Dr Sarah Peck

I'm an assistant professor in Human Geography at Northumbria University, and part of the Centre for Global Development. My work is centred on my interests in: 

1. Everyday activism, labour, solidarity and civic space for development, particularly transnational mobilisations;

2. The critical geographies of migration and development;

3. The philosophy and culture of aid;

4. The use of archives and archival co-creation as a method for thinking about global development.

I'm currently the Programme Lead for the MSc Global Development programme at Northumbria University and co-chair of the Development Geographies Research Group at the Royal Geographical Society.

Previously I was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Northumbria, with a project entitled Deterritorialised responsibilities: diasporic life, civic space and global development. This adopted a comparative multi-sited approach, combining policy analysis, archival research, archival co-curation, narrative interviewing and digital storytelling to explore the intersections between diasporic life, civic engagement and global development, and how this has changed over time for diasporic groups and communities in the UK. 

An example of an archive co-curated through the project can be visted here: Indian Workers' Association GB: Stories from the Archive - IWAGB website

I completed my PhD at the University of Sheffield in 2018. My PhD examined the experiences of civil society actors working in sustainable development in Barbados and Grenada. Working in collaboration with an International Development agency, my research concluded that civil society can be understood as a space of complex interactions, rather than one based on Western constructs. 

More information about my PhD work can be found here: Civil Society & Sustainable Development in the Caribbean (wordpress.com)

I am also interested in collaborative and participatory research methods. I have worked in academic and the voluntary sector, prior to coming to Northumbria I completed a qualitative project with a team of volunteer researchers looking at ageing and social isolation in Sheffield.