Alice Watson

Alice Watson

DPhil Candidate  

Affiliation: School of Geography and the Environment 
Expert in: Migration narratives, representations, and public opinion 
Geographic focus:  UK

Alice is studying for an ESRC-funded DPhil in Human Geography at St John’s college. Her research interests lie in media and migration, and specifically radio as an understudied space of knowledge production in Geography with the capacity to shape geographical imaginations. Alice is interested in how listeners are called on to imagine the spaces, places, and people that broadcasters describe and to actively construct ideas and imaginaries. She approaches radio as an increasingly malleable medium – disseminated across and accessed through multiple platforms from social media to podcasts – with rich potential for examining reconfigured listening practices and new spaces of consumption. Her thesis examines how migration is represented in BBC Radio and how, and in which spaces, imaginative geographies of migration are received and understood by listeners. The project seeks to reveal how radio impacts geographical imaginations and shapes public attitudes towards ‘migrants’ and ‘refugees’.