HERODOT Network for Geography: Big Hope competition

The HERODOT Network’s essay competition tied to the 2008 Big Hope World Youth Congress remains one of the clearest early examples of how a subject association can convert a one-off cultural event into durable curriculum and advocacy material. Rather than simply sending delegates to a conference, HERODOT built a competitive pipeline: entrants wrote essays on the Congress’s core themes, the winners travelled to Liverpool, and the resulting work was edited into a permanent publication. For anyone running a geography department, a teacher-training programme, or a student society today, the episode is worth studying as a reusable model — not just a historical footnote.

Key Takeaways

• The competition selected 14 young academics, postgraduate students, young professionals and leaders whose winning essays addressed the Big Hope themes of Education, Faith, Social Change, Citizenship and Responsibility.
• The essays were compiled into the HERODOT publication “Promoting and Celebrating Geography,” edited by Karl Donert and Glenda Wall.
• The book was launched on 6 June 2008 at the Big Hope, with certificates presented by North West England MEP Sajjid Karim; Lord David Alton also attended.
• The initiative was explicitly tied to HERODOT Thematic Pillar 2, whose remit is to promote Geography and support the work of geographers.
• The 2007 video competition winners also attended, and their films were hosted on YouTube to communicate the value of Geography to wider audiences.
• The Big Hope ran 4–12 June 2008 in Liverpool as part of the city’s European Capital of Culture year, giving the competition a ready-made public platform.

Why the Big Hope mattered for geography advocacy

Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture in 2008 gave the city an unusual concentration of public attention, and the Big Hope World Youth Congress — hosted at Hope University under the URL then published as hope.ac.uk/thebighope — was designed to channel that attention toward young people and global themes. Congresses of this kind typically mix plenary sessions, workshops and networking, and they succeed or fail on whether participants leave with something they can use.

HERODOT’s contribution was to make sure the geography contingent left with something publishable. By running an essay competition in advance, the Network did three things at once:

• It created a selection mechanism that identified motivated early-career geographers rather than relying on whoever happened to be available.
• It generated content — the essays themselves — that could outlive the event.
• It gave winners a credential (a prize, a certificate, a named publication) that is genuinely useful on an academic CV.

That third point is easy to underestimate. For a PhD student or early-career lecturer, a competition win with a formal launch and a printed book is a concrete line item for promotion, fellowship applications and teaching portfolios. Departments that sponsor such entries are, in effect, investing in their staff’s visibility at low cost.

The themes: Education, Faith, Social Change, Citizenship and Responsibility

The five Big Hope themes were not chosen at random, and they map onto live debates in geography education that are still recognisable today.

• Education — who gets access to geographical knowledge, and what a geography curriculum is for.
• Faith — how cultural and religious identity shapes the way people understand place, territory and community.
• Social Change — migration, urbanisation, inequality and the processes that redraw the map of opportunity.
• Citizenship — the relationship between local belonging and global responsibility.
• Responsibility — sustainability, environmental stewardship and the ethics of intervening in other people’s places.

For a curriculum developer, these themes are a reminder that geography’s contribution to citizenship education is not decorative. The subject supplies the spatial vocabulary — scale, distribution, connectivity, place — that lets students reason about global problems rather than merely feel strongly about them. An essay competition framed around these themes forces entrants to make that argument explicitly, which is precisely the skill that advocacy for the discipline requires.

How the competition worked as a model

The mechanics are worth reconstructing because they are transferable. HERODOT announced an essay competition, invited submissions from young academics, postgraduate students, young professionals and leaders, and selected winners whose work was then edited into a book. The winners attended the Congress; the publication was launched there; certificates were presented by a public figure.

If you were designing something similar now, the decision points would look like this:

Decision	Options	Trade-off
Eligibility	Open to all vs. restricted to early-career	Open entries widen reach; restricted entries sharpen the “development” purpose
Judging	Single editor vs. panel	A panel adds credibility and spreads workload; a single editor is faster and more coherent
Output	Online only vs. printed book	Print carries prestige and a launch moment; online is cheaper and more discoverable
Link to event	Winners attend vs. publication only	Attendance creates the story; publication creates the legacy
Editing	Light-touch vs. developmental	Developmental editing improves quality but demands editor time

The HERODOT case chose a middle path on most of these: a defined pool of early-career entrants, an edited print publication with named editors, and a launch tied to a major event. That combination is what made the output quotable years later.

The publication and its launch

The compiled volume, “Promoting and Celebrating Geography,” was edited by Karl Donert and Glenda Wall. Donert’s association with HERODOT is long-standing, and the Network’s publication list — referenced on the site as “HERODOT publications” — is the natural place to look for the full catalogue and any surviving PDFs.

The launch took place on 6 June 2008, during the Big Hope. Certificates were presented to prize winners by Sajjid Karim, then a Member of the European Parliament for North West England, and the event was also attended by Lord David Alton. The presence of an MEP and a peer is not incidental: it signals that the Network was deliberately connecting geography education to policy audiences, not just to other geographers.

A book review (published as a PDF) accompanied the launch, which matters for a practical reason. Reviews are how a publication enters the scholarly record and how later researchers discover it. If you are producing an edited student volume today, budgeting for a review — even a short one in a subject-association newsletter — is one of the highest-return steps you can take.

The video competition and multimedia advocacy

The 2007 video competition winners also attended the Big Hope, and their videos were housed on YouTube with the explicit aim of promoting the value of Geography. This is worth noting because it shows HERODOT treating advocacy as a multimedia problem well before “science communication” became a standard phrase in institutional strategies.

Video advocacy has real advantages over written advocacy:

• It travels further on social platforms and is easier to embed in open days and recruitment pages.
• It lets students speak in their own voice, which is more persuasive to prospective students than a lecturer’s testimonial.
• It is reusable — a single well-made short film can serve recruitment, outreach and conference promotion for years.

The caveat is durability. Videos hosted on third-party platforms can disappear, be made private, or lose their context. Any department running a similar competition should archive master files locally and record the licence terms under which students consented to publication. That is a data-protection and consent issue as much as a technical one, and it is the single most common failure point in student media projects.

What a modern department can borrow from this

The Big Hope competition is a template, and it can be adapted at almost any scale. A few concrete ways to apply it:

• Tie the competition to a real event. A conference, a field-course anniversary, a national geography day, or a Capital of Culture-style civic programme all provide a deadline and a stage.
• Publish the winners. An edited volume, a special issue of a departmental journal, or a curated online collection all work. Name the editors; it gives them credit and gives the volume a citable identity.
• Involve external figures. A local politician, a national academy representative, or a partner from industry raises the profile and signals that the work matters beyond the department.
• Connect to an existing pillar or strategy. HERODOT anchored the competition in Thematic Pillar 2, which meant the activity had a home and a rationale rather than being an isolated event.
• Keep the archive. Record what was submitted, who judged it, what was published and where it now lives. Institutional memory is what allows a one-off to become a recurring programme.

The broader lesson is about leverage. A single Congress in a single city produced, through deliberate design, a book, a set of prize-winners, a video archive and a policy-facing launch. That is a far better return than simply sending delegates and writing a report afterwards.

Where this sits in HERODOT’s wider work

HERODOT — the network for geography in higher education in Europe — has consistently worked across several fronts: publications, conferences, thematic pillars and competitions. The Big Hope essay competition sits alongside the HERODOT Liverpool 08 Conference, the HERODOT GIS Poster Competition 2007 and the HERODOT Video Competition 2008 (the latter noted as being for members only). Together these show a pattern of using competitions to generate both content and community.

For researchers in geography education, this matters methodologically. Competitions and their outputs are a form of evidence about what the discipline values at a given moment. The themes chosen, the judging criteria, the people invited to present prizes — all of these are data. Anyone writing a history of geography education in Europe in the late 2000s would do well to treat HERODOT’s competition archive as a primary source.

The Network’s site also carries a note that it was