Daniel Hammett read for a BA Geography at the University of Oxford (2002) before moving to the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh where he gained his MSc by research (2003) and PhD (2007). He then held an ESRC Post-Doctoral Fellowship and an ESRC Research Fellowship at the Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh before moving on to a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
He joined the Department in Sheffield as a Lecturer in 2010 and was awarded a Faculty Research Fellowship in 2012, before being promoted to Senior Faculty Research Fellow in January 2015, and Senior Lecturer in September 2015.
He is the Director of Learning and Teaching in the Department of Geography.
He also held a Research Associate position at the Department of Geography, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa from 2010 to 2014.
My research addresses concerns within political and development geography, primarily in relation to sub-Saharan Africa. My work falls into two main themes: geographies of citizenship and civil society, and geopolitics of the global south. Specifically, my work explores questions around scales and practices of citizenship in relation to practices of governmentality and identity, as well as addressing how understandings of belonging and division are developed and promoted.
This work explores the changing nature of and space for citizenship, civil society and activism. Specifically, this work addresses questions of how political power and governance are used to develop and limit understandings of belonging and the practices of claims-making by citizens and civil society. Integral to this work is a concern with how notions of ‘civility’ are used to limit what is allowed as ‘good’ or ‘active’ citizenship, as well as questioning the scales at which citizenship is understood and enacted through participation in both invented and invited public spaces. At the heart of this work is a concern with understanding how active and activists citizens contest and seek to realise citizenship, belonging and democratisation.
projected, contested, interpreted and challenged in Southern Africa. Work in this theme has addressed ephemera produced in South Africa and Zimbabwe, and has led to contributions to discussions on the role of civil society in sub-Saharan Africa.
In the 2018/19 academic year Daniel will be responsible for leading a Level 3 Geographies of the Global South Fieldtrip to Uganda, as well as teaching on Level 2 Political Geography and Level 3 Geographies of Politics and Society modules.
In other years, his teaching interests have covered a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses. At the undergraduate level his contributions to courses in political and development geography have explored key geographic issues and their relationship to everyday life. In particular, his teaching has explored questions of uneven development, geopolitics and power relations. His interactive style of teaching and use of board games, music, videos and the media has allowed him to engage students in exploring the ways in which our understandings of the world around us are continually reshaped. Throughout these courses he has utilised ongoing research interests in East and sub-Saharan Africa as well as South East Asia to demonstrate and unpack the theoretical and empirical material presented to make geographic debates interesting and accessible.
This concern with exploring power, development and (in)equality has informed his postgraduate teaching in development geography which has explored and contested developmental assumptions and the power relations behind these.
Daniel's teaching has been recognised as excellent by students and peers, with the award of status as a Senate Teaching Fellow in 2012 and the Innovation in Teaching award at the 2011 Sheffield Students' Union Academic Awards in recognition that good teaching has an enormous positive impact on students' learning experience. The supporting citation for the Innovation in Teaching award read, "As well as constantly bringing examples forward using you tube clips and satire, his enthusiasm and obvious love for what he was teaching me was incredible and incredibly contagious."
Hammett, D., Twyman, C. and Graham, M. 2015 Research and Fieldwork in Development. Routledge, London.
Daniel is co-editor of the journal International Development Planning Review, and a member of the ESRC Peer Review College. He is also the secretary for the Political Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), and a member of the British International Studies Association.
In addition, he acts as a reviewer for a number of international funding bodies as well as reviewing submissions to journals including Political Geography , Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers , Annals of the Association of American Geographers , Environment and Planning , and International Journal of Educational Development .