Dr Alice Watson
Research Affiliate
Research Affiliate
Academic Profile
Alice is a Lecturer in Human Geography at St John’s College and a Postdoctoral Researcher in the School of Geography and the Environment (SoGE). Her research sits at the intersection of cultural and political geography and critically examines the geographies and geopolitics of media and popular culture.
Alice’s primary focus to date has been on radio as an understudied, popular, and sonic space of geopolitical storytelling around migration and displacement. She has published a number of scholarly articles on the construction of imaginative geographies through spoken narratives and soundscapes in broadcasts, journalists as geopolitical witnesses and storytellers, and the power of radio to regulate a politics of recognition with people on the move. In addition to critical scholarship, Alice is interested in creative practice. She has forged an ongoing collaborative research partnership with the BBC, conducting public engagement projects which capture and explore the impact of popular culture and broadcasting on audiences.
Prior to joining St John’s, Alice was a Lecturer in Human Geography at St Peter’s College, an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in SoGE, and a Principal Investigator on an AHRC research grant for the BBC’s centenary. She completed her DPhil in Geography at the University of Oxford and also holds an MA (First Class Hons) in Geography from the University of St Andrews and an MSc (with distinction) in Migration Studies from the University of Oxford.
Current Research
Alice is a cultural and political geographer, and her interests broadly lie across the following four areas of research:
Critical and Popular Geopolitics
Geographies of Media, Broadcasting, and Popular Culture
Migration, Displacement, and Borders.
Sounds and Sonic Geographies
Alice is interested in the role of media and popular culture in shaping geographical imaginations around the urgent stories of our times. She critically investigates the power of media to frame people and places, communicate geopolitical events and ideas, and influence how audiences imagine, understand, and participate in the world. To date, she has focused principally on radio as a sonic space of knowledge production around migration, displacement, and borders. Most recently, however, Alice has considered podcasts as popular sites of cultural and political commentary and debate, and reflected on the utility of mobile methods to capture everyday geographies of listening.
Alice has made empirical, conceptual, and methodological contributions to the field through her work on radio geopolitics. She has detailed how BBC Radio 4 - as Britain’s most popular speech radio station - variously constructed imaginative geographies of Europe’s migration ‘crisis’ across its diverse range of programming between 2014 and 2019, and revealed how broadcasts were produced by journalists and heard, interpreted, imagined, and felt by listeners; the first study in Geography and Migration Studies to do so. By uncovering patterns of representation and storytelling across Radio 4’s coverage, and studying audiences responses to them, Alice has made timely interventions into interdisciplinary debates about media reportage on migration and its discursive, affective, and experiential impacts.
Alice is passionate about public engagement and committed to undertaking innovative research. She is currently working with the BBC on a project exploring cultural geographies of Call the Midwife fandom (Fans of Call the Midwife). Call the Midwife is one of the BBC’s most successful and long-running television dramas which dramatises Britain’s post-war medical and social history and excavates human experiences from the cradle to grave. In line with recent interest in practices, the onward circulation of media, and geographies of creativity, Alice is investigating how fans across the UK engage with, and express their passion for, Call the Midwife beyond simply watching the drama - taking part in creative activities which expand the traditional site of audience reception and intersect with important social, cultural, and political themes. Alice is co-producing a BBC video series delving deeper into the significance of, and motivations behind, these creative activities and capturing the meaningful and inspirational directions in which fans take the programme.
This builds on Alice’s previous AHRC-funded project for the BBC centenary in which she co-produced a 28-part podcast series illuminating the cultural impact of Call the Midwife (Tales from Call the Midwife - Canvas). By recording audiences from across the UK who remembered, had experienced, or been affected by Call the Midwife’s storylines - from adoption and alcoholism to Down’s syndrome and mental health - Alice documented the drama’s ‘place’ in people’s lives, its ability to speak to contemporary lived experiences, and amplify marginalised voices and stories. This research has made innovative contributions to creative geographies and the GeoHumanities by detailing a collaborative partnership between academia and the media which co-produced digital broadcast output and uncovered the power of popular culture to affect, empower, and make a difference to those watching.
Teaching and Advising
Alice is a Lecturer in Human Geography at St John’s College where she teaches the following courses:
- Prelims: Human Geography; Geographical Controversies; Geographical Techniques.
- Final Honours School (FHS): Space, Place and Society; Environmental Geography; Geographical Thought; Dissertation Supervision.
Selected Publications
Journal Articles
- Watson, A. (2024) Reporting on Europe’s Migration ‘Crisis’ for BBC Radio 4: Journalists and the Geopolitics of Storytelling. Geopolitics, 00: 1-33.
- Watson, A. (2024) Methodological reflections on radio and podcast listenership in political geography. Area, 56(3): 1-8.
- Watson, A. (2024) Listening to Europe’s Migration ‘Crisis’: The discursive, affective, and imaginative responses of audiences to BBC Radio 4 broadcasts. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 49(4), 1-20.
- Watson, A. (2024) The production of ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ on BBC Radio 4: A popular geopolitical analysis. Area, 56(2): 1-8.
- Watson, A. (2023) Radio and the Anti-Geopolitical Ear: Imaginative Geographies of a Syrian Family's Journey to Europe on BBC Radio 4. Social and Cultural Geography, 25(5): pp. 775-794.
- Watson, A. (2023) Radio geopolitics: Imaginative geographies of Europe's migration 'crisis' on BBC Radio 4. Political Geography, 107: 1-10.
Book Reviews
- Watson, A. (2022) Prisms of prejudice: mediating the Middle East from the United States, Karin Gwinn Wilkins. Social and Cultural Geography, 23(8): 1196-1199.