As I am preparing to submit my final project proposal/plan, I have been reading through my previous blog posts to see how my project has evolved from its initial ideas. Reflecting on this, it is really interesting to see how even the smallest ideas I had or shared from the different classes I was taking […]

As I am in the process of synthesising my ideas for my final project, I find myself reflecting on the different ideas I have covered throughout my blog.  In one of my first blog posts, I wrote about my previous experience in quantitative data analysis and how I was excited to develop these skills more […]

    I’ve been thinking more recently about focusing my final project on the idea of mobility justice, and thinking critically about walkable cities by asking the question ‘walkable for who?’. To conceptualise this more I’ve been reading Jennie Middleton’s book ‘The Walkable City: Dimensions of Walking and Overlapping Walks of Life’, which argues that […]

I’ve recently been researching the concept of ‘urbanising degrowth’ to think about ways in which sustainable development can be decoupled from economic growth. The idea of degrowth arises from the critique of eco- or environmentally-focused plans that also prioritise the inherently capitalistic approach of economic growth. In these initiatives, economic growth often takes precedence over […]

One of my electives this semester is called ‘Changing Climate, Changing Health’ and is all about making links between climate change and health, and recognising how interlinked human, animal, and environmental health are. My assignment for this class has been focusing on how heat waves impact mental health. Since climate change means we are getting […]

  A few of my classes this semester have focused on initiatives for redistributing wealth in society, one of which was Universal Basic Income (UBI). The idea behind UBI is that every adult, no matter of income/class/ethnicity/gender/etc., receives a regular state-awarded sum of money that would be enough to live on. With this, the idea […]

Learning about sustainable cities in one of my electives this semester, titled ‘Regenerating Place’, has really opened my eyes to the transformative potential of sustainable urban planning, particularly in the context of health inequalities. This course involved group collaboration to come up with regeneration projects focused on an Edinburgh neighbourhood, whilst seeking to incorporate elements […]

Along with the core DIS courses I’ve been taking this semester, I took an elective from the Planetary Health programme, called ‘Global Governance of the Health-Environment Nexus’. This course aimed to critically assess the decision-making bodies on issues related to both health and the environment, emphasising that health-environment issues are often seen as unrelated. The […]

I’m starting to think about which area I’d potentially like to do my project in. I’m really interested in inequalities in health specifically and would really like to delve further into that area with my research. For my undergraduate dissertation, I researched the impact of Covid-19 on well-being within the UK using secondary data from […]

Hi, I’m Lauren and I’m really excited to be doing this programme in Data, Inequality and Society.I studied Geography as an undergraduate degree at the University of St Andrews and spent a lot of my time there thinking about ideas of inequality. Questions that challenged me during my time there included; what do we define […]