Professor Phil Jones MA PhD

• PhD University of Birmingham, 2003
• MA University of Leicester, 1999
• MA University of St Andrews, 1998

Phil grew up on the Wirral before moving to St Andrews in 1994 to undertake an MA in Modern History.  An MA in Urban History from the University of Leicester followed in 1999.  He started his PhD in Geography at Birmingham in 2000 and has lived in the city ever since.  He has worked for the University of Birmingham since 2003 and has served in a number of different roles including leader for the Human Geography Research Theme and REF lead for Unit of Assessment 14.  He is now the GEES Head of Education and Research Development.

BA / BSc Geography

Dr Jones teaches around cities, culture, embodiment and architecture. He gets consistently high feedback scores from student evaluations and has a commitment to excellence and innovation in the delivery of teaching. 

Phil runs a 'Playful Methods' Lab bringing together the activity of his PhD students, visiting fellows and postdoctoral researchers. He is keen to supervise students with an interest in qualitative methods exploring topics such as: embodiment (particularly around walking and cycling); urban development and regeneration; cultural and arts activity.

Professor Jones welcomes formal and informal enquiries from prospective doctoral researchers in his areas of interest.

Phil is a cultural geographer whose work focuses on developing novel qualitative methods.  He runs the Playful Methods Lab and has developed techniques drawing upon virtual and augmented reality, videogames, qualitative GIS, wearables, biosensing, eyetracking, touchtables, smartphone apps, video and action research.  Much of his work is empirically embedded within cities and covers topics around embodiment (especially walking and cycling), art, creativity and urban regeneration.