Last week, thousands of students from the University of Gloucestershire were celebrating at graduation ceremonies taking place at Cheltenham Racecourse. Amongst them were a number of students that had been supervised in part by staff from CCRI.
Master’s Students Kate Smith and Sarah Roberts celebrated their respective graduations. Kate’s Master’s thesis involved evaluating the use of 3D landscape visualisation technology (Google Earth) for enhancing and improving participation in Natural Flood Management, which is an approach to the sustainable management and reduction of flood risk that that can generate wider benefits for the environment and communities. Sarah’s Master’s degree was in Applied Ecology and was supervised by Anne Goodenough and Dan Keech.
Stephen Pritchard also graduated having successfully defended his PhD thesis in November. Entitled “The social construction of landscape scale conservation projects as delivered by The Wildlife Trusts movement in England”, the thesis explored the current transition within nature conservation. In particular the research focused on organisations like the Wildlife Trust and how they have moved from reserve-based organisations to landscape-based organisations, as represented in the programme of Living Landscape projects. A key findings was that such a transition requires more adaptive forms of governance in order for these approaches to be effective.
Finally we were particularly pleased to recognise the hard work over the last few years of Dr. Dilshaad Bundhoo who graduated with her PhD.
In her thesis, entitled “Developing a context based framework to understand interpersonal resilience” Dilshaad has developed a context based framework for understanding how relationships transform effectively at times of stress (interpersonal resilience) instead of breaking down. Taking a pragmatic perspective, this socio-cognitive framework was built blending conceptual insights from interdisciplinary literature with qualitative field research using a philosophically coherent set theoretical tools.
The research fieldwork phases were themselves something of an act of personal resilience, being carried out for extended periods of time in Israel and the West Bank.
Congratulations to all graduates from everyone in CCRI!
