THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM
Recruitment Role Profile Form
Job Title:
Teaching Associate in Economic Geography (fixed-term)
School/Department:
School of Geography
Salary:
£25,513 - £37,394 per annum, depending on skills and
experience
Job Family and Level:
Research and Teaching Level 4 (Teaching Focus)
Contract Status:
Fixed term for one year available from 5 January 2015.
Hours of Work:
Full time: 36.25 hours per week. Applications will also be
considered from candidates wishing to work a minimum of 30
hours per week. This post is open to job share.
Location:
School of Geography, University of Nottingham, University
Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK
Reporting to:
Professor Andrew Leyshon, Head of School.
Purpose of the New Role:
To provide teaching and associated duties, including administrative duties. To make a
substantial contribution to delivery of teaching to degree courses, and in particular in the field
of economic geography, through lectures, seminars, tutorials and field classes.
Main Responsibilities
1.
2.
3.
4.
Teaching, Learning and Support
Contribute to teaching at all levels within the School of Geography, from Year
1 to Year 4, as required. Undertake personal tutorials at UG and PG levels.
The role holder may also be required to attend the Year 1 Field class in the
Lake District during the Easter vacation.
The role will including setting of assessments and examinations, preparation,
teaching, marking, tutorial support, feedback and associated administration
and outreach activities.
Continuously evaluating teaching content, delivery methods and assessment
methods and making improvements.
Supervision
Supervise and assess undergraduate student projects.
Supervise postgraduate students.
Act as a Personal Tutor providing tutorials, assessment and teaching
observation.
Pastoral care of students, providing advice and support relating to their
studies.
Administration
To undertake a range of administrative duties, as required, to support the
operation of the School and University.
Attending School Committees, teaching groups and relevant School meetings
to ensure teaching and programmes are co-ordinated.
Any other duties appropriate to the post as required by the Head of School.
% time
per year
60%
20%
15%
5%
Knowledge, Skills, Qualifications & Experience
Qualifications/
Education

Essential
PhD (or due to submit) in, or a
subject
closely
related
to,
Economic Geography


Skills/Training




Skills in teaching both small and
large
groups
of
geography
students, at undergraduate and
postgraduate level.
The ability to contribute to some
of
the
following
modules:
Economic
Geography,
Geographies
of
Money
and
Finance, Techniques in Human
Geography, Research Tutorial.
Ability to work to deadlines and
prioritise tasks.
Excellent
oral
and
written
communication skills, including
the ability to communicate with
clarity on complex information.
Experience


Desirable
30
credits
of
a
UK
Postgraduate
Teaching
Certificate or Education-related
Masters, or equivalent
Higher
Education
Academy
Fellow status or equivalent
nationally recognised status for
HE teaching from another
country.
Experience
of
university
teaching and assessment in
relevant geographical subjects
at HE level.
Sound track record in research
as evidenced by publications
Decision Making
i)
Taken independently by the role holder
Convening of individually-taught modules.
Teaching and guidance of students.
Setting and marking of coursework assignments and examination papers.
Personal tutorial support to students; content of seminars..
ii)
Taken in collaboration with others
Structure/content of joint modules.
Aspects of course/curriculum development.
Ensuring academic and administrative quality of courses.
iii)
Referred to the appropriate line manager by the role holder
Complex pastoral issues.
Disciplinary/grievance procedures.
THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM
SCHOOL OF GEOGRAPHY
Teaching Associate in Economic Geography
Further Details
Research in the School of Geography
The School of Geography at the University of Nottingham is one of the largest centres of
geographical research and teaching in the UK and was ranked 6 th for Research Power in the
last RAE. The School is continuing to develop and expand its research activities and further
strengthen its reputation for world class research, with strong collaborative research links with
the University’s major science, social science, humanities and medical schools and institutes.
Members of the school also play an important role in developing and implementing research
policy and strategy across the University. As well as being the home to the Centre for
Environmental Management, the School of Geography is a key player in a number of multischool research centres and institutes including the Centre for Environmental Geochemistry,
the Nottingham Geospatial Institute, the Energy Technologies Research Institute and the
Leverhulme Programme on Sustaining Urban Habitats.
The successful applicant will join the Economic Worlds research theme, which is one of four
major groups around which research in the school is focused. The other three being:
 Cultural and Historical Geography
 Environment and Society
 Geosciences
Economic Worlds Research Theme
The Economic Worlds research theme is an internationally recognised research cluster within
the School. Through its vibrant and dynamic research culture, research undertaken within the
theme has advanced analysis of economic phenomena in contemporary globalization in
economic geography and the wider social sciences. The theme has a good track record of
obtaining external research grants and doctoral and CASE studentships from sources including
the Economic and Social Research Council, The British Academy, and The Leverhulme Trust.
Research is characterized by the development of innovative theoretical approaches to the
economic that are attuned to the cultural, political and social dimensions of economic life. This
is coupled with a strong commitment to rigorous empirical research using a range of
methodologies.
This research agenda is shaped through four related themes.
Money
Research has analysed the changing geographies of the international financial system and the
links between global finance and everyday financial lives.
The main themes in this area of research include:
Geographies of financial inclusion/exclusion: Research has critically analysed the geographies
of financial service withdrawal in the UK and the policy arena of financial exclusion in the UK.
This research has been widely reported in the media and has had a significant impact on
financial exclusion policy in the UK, notably informing the work of the government’s Financial
Inclusion Taskforce.
The places and spaces of financialization: By revealing the ways in which the growing power of
money and finance in everyday life is geographically uneven, this research has made an
important contribution to inter-disciplinary studies of financialisation and cultural economy
approaches to money and finance.
Relational understandings of international financial centres: Research has revealed the
changing form, function and geographies of international financial centres in the run up to and
following the financial crisis of 2007-8. Analyses have also been conducted into the
geographical underpinnings and consequences of the crisis itself.
Recent research projects are now investigating:

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International labour migration and the City of London
The UK financial industry’s private wealth management sector for high net worth
individuals
The wholesale-retail financial service interface in London’s financial district
Reconfiguring service space in rural communities: bank and building society branch
closures and ‘alternative’ economic networks
Financialisation and the global financial crisis
Knowledge
Research has identified and examined the geographies of new forms of knowledge and learning
that play a central role in shaping the contemporary global economy.
The main themes in this area of research include:
Expert knowledge and the geographies of work and consumption: There are two main
elements to our research on the geographies of knowledge. Firstly, we focus on global elite
labour markets and explore emergent and powerful actors and practices, such as executive
search, selection and expatriation within the global economy that are central to producing,
circulating and legitimating different forms of knowledge that are vital to the success of global
elite labour markets. Secondly, research is focusing on a number of dramatic shifts in the
practices and spaces in which knowledge is generated, reproduced and distributed in sectors
such as fashion, retailing and the musical economy as a result of digitally-mediated
communications. The reintermediation caused by such technologies are restructuring existing
hierarchies and displacing the authority of traditional ‘experts’. Such new relations between
producers and consumers are redefining what we understand as innovation and knowledge and
suggest more consumer-centric, democratic and participatory economies.
Knowledge, education and learning: By examining the changing nature of business education,
research has placed education more centrally within geographical understanding of learning in
the global economy. Research has analysed the significant role played by business schools and
education firms in forming and reproducing transnational economic elites and their knowledge
base.
New spatialities of knowledge: Through empirical work in a range of settings including the
music industry, the former Soviet bloc , fashion, consumption and retail, research has
theoretically examined the connection and/or tensions between different types of economic
knowledge. This research uses topological understandings of space to reveal new networks of
knowledge creation and dissemination that cross-cut established economic scales such as the
home, the local and the global and question conventional forms of knowledge production.
Through examining the new temporalities associated with these networks as knowledge moves
more rapidly through practices of instant download and social networking, important questions
are being examined concerning processes of innovation that challenge assumption concerning
the ‘laws’ of markets
Recent new research projects are now investigating




Disintermediation and fashion democracy
Spaces of business education and the (re)production of financial theory in practice
Globalizing for-profit business education service firms and the making of education
markets in the UK and US
Socio-technical change within the musical economy
Bodies
By focusing on the practices and performances of individual economic actors, research has
provided innovative insights into the ways in which everyday economic geographies shape the
global economy.
The main themes in this area of research include
Consuming bodies: Using innovative methodological approaches, research has been at the
forefront of work in consumption geography in demonstrating how consumption involves the
complex interplay between subjects, objects and agency in spatially variegated
ways. Particular attention has been paid to understanding the desires of consumers and their
ongoing sensory and bodily interaction with a range of household objects, clothing and retail
spaces.
Mobile bodies: Research has revealed and analysed new forms of corporeal mobility associated
with elite labour markets in the contemporary global economy and the role of travel in the
development of academic geography. Particular attention has been paid to elite financial labour
markets and the role of labour market intermediaries and other organisations in facilitating
their operation and transformation, including headhunting firms and business schools.
Economic subjectivities: Informed by neo-Foucauldian approaches to financialisation, research
has examined how new forms of financial and economic organisation associated with neoliberalisation and the growing power of money and finance have called forth new forms of
financial subjects who are required to take greater responsibility for their own financial
security.
Recent new research projects are now investigating:





Wear:where – on the relational geographies of bodies and buildings.
Performative fashion in the internet age
Consumer desire, disgust and disillusionment with iconic domestic objects
The global production and consumption of luxury commodities and the bodies that
desire them
Bodily practices of object maintenance and repair
Value
Research has produced new, culturally sensitive understandings of the creation, transformation
and destruction of commodity value in cultural and financial economic circuits.
The main themes in this area of research include
Negotiating everyday value
Through a focus on household consumption practices, and drawing on empirical work on
domestic appliances, clothing and music, research has examined the complex, variable and
contingent determinants of value attached to different material objects and the consequences
when these different approaches to value collide or fail.
Financial value
Research has examined how financial elites learn the language of financial valuation and the
ways in which this language is translated in geographically variegated ways. This research also
extends to examining everyday forms of financial value associated with products such as buy-
to-let mortgages, the life assurance industry and processes of de and re valorisation in the
wake of the financial crisis in Eastern Europe, the Former Soviet Union and Europe.
Unexpected value
Research has demonstrated how value is often found in the most unexpected places as value is
shaped through object:subject relations, provenance and biography alongside more
conventional forms of value produce through processes of design, production and market
demand and supply relationships. This work calls for understandings of value to be recast with
a greater emphasises on use value beyond market understandings of value.
Recent new research projects are now investigating:



Evocative and enduring value: Understanding value through the relational practices of
object acquisition, possession and destruction.
Craft, provenance and skill: recasting value through the geographies of slow fashion
The ‘buy-to-let’ market in the UK housing sector
Teaching
Undergraduate Degrees
The number of undergraduate students is presently around 550, split evenly over the three
years of the undergraduate programmes. The School offers a wide range of modules that form
four undergraduate degree programmes – the BA and BSc degrees in Geography, a BA in
Geography with Business, and a BA in Geography with Chinese Studies (a BA in Archaeology
and Geography is administered by the Department of Archaeology). A fifth programme, a new
BSc in Environmental Geoscience, will accept its first undergraduates in in 2014. The BA/BSc
programme is one of the most popular geography degree courses in the UK and the high
minimum offer (AAB) reflects the calibre of our intake. Students gaining first class honours
degrees are currently well in excess of 10% and those gaining at least upper second class
honours degrees are usually greater than 90%. The School ensures that its strong reputation
for academic excellence and pastoral care is maintained, using mechanisms under the
University’s Teaching Quality Assurance programme. There is a tradition of team teaching on
relevant undergraduate modules within the Research Theme. This helps to expedite the
generous system of research leave operated in the School, as absences can easily be
accommodated without disruption to the teaching programme.
Masters Degrees
The School offers taught Masters courses in Geographical Information Science (established
1989), Environmental Management (established 1995) and Landscape and Culture (established
1996). More recent additions to the Masters programmes include a number of ESRCrecognised taught masters courses in Human Geography (since 2003), Environmental History
(2004), Economy, Space and Society (2004), and Geospatial Intelligence (2008).
Doctoral and Postdoctoral Research
The School’s doctoral research programmes are closely associated with the research themes.
The School has about 50 doctoral students registered for research degrees. The School is part
of the AHRC Midlands3Cities Consortium, Nottingham’s ESRC Doctoral Training Centre, a NERC
Doctoral Training Partnership and provides a comprehensive programme of generic study-skill
courses for MPhil/PhD students, which is taught in collaboration with other Universities and
Schools.
Background Information
An annual Personal Development and Performance Review (PDPR) focuses on career
development, and the School offers mentoring support to all staff. Further information on both
the School of Geography and the University of Nottingham is available at:
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/geography/.