Sustainable Futures in Africa is an interdisciplinary collective aiming to build understanding, research, and practice in socio-ecological sustainability in Africa. In order for relationships to be built, methodologies to be explored, and to achieve the shared understanding that is aspired for, the SFA network is running trial research projects. These are being run with an emphasis on the trial and error aspect, for researchers to explore the unfamiliar, social scientists exploring hard science and vice versa.

Furthermore colleagues in Glasgow will take every opportunity to work with the projects in Nigeria, Malawi, Uganda and Botswana as they develop.

Malawi Research Project: Creative Geovisualisation

This research trial took place from 24th – 26th May 2017 through a collaborative partnership including:

• Philip Nicholson, University of Glasgow
• Professor Deborah Dixon, University of Glasgow
• Dr. Deepa Pullanikkatil, Abundance 
• Dr. Boyson H Z Moyo, Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources
• Dr. Hazel Long, University of Glasgow
• Dr. Brian Barrett, University of Glasgow

Dr. Deepa Pullanikkatil departed from South Africa and Dr. Boyson H Z Moyo from Malawi for Glasgow on the 22^nd May, arriving 23^rd May. The research team was based in the University of Glasgow for the 24^th, 25^th and 26^th May.

At the end of May, Philip Nicholson, Deborah Dixon, Brian Barrett, and Hazel Long were joined at the University of Glasgow by Glasgow PhD alumni Boyson Moyo from Malawi, and Deepa Pullanikkatil from South Africa. From the 24th to the 26th of May they spent time collaborating, sharing research, and discussing methodologies, working on a creative geovisualisation project on the theme of environmental sustainability in Malawi.

For the project they focused on two sites in Malawi, the Tikondwe Freedom Gardens, an organic farm, and the Likengala River. In preparation for the meeting, participants collected and shared various kinds of data sets for those sites relevant to their own expertise. As a result, the first day involved discussions around the nature of the data, i.e. how it was acquired, what methods were used to capture it, why was it captured, who owns it, and so on. The following two days were focused on a collaborative effort to bring these different types of data together into a narrative structure using the storymap format as model.

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