Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

One of the key structural drivers of economic performance is economic openness which measures the connectedness and mobility of economies that comes about through international trade, capital flows and the movement of information and people. Achieving higher economic openness is a positive force in play that holds great promise for the sub-Saharan Africa.

Adrian Saville

From lagging developed markets, sub-Saharan Africa has played catch-up over the past 15 years. The region has shown annual real GDP growth some 2% per annum ahead of global growth. This, combined with structural reforms taking place in the sub-continent – which include governance and policy improvements, debt retirement and material political reforms – has yielded a region rich with opportunity. That this coincides with an era of advanced world structural decay only serves to highlight the potential of Africa

Last spring, I was invited to respond to an article in Dialogues in Human Geography, a relatively new journal, which has the aim of stimulating conversation across the discipline. The article, by Kitchin, Linehan, O’Callaghan and Lawton, concerned their experiences with their public blog, IrelandAfterNAMA (IAN), and the issues of public geography that this experience raised for them. Since I was at the time teaching a professional development seminar devoted to PhD students as potential entrants to the academic labor market, including issues of social media, branding, engagement, etc, I thought it would be a good idea to write the response jointly with the students.

Our response “Whose Geography? Which Publics? is now available online. There are also responses by several other people, and then Kitchin et al. have the final word.

All in all I think this was a very positive experience, especially for our PhD students. We…