Hello everyone! Below is a teaser – or warmup if you will – of our upcoming production, Shout Trout Workout, premiering at 1645 (British Summer Time) on Wednesday 21 October on FIRE Lab Swansea YouTube Channel! Join us for the Shout Trout Workout as part of a week-long celebration for free-flowing rivers and migratory fishes […]
Exploring your local river on Google Earth
We can learn about and visit our local rivers, but sometimes we might like to learn different things and see more of the river than we can do by visiting it locally. How can we do that? One way is to use tools like Google Earth that project satellite imagery onto our computer screens, allowing […]
Lukim yu bihain: Amphidrous Fishes of Island Rivers
Lukim yu bihain is an informal good-bye in Tok Pisin, a Bislamic language spoken in Papua New Guinea (PNG) – the place where this blog post starts. More specificaly, we start on the island of New Britain, which is part of the Bismark Archipelago – a group of islands off the northeastern coast of PNG. […]
From Swansea to Solihull
Happy Friday readers! Yesterday, I swapped my usual routine of researching freshwater invertebrates, to teaching them to primary school children this week. For this, I visited Sharmans Cross Junior School (Solihull, West Midlands), who hosted a water day for their year 5 group (ages 9-10) so that the students could learn about how our precious […]
A round of updates from FIRE Lab
We have been posting on the FIRE Lab blog for around 7 months now, and we recently held a lab meeting, since Sayali returned, and decided we would move to writing a blog post every two weeks instead of weekly. So you will be hearing less from us, but we hope that when do hear […]
Tawe Walks: A walking – technology experience
Last week Tara shared about our recent walk up and down the River Tawe in south Wales. This week I will build on what Tara shared and talk about a reflection I had on the return walk from the upper reaches of the Tawe. On my way back downstream I decided to take a different […]
What we owe to each other: Conducting ethical qualitative research along the River Tawe
This week we (Steph and Tara) submitted our project design for review by our internal ethics review board at Swansea University. We are now one step closer to field work and getting to know communities in the River Tawe catchment (here in South Wales)! This blog post will serve as a brief introduction to conducting […]
The quest for dam data – #DamOrNot 2/2
In last week’s blog post, I wrote about #DamOrNot, a weekly game I host on Twitter, and shared definitions and imagery of different infrastructure we commonly encounter in the game. This week I’ll work to address a few questions that came through on Twitter. A few of these questions came from Michiel Jorisson, an active […]
Getting to know the Twitter game #DamOrNot (post 1/2)
In the summer of 2016 I thought it would be fun to share a post on Twitter about my quest to confirm the locations of different built infrastructure found on rivers in France. I asked Twitter followers whether the infrastructure in the satellite image I posted was a dam, or not. This was a question […]
Exploring freshwater geographies: Approaches and prospects for engaged research methods
I arrived at Swansea University with a background in cultural geography and qualitative research methodologies and methods. In particular, I am very fond of using ethnographic research methods— including participant observation, interviewing, and photographic work to explore the lived, everyday worlds of research participants. I use in-depth observation and participation through ethnographic fieldwork to understand […]