HERODOT Network for Geography: Big Hope essay competition

In 2008 HERODOT — the Thematic Network for Geography in Higher Education — ran an essay competition for its members with a deliberately ambitious brief: get geographers to argue, in public and in writing, for the value of their own discipline. The competition was tied to the Big Hope World Youth Congress, held in Liverpool from 4–12 June 2008 as part of the city’s European Capital of Culture programme. Twelve young academics, postgraduate students, young professionals and youth leaders wrote winning essays on one of the Big Hope themes, and those essays were compiled into a special HERODOT publication, Promoting and Celebrating Geography, edited by Karl Donert and Glenda Wall.

The book was launched at the Big Hope on 6 June 2008, when Sajjid Karim MEP for North West England presented certificates to the prize winners. The launch was also attended by Lord David Alton and Patrick Kelly, the Archbishop of Liverpool.

The volume addresses Education, Faith, Social Change, Citizenship and Responsibility, and it supports the ongoing work of HERODOT’s Thematic Pillar 2 — the pillar concerned with promoting Geography and supporting the work of geographers. Four video competition winners also attended the Big Hope; their films, designed to communicate the value of Geography, were housed on YouTube.

The Big Hope itself was opened at the Metropolitan Cathedral in Liverpool by Cherie Booth QC, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Archbishop of Westminster, Mike Storey (Deputy Mayor of Liverpool), Ken Pye and Baroness Caroline Cox. Keynote speakers included Mary McAleese, then President of Ireland, John Gummer MP, Chief Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks, and the former President of India alongside Baroness Ilora Finlay.

Key Takeaways

• The 2008 HERODOT essay competition was a discipline-advocacy exercise, not a conventional academic prize: entrants had to argue for Geography’s public value to a non-specialist audience.
• The winning essays were published as Promoting and Celebrating Geography, edited by Karl Donert and Glenda Wall, and launched at the Big Hope World Youth Congress in Liverpool on 6 June 2008.
• The competition sat inside HERODOT’s Thematic Pillar 2, which exists to promote Geography and support geographers — a structural link worth understanding if you are designing similar initiatives today.
• A parallel video strand shows that the network treated media literacy and visual communication as legitimate geographical outputs alongside written argument.
• The Big Hope’s themes — Education, Faith, Social Change, Citizenship and Responsibility — map closely onto the civic and sustainability agendas that European geography departments still negotiate today.

Why a Discipline Needs an Advocacy Competition

Most academic competitions reward specialisation. This one rewarded the opposite: the ability to explain, to a mixed audience of youth delegates, clergy, politicians and cultural figures, why Geography matters. That is a harder task than it sounds, and it is worth being explicit about why.

Geographers in higher education routinely face a structural problem that colleagues in, say, physics or medicine do not face in the same way. The discipline is administratively fragmented.

In many European universities, human geography sits with social sciences, physical geography with earth or environmental sciences, and GIScience with informatics or engineering. The result is that “Geography” as a coherent intellectual project is often invisible at exactly the level where institutional decisions are made — faculty restructuring, degree validation, research assessment panels.

Advocacy competitions address that invisibility in three ways:

• They force articulation. Writing for a non-specialist audience exposes whether a department can actually state its value proposition in plain language.
• They generate reusable material. A published collection of essays becomes a departmental asset — usable in open days, in validation documents, in conversations with deans.
• They build a cohort. The twelve winners were early-career people. Networks that invest in early-career advocates tend to have longer institutional memories than those that rely on senior champions alone.

If you are running something similar now, the lesson from 2008 is that the brief matters more than the prize. A prompt like “write about Geography” produces platitudes. A prompt anchored to a live public theme — citizenship, responsibility, social change — produces arguments.

The Big Hope as a Platform, and Why the Venue Mattered

The Big Hope was not a geography conference. It was a youth congress staged inside a wider civic festival, and that is precisely what made it useful. Geography delegates were speaking to people who had not chosen to hear about Geography.

The opening at the Metropolitan Cathedral brought together an unusually broad coalition: Cherie Booth QC, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the then Archbishop of Westminster, Mike Storey as Deputy Mayor of Liverpool, Ken Pye and Baroness Caroline Cox. The keynote roster — Mary McAleese, President of Ireland; John Gummer MP; Chief Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks; a former President of India; Baroness Ilora Finlay — spanned politics, faith, diplomacy and public health.

For a geography network, that mix is an opportunity with a specific shape. It means the audience is receptive to arguments framed around:

• Place and identity — how territory, memory and belonging interact.
• Environment and responsibility — stewardship framed in ethical rather than purely technical terms.
• Migration, borders and citizenship — questions the Big Hope’s themes put at the centre.
• Global interdependence — the scale at which geographers habitually think.

The trade-off is real, though. Speaking in a multi-faith, multi-sector civic forum rewards accessibility and penalises jargon. Any department preparing students for that kind of platform should rehearse them on the difference between a conference paper and a public argument. The former demonstrates command of a literature; the latter has to earn attention in the first thirty seconds.

What Promoting and Celebrating Geography Actually Represents

Edited by Karl Donert and Glenda Wall, the collection is best understood as a primary source for the history of geography advocacy in European higher education. Its five thematic areas — Education, Faith, Social Change, Citizenship and Responsibility — are not arbitrary. They are the Big Hope’s themes, and adopting them was a strategic choice: it positioned Geography as a discipline that speaks to the congress’s agenda rather than one asking for a slot on it.

The launch on 6 June 2008, with certificates presented by Sajjid Karim MEP and attended by Lord David Alton and Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, gave the volume a civic imprimatur that a purely academic launch would not have had.

For anyone using the book today — as a teaching text, as a case study in a module on the public role of geography, or as evidence in a departmental review — the useful questions to ask of it are:

1. Which arguments have aged well, and which now read as period pieces?
2. Which of the five themes has become more, not less, urgent?
3. What does the collection reveal about who was in the room, and who was not?

That third question is the one most worth pressing. A competition that drew twelve winners from a European network in 2008 reflects the network’s composition at that time. Contemporary equivalents should be designed with a wider geographic and institutional spread in mind.

The Video Strand: Visual Advocacy as a Geographical Skill

Four video competition winners also attended the Big Hope, and their films were hosted on YouTube. This is easy to skim past, but it was a genuinely forward-looking decision for 2008.

Video advocacy asks different things of a geographer than an essay does. It demands:

• Shot selection as argument — what you choose to show is a claim about what matters.
• Compression — a two-minute film has no room for a literature review.
• Distribution literacy — understanding that a platform’s recommendation logic shapes who sees your work.

These are transferable skills. Fieldwork, dissertation projects and public engagement all benefit when students can communicate spatially with images as well as prose.

Departments building assessment today might consider whether a short film or story map can carry the same learning outcomes as a written piece — and, importantly, whether it can be assessed with the same rigour. The answer is usually yes, provided the marking criteria are written for the medium rather than borrowed from essay rubrics.

Running a Comparable Competition Today: A Practical Framework

If you are a lecturer, department head or teacher trainer considering a revival or an equivalent, the 2008 model offers a workable template. The decisions that matter are these:

Decision	Options	What to weigh
Audience	Internal to the department; network-wide; public/civic	Public audiences raise the bar on clarity but produce more reusable output
Prompt	Open (“why Geography matters”); themed; problem-based	Themed prompts yield comparable entries and easier judging
Format	Essay; video; poster; story map; mixed	Mixed formats widen access but complicate judging criteria
Publication	None; online only; edited volume	A published collection creates a lasting departmental asset
Launch	Academic seminar; civic event; conference slot	Civic launches attract external credibility but require more lead time
Judging	Single assessor; panel; panel with external member	External judges reduce internal bias and raise perceived prestige

Two caveats are worth stating plainly. First, an advocacy competition is not a substitute for curriculum reform — it is a supplement, and it works best when the department already has something coherent to advocate. Second, publishing student and early-career work carries editorial responsibilities: consent, attribution and the quality of the editing all matter, and a poorly edited volume can do more harm than no volume at all.

The Thematic Pillar 2 Connection

The book explicitly supports HERODOT’s Thematic Pillar 2, the strand dedicated to promoting Geography and supporting geographers. Understanding that structural placement matters, because it explains why the competition existed at all.

A thematic network’s pillars are its working machinery. A pillar focused on promotion typically does several things at once:

• Collects and shares arguments for the discipline’s value.
• Creates opportunities for members to contribute to those arguments.
• Produces outputs — publications, events, resources — that members can cite.
• Maintains continuity between funded project cycles.

The essay competition did all four in a single activity. That is efficient design, and it is worth studying if you are writing a bid for a network or consortium project. Reviewers respond well to activities that generate a tangible output and serve an existing work package simultaneously.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the HERODOT Big Hope essay competition?

It was a competition organised by the HERODOT Network in 2008 for its members, inviting them to write essays promoting the role and significance of Geography. Twelve winners were selected, and their essays were published in the collection Promoting and Celebrating Geography, edited by Karl Donert and Glenda Wall.

When and where did the winners present their work?

The winners attended the Big Hope World Youth Congress in Liverpool from 4–12 June 2008, an event staged as part of the city’s Capital of Culture celebrations. They promoted Geography in the congress workshops and strands, and the book was launched there on 6 June 2008.

Who spoke at the Big Hope congress?

The congress was opened at the Metropolitan Cathedral in Liverpool by Cherie Booth QC, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Mike Storey, Ken Pye and Baroness Caroline Cox. Keynote speakers included Mary McAleese, John Gummer MP, Chief Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks, a former President of India and Baroness Ilora Finlay.

What themes did the winning essays address?

The essays dealt with Education, Faith, Social Change, Citizenship and Responsibility — the themes of the Big Hope congress. Adopting the congress’s own themes allowed the contributors to position Geography as a discipline engaging with the event’s agenda rather than simply requesting visibility within it.

How did the video competition fit in?

Four video competition winners also attended the Big Hope, and their films — designed to promote the value of Geography — were housed on YouTube. The video strand ran alongside the essay competition and treated visual communication as a legitimate form of geographical advocacy.

How does this connect to HERODOT’s wider work?

The publication supports the ongoing work of Thematic Pillar 2 in HERODOT, which exists to promote Geography and support the work of geographers. The competition is a useful example of a single activity serving a network’s promotional work package while producing a lasting published output.