Research by Senior Lecturer Tamson Pietsch Establishes the Knowledge of Climate Science and the Credibility needed for formulating climate policy in terms of climate action and the role of the university in climate activism

The New Social Contract podcast team
Host: Tamson Pietsch, Associate Professor, Social and Political Sciences
Impact Studios Executive Producer: Emma Lancaster
Impact Studios Digital Communications Manager: Ben Vozzo
Audio Producer: Allison Chan
Journalist: Kathy Marks
Sound Engineer: Adrian Walton”

1. Pietsch, Tamson. “Wandering scholars? Academic mobility and the British world, 1850–1940.” Journal of Historical Geography 36.4 (2010): 377-387. At the Allied Colonial Universities Conference, held in London in 1903, delegates from across the universities of Britain’s settler empire professed the existence of a British academic community, defined not by location, but by shared culture, shared values and shared ethnicity. This article examines the extent to which these claims reflected actual patterns of academic mobility in the settler empire between 1850 and 1940. By mapping the careers of the 350 professors who served at the Universities of Sydney, Toronto, and Manchester during this period, it concludes that, between 1900 and 1930 especially, there existed a distinctly British academic world within which scholars moved frequently along different migratory axes. Though not as united, extensive and uncomplicated as that in which the 1903 Conference delegates believed, this world nonetheless shared more in common with their vision of an expansive British academic community than it did with the image of an unconnected and isolated periphery that has characterised portrayals by subsequent university historians.
2. Pietsch, Tamson. “A British sea: making sense of global space in the late nineteenth century.” Journal of Global History 5.3 (2010): 423-446.  It is the contention of this article that historians of the nineteenth century need to think about notions of empire, nation, and race in the context of the social production of space. More specifically, it posits that the moving space of the steamship functioned as a particularly important site in which travellers reworked ideas about themselves and their worlds. Supporting this contention the article pays close attention to the journeys of J. T. Wilson, a young Scottish medical student who between 1884 and 1887 made three voyages to China and one to Australia. For it was in the space of the ship, literally moving along the routes of global trade, that Wilson forged a particular kind of British identity.
3. Pietsch, Tamson. “Many Rhodes: Travelling scholarships and imperial citizenship in the British academic world, 1880–1940.” History of Education 40.6 (2011): 723-739.  Since its Foundation in 1901, the Rhodes Scholarships scheme has been held up as the archetype of a programme designed to foster imperial citizens. However, though impressive in scale, Cecil Rhodes’s foundation was not the first to bring colonial students to Britain. Over the course of the previous half-century, governments, universities and individuals in the settler colonies had been establishing travelling scholarships for this purpose. In fact by the end of the nineteenth century the travelling scholarship had become an important part of settler universities’ educational visions. It served as a crucial mechanism by which they sought to claim their citizenship of what they saw as the expansive British academic world.
4. Pietsch, Tamson. “Rethinking the British world.” Journal of British Studies 52.2 (2013): 441-463. This article rethinks the concept of the “British World” by paying close attention to the voices of those who attended the 1903 Allied Colonial Universities Conference. They identified not one, but three different kinds of British world space. Mapped, respectively, by ideas and emotions, by networks and exchange, and by the specific sites of empire, this article suggests that, in the light of criticisms the British World concept has faced, and in the context of recent scholarship on the social and material production of space, this tripartite approach might offer a useful framework for British and imperial historians interested in the history of the global.
5. Pietsch, Tamson. “Bodies at sea: travelling to Australia in the age of sail.” Journal of Global History 11.2 (2016): 209-228. This article considers the bodily experience of being at sea in the age of sail. Using shipboard diaries written by eight passengers during the high period of free migration to the Australasian colonies, it argues that oceanic journeys disrupted and upended the land-based bodily practices being fashioned in nineteenth-century Britain. At sea, these mechanisms of bodily comportment were rendered fragile and unstable, leaving middle- and working-class bodies alike vulnerable and open to refashioning and reformation. In so doing, it points to the need for scholars to bring together land- and sea-based histories and to historicize and particularize oceanic spaces.