Coffee & Geography Podcast Season 6 Episode 13
This one started with me talking to someone in Vietnam while I was, presumably, very much not in Vietnam. I was talking to Dr Cyrus Golding, who was over there working with schools, and I was wherever I was that day, probably surrounded by too many tabs, too many notes and not enough tea. Cyrus is now a Senior Teaching Fellow at the University of Southampton, where he leads the Geography PGCE course, and he is also the founder of Golding Education, supporting international schools and education projects across Asia.
I had followed Cyrus’s work for a while, but we had only properly met in person at the Geography Teacher Educators Conference in Manchester. That is one of the nice things about geography education spaces. You can feel like you have known someone for ages because you have seen their work, read their posts, heard their name in conversations, and then eventually you are both in the same room and it feels like the conversation has already been going for some time.
Geographical identity, but not in a neat way
I asked Cyrus about geographical identity because that is one of my favourite questions to ask people, even though it is not always a straightforward question to answer. For Cyrus, the answer did not begin with a simple list of places, but with problems: social justice, inequality, access to education, uneven impacts of hazards, and how people experience those things in their own lives.
That is very geography, isn’t it? Not just where are you from, but what questions orientate you?
Cyrus talked about being born and growing up in Manchester, about his Iranian and Ukrainian heritage, and about how his interest in geography shifted over time from physical geography towards more theoretical, philosophical and qualitative ways of thinking. I really liked the way he framed geography through experience. He said:
“The idea of who you are is shaped by actually the way that place has impacted your body.”
That feels important. Place is not just background scenery. It gets into us. It shapes what we notice, what we fear, what we value, what we think is normal, what kinds of futures feel imaginable. Sometimes that happens through belonging and comfort. Sometimes it happens through struggle, exclusion, movement, migration or inheritance.
Cyrus’s own heritage brought in Iran and Ukraine, which he described as two places that, when he was younger, many people in the UK might not have known much about, but which are now major geopolitical flashpoints. That in itself says something about how geographical knowledge moves in and out of public consciousness. Places are always important to the people whose lives are tied to them, but they become “important” in mainstream discourse when crisis, conflict or strategic interest makes them visible.
Iceland, hazards and what happens after “the event”
Cyrus’s PhD looked at how communities in Iceland experience natural hazards, especially on Heimaey, an island that is itself a volcano and which erupted in 1973. That immediately took us into one of my favourite geography arguments: there is no such thing as a natural disaster.
There are natural hazards. There are natural processes. There are earthquakes, eruptions, storms, floods, droughts and tsunamis. But whether those become disasters has a lot to do with human choices, vulnerability, preparation, inequality, power, histories of development, infrastructure and political decision-making. Ilan Kelman’s Disaster by Choice makes this argument very clearly, showing how human choices turn natural hazards into catastrophes.
Cyrus’s work adds another layer to that because he was interested in how hazard experience does not necessarily fit the model we often teach in school geography. We like clear events. Big eruption. Big earthquake. Big tsunami. Before, during, after. Causes, impacts, responses. Social, economic, environmental. Primary, secondary. Short term, long term. That structure is useful, but it can distort reality.
Cyrus talked about how hazard management and policy often move on after the official event, while communities continue to live with the emotional, physical, material and social effects long afterwards. He also pointed out that some Icelandic volcanic hazards do not fit the dramatic “sudden event” model that media and school case studies tend to favour. The ongoing activity around Grindavik, for example, is not easily captured by the idea of one shocking event followed by recovery.
This took us into Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence”, which describes forms of harm that unfold gradually and often invisibly, such as toxic drift, climate change, deforestation and environmental degradation, rather than through spectacular moments of destruction. Cyrus connected that idea to hazards, air pollution, land degradation and the uneven impact of environmental harm on racialised and marginalised communities.
I think geography is very good at this when we let it be. It can slow us down enough to ask who is affected, who is protected, who is ignored, what histories sit underneath the present, and why some forms of suffering become visible while others are treated as background noise.
Feminism, bodies and one of my usual podcast self-realisations
At some point in almost every Coffee & Geography conversation, I have a small moment where someone says something and my brain goes, “Oh. That explains something about me.”
In this conversation, it happened when Cyrus was talking about bodies, feminist thought and how experiences shape us materially as well as intellectually. It made me reflect out loud on why I was drawn to feminism even before I had the language for my own gender identity.
I will not pretend I made a perfectly polished theoretical point in the moment. I probably did what I often do, which is talk my way towards understanding something. But that is one of the reasons I enjoy these conversations. They are not scripted interviews where everyone stays in their lane. They are places where ideas bump into lived experience.
And geography, at its best, has always allowed for that. It is about the world, but it is also about being in the world.
Routes and whose knowledge counts
A big part of the conversation was about Routes: The Journal for Student Geographers, which Cyrus co-founded with Professor Lizzie Rushton in 2020. Routes describes itself as a peer-reviewed digital journal for sixth form and undergraduate geographers, publishing work from across human and physical geography, free to submit to and free to read.
I love Routes. I really do. Cyrus explained that he and Lizzie wanted to create a space where young people’s geographical work could be treated seriously, rather than simply as preparation for “real” academic work later. The journal gives students detailed feedback from two expert peer reviewers, with the aim of helping each piece become publishable.
Cyrus said:
“It validates that kind of knowledge that my own experience actually is geographical knowledge.”
That is such an important point. Geography is not only something produced by established academics, textbook writers or exam specifications. Young people have geographical knowledge too. They have knowledge of places, identities, injustices, landscapes, communities, anxieties, futures, coastlines, cities, schools, borders, food systems, weather, migration, bodies and belonging. Routes makes that visible.
We talked about the range of work published there: poetry, book reviews, academic articles, fieldwork, queer geography, Uyghur geographies, nuclear weapons, rewilding, 15-minute cities, sustainability, small islands, climate anxiety and much more. [geogramblings.com], [routesjournal.org]
I started browsing the site during the conversation, which is exactly the sort of thing I do. I noticed an undergraduate article on climate change education, urgency and anxiety, and immediately thought that if I keep saying young people’s voices matter, then I had better actually read young people’s work rather than only citing established adults saying young people’s voices matter.
It also made me think back to when I was teaching GCSE controlled assessment. I know controlled assessment was flawed, awkward and very much a product of its policy moment, but some of the work my pupils produced on local geography was genuinely excellent. If Routes had existed then, I would have wanted them to know that their work could live somewhere beyond a folder, a mark scheme and a moderation sample.
AI, geography and not getting stuck at chatbot level
The conversation then moved towards AI, partly because Cyrus is doing a lot of thinking in that area now. His University of Southampton profile lists research interests including AI in education, pedagogy and AI technologies, and international education in Vietnam and Asia. He also leads Southampton’s PGCert in Online Teaching, where his work includes bridging theory and practice in AI education.
What I appreciated was that Cyrus did not keep the AI discussion trapped in the usual school-level panic about plagiarism and chatbots. While those matter, they aren’t the whole conversation. He pointed out that thinking about AI only as “something that can produce a piece of writing that sounds a bit human” is quite a limited starting point.
He asked bigger geographical questions. What is AI doing to economies? What is it doing to labour? What happens to human relationships, graduate jobs, education systems and expertise? What uses of AI might help young people become more creative, entrepreneurial or capable, and what uses might narrow their experience or reduce human contact in ways we should care about?
That is where geography has something important to offer. We are used to asking: where is this happening, who benefits, who is harmed, what systems make it possible, what resources does it depend on, what labour is hidden, what futures are being produced, and what alternatives might exist?
I also talked about my own use of AI, especially because I am an ADHD dyslexic. Sometimes I know exactly what I want to say but cannot get it out in a form that makes sense to another human. Sometimes I use Copilot to help me structure dictated thoughts, check code, or troubleshoot data work. I still check everything, because AI absolutely can produce nonsense, but for me it can be a support rather than a replacement for thinking. Indeed, using AI as an accessibility tool is how I manage to get out blog posts like these out in a timely manner while making an ounce of sense to the reader.
I think this distinction on how schools us AI matters too. If we reduce AI to cheating, we miss the accessibility, productivity, ethical, social and economic questions. If we embrace it uncritically, we miss the risks. Geography can help us sit in the more complicated middle.
Hair gel, Asda and geography graduates going anywhere
One of my favourite lighter moments was Cyrus talking about his first job after university, which involved selling hair gel to Asda.
I enjoyed that because it is exactly the kind of thing students need to hear sometimes. Careers are rarely linear. A geography degree does not lock you into one path, and your first job does not define the rest of your life. It might make no sense at the time, or it might make perfect sense later. It might teach you something about supply chains, retail, people, negotiation, confidence, data, business, or what you absolutely do not want to do forever.
I mentioned a former student who wanted to work in renewables but was only seeing an admin job at a local renewable energy company. My advice was to get in there, get known, learn, ask questions and see what happened. Years later, that student was managing things. This is one of the messages I wish more young people heard: sometimes the route into the thing is not labelled “route into the thing”.
Flight and lines of flight
At the end of each episode, I ask the guest to respond to a word left by the previous guest. Dr Anjana Khatwa had left Cyrus the word flight. He could have gone with travel, and given how much he works internationally, that would have made sense. Instead, he took it somewhere more philosophical.
He talked about flight as movement across the world in an aeroplane, but also escaping something as a refugee. Then he moved into Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of “lines of flight”, from A Thousand Plateaus, as a way of thinking about newness, escape from existing structures, and the creation of something that does not simply fit a pre-existing schema.
I liked that ending because it fitted the whole conversation. Hazards that do not fit the event model. Student writing that does not wait for permission from established academia. AI conversations that need to move beyond black-and-white thinking. Career paths that do not move in straight lines. Geography itself as a discipline that keeps making connections and asking what those connections do.
What I took away
I finished the conversation thinking about geography as a discipline that does not just connect things, but asks what those connections reveal.
It is easy to say “everything is geography”, and I have definitely said it. But Cyrus made the better point: the question is not just whether we can connect two things, but what work that connection does. Does it reveal hidden labour? Does it show inequality? Does it validate someone’s lived experience? Does it make a slow harm visible? Does it help young people see themselves as knowledge producers? Does it open up a new line of thought?
That, for me, is the thread running through the episode. And, apparently, geography as a route from selling hair gel to Asda to leading a PGCE, working internationally, and talking about Deleuze and Guattari from a hotel room in Vietnam.
Which, in fairness, is quite a line of flight.
🔗 Dr Cyrus Golding — University of Southampton profile: https://cdn.southampton.ac.uk/people/672ydb/doctor-cyrus-golding
🔗 Dr Cyrus Golding — personal academic / professional profile: https://cgolding.snaap.app/
🔗 Golding Education: https://goldingeducation.com/
🔗 Routes: The Journal for Student Geographers: https://routesjournal.org/
🔗 Ilan Kelman: Disaster by Choice: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/disaster-by-choice-9780198841357
🔗 Rob Nixon: Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674072343
🔗 Deleuze and Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus: https://files.libcom.org/files/A%20Thousand%20Plateaus.pdf
🔗 Lines of Flight: theory article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/48618028
