Prof Gillian Rose and Prof Linda McDowell celebrated in a new edition of 'Key Thinkers on Space and Place'

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Gillian Rose and Linda McDowell

We would like to congratulate Prof Gillian Rose, Professor of Human Geography and Fellow of the British Academy and Academy of Social Sciences, and Prof Linda McDowell, Professor Emerita of Human Geography, Fellow of the British Academy and CBE for services to Geography and Higher Education, for their inclusion in the third edition of Key Thinkers on Space and Place (ed. Mary Gilmartin, Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin and Susan M. Roberts; Sage, 2024). The book dedicates a chapter to both Linda and Gillian, celebrating their career achievements.

Space and place are at the heart of how geographers and sociologists think.  This updated edition of the essential undergraduate text will introduce the most influential thinkers in the tradition of social theory, with a new focus on the past fifty years. The book is designed to engage with theoretical debates in human geography through the individuals who have made the most significant contributions to this field, showing how ideas are shaped by contexts, and in turn effect change. The book shows how theoretical understandings evolve, shift and change, highlighting the connections between different thinkers, whose ideas are developed in collaboration with or in reaction to others. The biographical approach of this book reveals how individual thinkers draw on a rich legacy of ideas from past and contemporary generations.

The essays on our work both emphasise our contributions to feminist geography, though in different fields. Linda’s contributions are mostly in the field of the contemporary social and economic geographies of the UK, focusing on labour market change, while Gillian works with urban and visual materials to elaborate feminist geographical theory and methodologies. (Linda and Gillian)

Linda and Gillian’s careers have followed remarkably similar paths, although a decade or so apart – Cambridge University as undergraduate geographers (Newnham for Linda, Sidney Sussex for Gillian), doctorates at the University of London, and some years on the faculty of The Open University. They both moved to the University of Oxford for their final post, elected one after the other as the Statutory Professor of Human Geography in the School of Geography and to a Professorial Fellowship at St Johns College. Linda held the post first – as the first woman Professorial Fellow in the college, and Gillian succeeded her in 2017. 

 

Photo credit: Sophia Carlarne