Speaker: Dr Jess Simonds, Study Skills Facilitator at Grwp Llandrillo Menai (North Wales)

Chair: Daryll Galloghly, PhD Scholar (QUB)

We are delighted to announce the forth in the new series of the Mitchell Institute  Fireside Chats for this Semester. This event will be held online via Microsoft Teams.

The way that we tell a story is important for creating the world that we live in – especially for contextualising spaces and places that are beyond the reach of everyday people.  Life at sea has been documented for thousands of years, with stories of risks at sea both mythical and man-made leading to the zonation of maritime space that draws on associations of danger, risk and unease that are paired with heroic tales of escape, assistance and defeat of the monsters that lurk beneath the waves.  

This lecture will offer a short history of stories that have spatialized risks at sea to demonstrate how dominant concepts in International Relations and Human Geography (namely, space, territory, and power) have been mobilised to express ownership and dominance at sea.  Jess will explore historical and mythical tales of sea monsters such as gendered sirens, lifelike whirlpools and the notorious Kraken whilst also drawing on modern maritime threats such as piracy.  These cases will demonstrate how sharing expertise and knowledge of the first-hand navigation of maritime dangers has been imperative for spatializing the modern maritime security regime. 

Dr Jess Simonds graduated with her PhD in International Studies in December 2021 from Queen’s University Belfast.  Her work contributes an interdisciplinary and entangled understanding of the relativity of space and time, territory as a layered term and power as inherently tied to expertise and personal talent.  Her empirical focus has captured how these reimagined concepts are experienced at sea in the effort to safely deter Somali based piracy.  She often contributes to NATO's Maritime Centre of Excellence through providing specialised lectures and looks forward to her next collaboration with this centre this June where she will contribute to the training of the Qatari Army prior to the 2022 World Cup.  After a stint in the private security sector, she rediscovered her passion for supporting others in education and currently works as a Study Skills Facilitator at a further education college in North Wales.  She looks forward to developing her skills as an educator and will further explore the field of Geography by embarking on a PGCE at the University of Oxford this September.

Please email mitchell.institute@qub.ac.uk to register before 12 noon on the 6 April 2022.

The full schedule of Fireside Chats for Semester 2 can be found here.