I am extraordinarily excited to tell you that I will be joining York St John University (YSJ) in the new year as a Lecturer of Geography! To be honest, it is my dream job.

When I left transport planning to start a PhD way back in 2009, my goal was to be a lecturer. It is the only job I have ever really wanted. When the role I now have was advertised, I threw everything I had at it – whether or not I was to be successful, I wanted to “leave nothing on the pitch”.

In part 1 of this blog, I looked back at what I had achieved at the EA, in this part I want to look forward to things I am most excited about.

Teaching

My new role will be predominantly teaching. I am anticipating doing a lot of it and being very busy. Honestly, I am looking forward to this. I’ve had the opportunity recently to develop and deliver a new module on river management for the third-year geographers at YSJ. The module mixed lectures, workshops, and field visits, and I made a lot of use of games throughout. It was practical, focussing on real-world applications, and I brought in those working in the sector to speak to the students. I have found it awesomely rewarding and when I am working with the students it just feels like that is where I am supposed to be.

It has become apparent to me in the last few years that my passion is for education. I want to teach. I want to learn how to do it better. I want to get very good at it. I want to explore new ways of doing it and write about it. What an opportunity this is to that!

Research and being creative

As an EA employee you are a public servant. You have a very clear job role, fulfilling an important function but with little scope to work outside of your job description. There were few opportunities in my day job to keep up my creative practice and maintain my science communication skills. For example, I was faced with a choice of either dropping out of organising the Games for Geoscience session or staying involved but in my own free time and at my own cost. It was also important that my own personal work was entirely and clearly separate from my day job and created no conflicts of interest. Hence, I developed the GeoSkinner brand to give my creative practice a distinct home.

In my new role, this creative work is encouraged and can be part of my day job (although the concept of a ‘day’ job in academia can be a little woolly). I am really looking forward to bringing together the different strands of my work into one. Obviously, I need to get settled in, and manage my time, but here are some of things you might see me working on in the coming years:

NERC Embrace-Enviro: This project has been funded by NERC and is led by my colleagues at YSJ. It is working with migrant and refugee communities to help them access science training, experience, and careers. I will be part of the team delivering science communication training in early 2026.

Games for Geoscience: We are approaching ten years of the Games for Geoscience session at the European Geoscience Union General Assembly, including the Geoscience Games Night. My ambition is for it to transcend the session and develop into a community with year-round activity.

Adventures in Model Land: Inspired by tabletop roleplay games (TTRPG), Adventures in Model Land is an open-source framework to help modellers design explorable worlds based on numerical models. Recently, I took part in a Maths on the Move podcast about the project, you can listen here. I hope to bring some new energy to this project.

Play Your PhD: My imagination workshops are inspired by LEGO SERIOUS PLAY are aimed at helping PhD students develop their imaginations as a useful skill. I’m really keen to develop an entire gamified programme of workshops equipping early career researchers with playful skills.

Hydrology Tea-Break: The majority of people who work with hydrology would not actually call themselves a hydrologist. Hydrology Tea-Break would use science communication as CPD aimed at those needing to follow multi-disciplinary T-shaped careers.

Models as Imagination Infrastructure: Imagination Infrastructures are things that help us think of and picture positive futures and change. Models can help us imagine the future but are often inaccessible and tend to focus on understanding impacts of disasters and worst-case scenarios. I’d like to explore the capacity of models to help us imagine alternative, more hopeful, futures. Games are potential medium to help make such models more accessible.

I hope to provide regular updates on my work through this blog so please do subscribe using the box below – I’ll aim for monthly updates but this might fluctuate when I get busy!

If you’re interested in working together, either on one of the projects above or something else entirely, please do get in touch, I’d love to chat (c dot skinner at yorksj dot ac dot uk).

Views expressed in this newsletter are mine and do not represent those of my employer. Content and links are provided for informational purposes and do not constitute endorsements. I am not responsible for the content of external sites, which may have changed since this newsletter was produced