analytics and demographic change, in particular quantifying patterns, sources and impacts of spatial inequality.

In this webinar, Mark Robinson will discuss how to best promote yourself and your publication, which is essential for your continued professional and career development.

Webinar Chair: Mia Bennett (The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)

Mark Robinson is Communications Manager at Taylor & Francis Group in Oxford, UK. Having previously worked for Springer, Mark has over 18 years’ experience in marketing and communications for academic publishing. In his current role, which includes the Taylor & Francis Author Services programme, Mark’s goal is to help researchers maximise the impact of their work.

This talk is about visual aspects of communication, particularly as they relate to graphs and maps – two things which we see quite a lot of in regional studies. Not everyone can have the technical expertise of people who spend most of their time working with packages like Stata, SPSS, R or QGIS, but even those that do can usually learn how to improve the way they communicate things (and I include myself in this group). The idea is that after listening to my short talk on the subject you will have a better understanding of how to ‘make an appeal to the eyes’ or, in other words, make charts and maps that make an impact. Too often, they are treated as supplementary or additional when in the field of regional studies, they often integral to telling the story of our work.

My talk begins with a Scottish political economist and ends with a very simple number map. In between, I will talk about Cicero, election mapping, and the principle of deriving simplicity from complexity: an objective that is certainly not confined to the field of data visualisation. After that I’ll be very happy to answer questions, as I would be during my talk.

Webinar Chair: Sylvia He (The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)

Alasdair Rae is a Professorial Fellow in Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield. His work focuses on the manipulation, analysis and visualisation of large geographic datasets in relation to urban planning, transport, policy and land issues. More generally, he is a proponent of open data and in his work seeks to make use of the wide range of new datasets that have become available in recent years to advance knowledge in policy-relevant areas. His work has appeared in a variety of media outlets, including The Economist, Huffington Post, CityMetric, WIRED, The Guardian, The Royal Statistical Society magazine and the BBC. He tweets at @undertheraedar and blogs at www.statsmapsnpix.com.