ABOUT US
Initiated in 2021, the Fi Wi Road Internship began as a collaborative project to provide a collective of Black-heritage Geography and Geoscience undergraduate students across the UK with a space to develop a new idea of what Geography could look like. Initially funded through Antipode’s ‘Right to the Discipline’ grant, the project has grown in the years since into an independent annual Summer internship that continues to provide our interns with one-to-one mentoring, skills workshops, and hands-on research experience, culminating in our annual Fi Wi Road Fair.
The internship continues to support Black students across the UK in building networks, voice and experience, encouraging them to stay within a discipline in which Black geographers are consistently under-represented, and often brutally marginalised and squeezed out.
Why ‘Fi Wi Road’?
The phrase ‘Fi Wi Road’ comes from Jamaican poet Kei Miller (2014), in a collection of poems that contend with conventional cartography’s colonial violence and considers Jamaican people’s own modes of place-making.
Within a similar mood of working towards the joyful freeing of our own futures, the Fi Wi Road Internship centres Black geography undergraduate voices and their own modes of making place and space, valuing the joy and creativity (and voicing the pain and isolation), through which they are making their own futures.
CO-ORDINATORS
Pronouns: She/Her
Pat is Professor of Human Geography and Chair in Postcolonial Geographies at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research centres around cultural and postcolonial geographies, particularly thinking about creative practices in the Caribbean and it’s diaspora. Pat led the AHRC-funded fellowship CARICUK (Creative Approaches to Race and In/security in the Caribbean and the UK), and is currently co-leading on a project to develop the Stuart Hall Archive in collaboration with the University of Birmingham and the Stuart Hall Foundation.
PROF. PAT NOXOLO
Pronouns: She/Her
Cynthia is a PhD Candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London with an interest in the emotional and spiritual geographies of death and migration. Her current research is a digital mapping of transnational deathscapes, specifically focussing on domestic memorial souvenirs and their use within contemporary Igbo Nigerian culture.
CYNTHIA NKIRUKA ANYADI
We commit to paying all of our interns above a London Living Wage, regardless of their location, to ensure that participation is accessible to people from all backgrounds. We rely on generous support and donations to continue running the internship. If you or your organisation are interested in further supporting the Fi Wi Road Internship you can contact us here.