February has been one of my favourite months since I began higher education all the way back in (gulp) 2010. Seems odd. Wet, cold, miserable, wet and cold. Especially bad in the South West this year – hope you’ve not been too badly affected if you’re reading this from down there, my sympathy goes out to all those afflicted by the awful floods. Anyway, students such as myself hold February in fond regard because it represents a lull in hostilities. Assessment deadlines are as rare as rocking horse doings and this allows a little more freedom in terms of how we use our time. The show must of course go on – those who completely down tools will suffer further down the line – but it can do so at a more relaxed pace, and in different forms.

One thing this does allow is engagement with the issues we study in forms other than sitting behind a desk. Last week I was fortunate enough to be invited by my supervisor -Dr Nick Megoran – to join a lunch meeting with young people from the School of Reconciliation and Justice, a group that seeks to train and empower young people to a life of reconciliation that flows into peace-making and justice ministries. Many of the people at the school are young people who have lived in conflict situations, be this in recognisable scenarios prominent in current affairs (for example the current conflict in Syria) or in equally important but oft-overlooked scenarios such as highly criminalised neighbourhoods in Zimbabwe.

I found this experience particularly inspiring, not least because it provided me an outlet to discuss these issues aside from boring my housemates. Moreover though this has to do with the nature of my work. My research focus this year is Syria (as I may have mentioned before) and in this context fieldwork is distinctly problematic. I suspect the risk assessors over at Kings Gate would take a dim view of any proposal of ethnographic work in Damascus at present, for example. This has been a problem for me given developments within my sub-discipline (Critical Geopolitics) which call for more embodied, locally grounded research. My work attempts to circumvent this by producing as broad a textual engagement as possible – from United Nations resolutions to social media – but the opportunity to take my head out of the books and speak to real people (for want of a less clumsy phrase) was nevertheless extremely refreshing. These were not specifically refugees of the Syrian conflict but young people of very diverse backgrounds who brought to the table perceptions of the issues of peace, violence and geopolitics that do not always come out in the classroom. The value of such opportunities cannot be overstated in producing a balanced academic outlook, and happily they are readily available to a postgraduate geographer at Newcastle.

Don’t worry about the absence of irrelevant drivel this month – I’m sure I’ll be back on form next time.

Here’s the School of Reconciliation and Justice’s website in case anyone would like to find out more: http://ywamharpenden.org/training/sorj/