Dear NECTAR friends,

Please find below the announcement for the 2nd NECTAR PhD Award 

2^nd NECTAR PhD AWARD

In many NECTAR meetings, workshops and conferences, PhD students present and discuss their work. To recognize the high quality of the research conducted by the best of the PhD students supervised by NECTAR members,  NECTAR is proud to announce his second NECTAR PhD AWARD. The award is established in memory of Professor Piet Rietveld, who chaired NECTAR in the years 2002-2007 and who with his exceptional academic abilities inspired and stimulated many young researchers, PhD students and the NECTAR community in general. The NECTAR PhD Award will be awarded for the best recent PhD thesis work in the NECTAR field.

The 2^nd NECTAR PhD award will consider PhD theses written in English which have been or will be defended between June 2015 and May 2017. We will also consider submissions consisting of sets of journal papers which are to be included in a future thesis, and which are representative for its quality. PhD thesis work can be submitted only by a supervisor who should be a NECTAR member (i.e. 2016-2017 membership is paid).

To be considered, the PhD thesis should be in the general realm of NECTAR research, including topics from the fields of regional and urban economics, transport economics, urban/regional planning, transport planning and transport engineering. The PhD thesis should relate to one or more of the NECTAR cluster theme’s: networks, policy and environment, logistics and freight, travel, migration and labour market, accessibility, tourism, recreation and leisure and information and communication technologies.

Phds will be judged by a Committee comprising of former and present NECTAR Presidents, and a selection of the current NECTAR cluster co-chairs. Professor Erik Verhoef from VU University Amsterdam will chair the 2^nd  NECTAR PhD Award Committee. The decision of the committee – which will be rendered March 2017 - will be final.

The author of the winning thesis must present the research at the 14^th bi-annual NECTAR conference in Madrid, May 31^st -2^nd of June 2017. The winning author will receive a reimbursement for travel and accommodation cost for the conference. 

PhD supervisors who wish to submit their PhD thesis work for consideration should send (a) an electronic copy of the summary of the thesis and (b) the PhD thesis (or collection of papers) in PDF format before January 16, 2017 to the NECTAR secretariat (Ana Condeço-Melhorado) at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Dear colleagues!

The Department of Human Geography and Regional Studies, the School of Geology, Geography, Recreation and Tourism, V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University (Ukraine) invites you to take part in the International Scientific and Practical Conference «Region-2016: Optimal Development Strategy» (10-11 November, 2016) and to publish your manuscripts in the scientific journal «Human Geography Journal», included in the scientometric bases Index Copernicus, Ulrich's Periodicals Directory, Google Scholar, InfoBase Index, Eurasian Scientific Journal Index, ResearchBib, Scientific Indexing Services.

The deadline for submitting papers for conference participation – October 15, 2016; submitting papers in the journal – November 1, 2016.

The information letter on the conference is in the attached file. Requirements to manuscripts publication you can find in the web-site of the journalhttp://hgj.univer.kharkov.ua/index.php/en/ and in the attached file

If you have any questions, please, write to the following e-mails:

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. – on the publishing manuscripts to the journal;

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. – on participation in the conference.

Also I would like to inform you about research fields of the department. 

The department deals with researches in the field of human (social) geography, regional development and territory planning, geodemography and urban geography, social development monitoring, estimation of tourist and recreational potential and tourist activity optimization, etc.

Investigation of cities and their transformation in the post-communist period in terms of Ukraine’s integration in the European space has become one of our most perspective directions. The separate issues are as follows:

•      researches of problem cities (depressive, old industrial) and activities regarding their stimulation; elaboration the strategic plans of cities and regions development;

•      estimation of the cities’ tourist and recreational potential, including opportunities of industrial tourism development, as well as studying the city cultural landscape and its changes caused by human activity, village tourism development, estimation of the territories’ tourist and recreational potential, usage the nature reserve fund in tourism;

•      cross-border areas research, characteristics of socio-economic, demographic, cultural development, migration processes in the border areas.

Our department participated in the development Kharkiv Development Strategy-2020, especially in such directions: population and region’s settlement system, educational system and healthcare, social infrastructure and population social security, cross-border cooperation, agriculture and agro-industrial complex, tourist attractiveness of a territory.

We have worked out a list of original methods:

   • spatial analysis – construction the surface of interaction and spatial impact of the socio-geographical objects (settlements of different ranks, separate elements of the social and industrial infrastructure, etc).

   • analysis the status, dynamic and development monitoring of the socio-geographical objects (modeling of trajectory development, identification the level and pace development, deviations from the optimal trajectory, progressive and regressive development phases, correction of the managed decisions;

  •  multidimensial classification of socio-geographical system on different system development indicators (estimation the systems evolution potential, specialization of systems, specificity of development).

The indicated methods were tested by our researchers, PhD students and doctoral students in the researches of region’s social and demographical development, investment attractiveness and territory competitiveness, cross-border cooperation, depressive and old industrial regions development, agriculture and ecologically balanced husbandry, tourist and recreational potential, transport system, educational system, healthcare, religion and cultural sphere, geoecological situation, GIS infrastructure, etc.

If some of the listed research topics or activities are similar to yours we are glad to cooperate with you.  

The web-site of the department:

 http://soc-econom-region.univer.kharkov.ua/index.php?lang=en

Sincerely, Ludmila Niemets,

Head of the Department of Human Geography and Regional Studies,

School of Geology, Geography, Recreation and Tourism,

V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, Ukraine

Tel.: +38 (057) 707-52-74

E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Dear members of RSAI,

Taking into account that nominations for Councilor to be elected at-large shall be made by the Council after solicitation of suggestions from the members of the Association we inform that the proposals for councilor-at-large can be send to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. before the 14th of September 2016. Suggestions shall include a CV and a photo.

The election of one councilor-at-large for the period 2017-2019 will be done electronically by RSAI members along September 2016.

Best regards,

Tomaz Ponce Dentinho

Executive Director

“Women in Regional Science"

(but more generally across social sciences)

• Gender – and more general Equality and Diversity (E&D) issues – recently resurfaced in an open debate across different social science disciplines. This stemmed from the observation of the strongly biased composition of academic community bodies of various types (e.g. key-note speakers, conference panels, editorial boards, summer school, policy research groups, etc.). A strong gender (and race) bias has been observed by groups of female academics spanning across regional science, economic geography, innovation studies, international business, and economics. It has been suggested that the gender bias has increased since the latest financial crisis, which has exacerbated competition in labour markets.
• In the Regional Science scientific community of the 1980s similar discussions were carried out and efforts were made to make the discipline more inclusive, for example by recruiting women into roles of responsibility within the community.  
• It is acknowledged that, since then, the gender ratio has changed substantially. Evidence of such change was acknowledged, e.g. Regional Science Newsletter, October 2009:

http://www.regionalscience.org/images/PDF/October_2009_newsletter.pdf

see, in particular, the article by Brigitte Waldorf  “Women in Regional Science: A success story”.

• It is realized, however, that the default choice in Regional Science, as in other disciplinary fields, is still highly ‘white male-dominated’. It is believed that this is not a success story for the community as a whole, and it will be a serious mistake to dismiss it as sorted while heading into the 2020's.   
• In the latest decades a lot of debate has been around the lack of representation of women in science, with a presumption that gender imbalance is a phenomenon affecting mainly STEM. However, this is also true in social sciences and related policy debates, although possibly in different ways from STEM (e.g. not so much lack of participation of women in social science, but lack of representation in the more “visible” areas of the academic and policy debate).
• The perception is one of women’s “tolerance”, more than real inclusion.  In fact, women are even very much appreciated as their presence makes it harder to point fingers against “old-boys-networks”. Women are also often sought because they are more willing to accept time-consuming tasks, like organizing conference.  But, in general, they rarely are involved in decision making processes: e.g. selection of key-note speakers, gender-ratio in the number of person-years as editors.
• The problem is complex and has a ‘cumulative causation’ nature. It has been noted, for instance, that women participation in policy ‘impact’ of research is negligible across domains (e.g. S&TI policies, industrial policies, regional policies). Impact is now in several academic systems (e.g. UK) one of the area of ‘metrics’ used to assess academic performance. More generally, it is also recognised that other metrics such as citations or teaching evaluations strongly penalise women, affecting their overall career progression and public profile. See for e.g. (among hundreds of others):

https://www.hastac.org/blogs/superadmin/2015/01/26/gender-bias-academe-annotated-bibliography-important-recent-studies

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/inside_higher_ed/2016/01/student_evaluations_show_bias_against_female_instructors.html

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/04/19/how-to-get-tenure-if-youre-a-woman-academia-stephen-walt/

• Women are easily dismissed as “endless complaining”: this distorted attitude makes female social scientists feel often like censoring their own writing and apologize for speaking up. This does not encourage serious evaluation and representation of the problem, particularly in social sciences.
• Also, and most importantly, many academic women in senior positions are already the first to be called upon for service work within their own academic institutions. Many academic women at advanced stages of career have and are increasingly called in decision making roles on the basis of gender ‘quotas’. It is not an imposition but women often have no choice, internal regulations on E&D fix quotas for female in management within universities. There is then a problem with overload, as women are still much fewer at present among the high levels of career because of the long-term glass ceiling, so this ends up by creating an impossible triad: more internal admin, more external engagement in the community, same skewed balance of tasks in professional and private life (particularly for women with young children).
• There is a clear mismatch between the demand for women colleagues and the stock of women colleagues (especially at the senior level of career). This has led to an informal perception of ‘she is there because she is a woman’, in most cases very explicitly communicated. The latter is a severe form of discrimination; women are acknowledged on the basis of their gender, rather than for their capabilities and qualities.
• A few decades of awareness is plenty of time to move women completely through the pipeline from students to settled academics. Looking around and not seeing those women, should be regarded as a failure and an urgent and pressing need to adjust the approach.
• Blatant discriminatory behaviour is enduring on this topic. Behavioural change (including support to women self-confidence and fight against unconscious bias) and transformation in informal attitudes and collective perceptions are really difficult tasks: in comparison, putting the demand for equality on the agenda and making it part of the discourse using simply metrics and quotas is, indeed, very easy. Thus, as said also above, many respectable universities in the US and Europe are now obliged to have a female representation of at least 30% on ANY Committee, and ANY kind of procedure involving HR, such as recruitment, promotion, reward, etc. has to adhere to strict formal E&D rules. There are, however, other (typically male) mechanisms, such as lobbying and bargaining, that are hidden, informal and highly (unconsciously or consciously) biased.  
• There is the firm belief that raising awareness is a first step in introducing changes. Reacting to specific unbalanced situations – as it is increasingly done but groups of female academics in Regional Science and other fields) is a first step, but there is still a large proportion of the academic world that believes that there is no such thing as discrimination in academia in general and in our field in particular.
  • An emblematic example of dismissal of problem that then led to some reaction is the following in Nature with respect to the STEM sciences:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v488/n7413/full/488590a.html

As a result of the turmoil that that article generated, Nature (who first denied any discrimination) actually revised substantially the policies to commission articles, assign editors, and the numbers today (4 years later) are much more balanced.

• Similar links with reference to all fields of science:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/03/08/gender-bias-in-academe-an-annotated-bibliography/

• What is also needed is for academic men to step forward and champion gender equality for the health of the Regional Science discipline, and for other interrelated fields. Increasing inter- and multi-disciplinarity can help liaise with other communities and strengthen actions. Asking only women to take the lead makes this a "women's problem" as opposed to a social science and societal challenge: thus, a real effort at equality might be assigning some of this work to male academics. It has been noted that the help of senior men in start making gender equality a priority, raises the chances to address effectively this huge issue, that necessarily require a steady and long-term concerted effort.

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2016 BARCELONA WORKSHOP ON REGIONAL AND URBAN ECONOMICS

 Innovation, networks and the geography of knowledge diffusion

Barcelona, October 27^th-28^th 2016

Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Barcelona

Dear Colleagues,

AQR-IREA is pleased to announce the 2016 Barcelona Workshop on Regional and Urban Economics, to be held in Barcelona on October 27^th-28^th, 2016.

The workshop will be focused on innovation and the spatial diffusion of knowledge with emphasis in collaboration networks. Its aim is to bring together researchers in urban and regional economics who are working in topics where the broad concept of the geography of innovation plays a fundamental role. Particular attention will be paid to papers dealing with the mechanisms and actors of knowledge diffusion (knowledge spillovers, networks, technological collaboration, and knowledge relatedness). Although the Workshop will focus on empirical papers, theoretical studies are also welcome.

The keynotes speakers will be:

• Maryann Feldman (Department of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina)
•   Karen Maguire (Regional Innovation Unit of the OECD Regional Development Policy Division)

Audience:We will accommodate around 8-10 papers, to be presented in plenary sessions that will complement the keynote speakers’ presentation.

Important dates:

• Deadline for papers submission: September 9^th 2016 (Papers should be sent in pdf format to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Extended abstracts or incomplete drafts will also be considered, but full papers will be favoured)
• Notification of acceptance: September 16^th 2016
• Preliminary programme: September 30^th 2016
• Final programme: October 15^th 2016

For further information, please visit the workshop website www.ub.edu/aqr/workshop/2016, see the attached file or contact to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Please, feel free to distribute this announcement. Excuse us for “cross-posting”.

We look forward for your participation at the Workshop!

AQR-IREA Research Group

University of Barcelona

http://www.ub.edu/aqr/

Remember the Madrid days: 31 May-2 June 2017! (International NECTAR Conference)

See below the NECTAR newsletter!