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Dr Edward Wigley

A smiling Edward Wigley holding a mug.

Profile summary

  • Regional Academic Staff
  • Staff Tutor in Geography
  • Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences
  • School of Social Sciences & Global Studies
  • Geography
  • edward.wigley

Web links

Professional biography

I began my academic life at the University of Lancaster with a degree in Religious Studies, following this with a MA at The Open University in 2012.  Partway through the MA, I realised that geography provided the lens on everyday life, structures and beliefs that I had been looking for so packed my bags and headed to University of the West of England in Bristol to pursue a PhD exploring the personal practice of religion and spirituality through the new mobilities framework.  I have since completed a MSc degree in Education.

Since completing my PhD in 2016, I have worked on a variety of projects including understanding resident’s perceptions of economic migrants and as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate on the ESRC funded Smart Cities in the Making: Learning from Milton Keynes project.  I have also published on contemporary wassailing practices, enchantment and 'tradition'.

Currently I am a Staff Tutor in the Geography Department, supporting level 1 and 2 Social Science modules.

Research interests

Research interests include: smart and urban geographies, sacred space, geographies of religion and spirituality and globalisation and migration.

Selected Publications:

Wigley, E., (2019 – online first), ‘A Place of Magic: Enchanting geographies of contemporary wassailing practices’, Social and Cultural Geography.

Wigley, E., (2019 – online first), ‘Wassail!  Reinventing ‘tradition’ in contemporary wassailing customs in southern England’, Cultural Geographies.

Wigley, E., (2018), ‘Constructing subjective spiritual geographies in everyday mobilities: the practice of prayer and meditation in corporeal travel’ Social and Cultural Geography, vol.19, no.8, pp.984-1005

Wigley, E., (2018), ‘Everyday mobilities and the construction of subjective spiritual geographies’, Mobilities, vol.13, no.3

Teaching interests

I have taught on a variety of topics drawing from geographies of national and ethnic identity, people and place, social and cultural geography, urban geography and mobilities, globalisation and migration, sociologies of ageing, religion and spirituality.

Publications

‘Why has this guy got his foot in the sink?’: challenges, encounters and everyday geographies of practicing wudu (2024)
Wigley, Edward and Bibi, Rashida
Social & Cultural Geography, 25(9) (pp. 1355-1373)

Blue is for boys: postfeminist continuations of gender, body and hue in UK magazines, 2009–2018 (2022)
Wigley, Edward and Dornelles, Vevila R. C.
Gender, Place & Culture, 29(3) (pp. 345-371)

Economic geographies of the illegal: the multiscalar production of cybercrime (2021-09-29)
Hall, Tim; Sanders, Ben; Bah, Mamadou; King, Owen and Wigley, Edward
Trends in Organized Crime, 24 (pp. 282-307)

‘A place of magic’: enchanting geographies of contemporary wassailing practices (2021)
Wigley, Edward
Social & Cultural Geography, 22(6) (pp. 868-889)

Do Autonomous Vehicles Dream of Virtual Sheep? The Displacement of Reality in the Hyperreal Visions of Autonomous Vehicles (2021)
Wigley, Edward
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111(6) (pp. 1640-1655)

[Book review] City Water Matters: Cultures, Practices and Entanglements of Urban Water (2020-07-01)
Wigley, Edward
Urban Studies, 57(9) (pp. 2010-2012)

Who’s behind the wheel? Visioning the future users and urban contexts of connected and autonomous vehicle technologies (2020)
Wigley, Edward and Rose, Gillian
Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 102(2) (pp. 155-171)

Wassail! Reinventing ‘tradition’ in contemporary wassailing customs in southern England (2019-07-01)
Wigley, Edward
cultural geographies, 26(3) (pp. 379-393)

Everyday mobilities and the construction of subjective spiritual geographies in ‘Non-places’ (2018)
Wigley, Edward
Mobilities, 13(3) (pp. 411-425)

A global sense of religious place: the production of religious and spiritual sites through local–global entanglements and global mobilities (2018)
Wigley, Edward
Globalizations, 15(5) (pp. 593-607)

Constructing subjective spiritual geographies in everyday mobilities: the practice of prayer and meditation in corporeal travel (2017-03-22)
Wigley, Edward
Social & Cultural Geography, 19(8) (pp. 984-1005)

Learning lessons for avoiding the inadvertent exclusion of communities from smart city projects (2020-11)
Valdez Juarez, Miguel; Wigley, Edward; Zanetti, Olly and Rose, Gillian
In: Aurigi, Alessandro and Odendaal, Nancy eds. Shaping Smart for Better Cities - Rethinking and Shaping Relationships Between Urban Space and Digital Technologies (pp. 221-237)
ISBN : 978-0-12-818636-7 | Publisher : Academic Press | Published : London