By Gabrielle Guy, University of Nottingham
Doomsday messages are everywhere. We hear that artificial intelligence (AI) machines are being trained to think faster than humans and eventually replace us. For those of us at the beginning of our research careers – whether in high school, college, university, or working independently – it is easy to feel irrelevant. Stepping back from this feeling as a third-year PhD student, I’d like to reflect on the value of human-led research in geography and offer a few tips on how we can mentally prepare for a changing landscape in understanding our planet.
My PhD research is small-scale. I investigate families, food, and wellbeing in specific ‘small island’ Caribbean contexts. This project has helped me pull together theories and ideas from different subdisciplines in geography. Yet I have always confronted my knowledge gap when justifying the approach I have chosen. Fortunately, this awareness of my shortcomings motivated me to apply for opportunities to help me learn more.
Food Policy Internship
One such opportunity was a Food Policy Internship at the Food Systems Institute at the University of Nottingham, cohort of 2026. This internship is a very new programme with a commendable approach, bringing together data and perspectives from industry, academics, and third-sector organisations (charities and NGOs). In six months of training, interns gain research-to-policy translation skills that support the shift to a nutritious, fair, and sustainable food system. As interns, we shared our translations through two-page policy briefs or stakeholder maps with four to six recommendations for practical approaches to address food-system problems. Early in my internship, while doing initial reading, I identified a connection between my two topics, and at the end of my internship the data proved me right.
The first research topic looked at the UK food system, value, and how to scale up citizen engagement. The second research topic looked at power and precarity, forced migration, and labour in the UK food supply chain. At the heart of both topics is research that looks at employment outlooks in the UK for under-35s, sustainable approaches to how we eat, reducing the violence in the system that keeps us fed, and how people are moving around our planet to provide food-system labour. While I started these investigations as a geographer, I had to draw from other perspectives, such as business, law, and economics, for a complete understanding. This is how my research used an interdisciplinary lens.
I am proud that my first policy research has made me a more well-rounded researcher on major topics. However, the policy landscape, like the wider research landscape, is changing. Governments used to be an arena where a variety of researchers felt they could influence political power positively. Policy recommendations can help many people living in different environments. But wars, geopolitical instability, and AI being pitched as a knowledge-producing machine make this aim seem less accessible for some researchers. So, what do we do when more closed doors keep moving further out of reach? Perhaps we need to change how we view opportunities and achievements. Maybe we should look on them as pathways to something else, instead of a milestone or benchmark.
Making interdisciplinary work effective
The strongest researchers today (or the ones who inspire me the most) are those who are curious and who look at topics that bridge connection and insight. These are people looking at new and familiar topics, linking ideas we don’t often put together to produce deeper understandings of complicated problems. However, for those of us who decide to do geographical research, both in, out of, and alongside the academy, here are two lessons I’ve learned.
1. The dream research role/environment is dead.
Higher education is changing everything for all of us. International student recruitment is down because of hostile conditions, and universities are balancing their books through cost-cutting by any means necessary. The pipeline of inspiring professors and researchers who were teachers for the students of tomorrow is broken. The tutors we turned to for inspiration and insights are being removed from our departments. This means that novel research projects and aims for impactful research must be considered beyond academia. PhD projects may have to be approached from an even more interdisciplinary angle than before. Traditionally cherished policy research may feature as a byline on our CVs or evidence of roundedness, not necessarily a foot in the door for an ideal organisation. The only ideal organisation is one where our skills and insights are valued, and our time and labour are exchanged for a salary.
2. Connecting the dots is the game we need to master.
Do regular audits of your knowledge; it’s easier to build on what you don’t know when you are aware of it. This could look like writing abstracts: short, snappy 250- to 500-word pieces summarising the background, problem, literature overview, methods, and implications (why your research is important) of your projects. Writing this in clear language for audiences unfamiliar with our work allows us to answer the questions that the dropping of specialist definitions and inaccessible language often conceals. This is something that has helped me to reveal, time and time again, areas of my thinking and research that are unclear and identify how to improve them. It’s also a useful way to prepare for public speaking about research to different audiences. By auditing my knowledge, I have learned about the interdisciplinary nature of my work and have been better able to connect with scholars, industry, and academic colleagues in other fields that my work can speak to. There are many times when the boundaries of subject areas like geography look like solid borders, but they are often only one or two questions or theories away from wider connection. This was demonstrated to me at my first RGS Conference in September 2026 in London, where I was inspired by geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, and other allied scholars using different language to discuss similar ideas.
Precarity is here to stay for all of us, and a strong antidote to negative propaganda about our future on this planet as Earth researchers is strategy, community, and focus.
About the author: Gabrielle Guy is a Geography PhD Candidate at the University of Nottingham. Her research works with Caribbean families in Tobago, drawing on human geography, physical geography, and visual arts to investigate how wellbeing is imagined, understood, and experienced in place through food practices. Gabrielle is enthusiastic about using research to support culturally relevant interventions that prioritise wellbeing for people and the planet.
Suggested further reading
Anderson, B., K. Brickell, D. Bissell, et al. (2026). Geography and ‘The New’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.70084.
Mason, O. (2026). Doing Geography Amidst Precarity. Area. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/area.70109.
Routon, M., and M. Varco. (2026). Acts of Noticing: Resisting Desensitisation in the Neoliberal Academy. Area. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/area.70148.
How to cite
Guy, G. (2026, November) Geographical research in an uncertain age. Geography Directions. https://doi.org/10.55203/BJBY6078
