Invited talk on school closures at Europa-Uni Flensburg

Yesterday I returned home from a visit to the Europa-Universität Flensburg, where Holger Jahnke kindly invited me to give a presentation as part of the interdisciplinary colloquium series “Sustainability and Inequality”. It was a nice challenge to try and weave together aspects of my recent work around the SDGs on spatial aspects of educational development generally, some earlier work on school closures in Saxony, and work in progress with Dan Zhao of the Northwest A&F University on school closures in rural China. It was also a great opportunity to present to a very different kind of audience also, specifically much more qualitative, and in German for a change. The way this opportunity arose has also demonstrated that popular-scientific output can actually bring scientific benefits too: Holger happened to see a summary of my article on Population, Space & Place on Saxony in an issue of the LandInForm and recalled that we used to meet semi-regularly until a few years ago at the annual events of the Arbeitskreis Bildungsgeographie. One phone call later we’d set up the talk!