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Dr Jessica Jacobs, PhD FHEA

Jessica

Research Fellow

Email: j.jacobs@qmul.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7882 2777
Room Number: Geography Building, Room 103
Website: https://www.filmgeographies.com
Twitter: @@tojessicajacobs
Office Hours: Tuesdays 1-2pm

Profile

My work focuses on heritage and tourism in the Middle East. I am particularly interested in how heritage is visualized, remembered and enacted through the production of tourist space. My research methods and outputs use filmmaking, creative mapping and other community focused strategies that aim to engage a wider audience within the scope of academic research and knowledge production.

I am the founder of Film Geographies, an online forum for fillms and filmmaking as a form of academic practice and knowledge production. We organise two annual calls for films AAG Shorts and RGS-IBG Shorts, to promote films by geographers and films about geography. Founded in 2016 we now have over 150 films online.

Research Projects

Storytelling for All : Skillshare Bedouin Women and Men through Film and Craft Impact and Engagement AHRC £98,000 PI  2023/25

Following on from the Newton award winning work carried out in Jordan for OPOF, Storytelling for All (SFA) will enhance the value of Bedouin tangible and intangible cultural heritage in South Sinai, Egypt, through the production of a handcrafted community map wallhanging. This follow-on project will develop and expand the handcrafting and storytelling methods to deliver a series of workshops for Bedouin communities in the South Sinai, Egypt. These workshops will incorporate a new filmmaking element helping to increase the focus on storytelling, overcome barriers to representation and inclusion, and increase impact through dissemination. Bespoke training in filmmaking will allow participants to determine themselves how they represent their work and will highlight and make visible the huge amount of undervalued knowledge and creativity held by Bedouin communities. 

Working with the same team of UK artists from OPOF, alongside Egyptian local partners Megawra, Metafilmes and residents of south Sinai, the project will deliver a series of skillshare based heritage focused workshops for women that will also include filmmaking training. By increasing the sense of ownership over the means of production and the means of representation of the production the project highlights the value of intangible cultural heritage as a means of female intergenerational knowledge transfer and production. The workshops will also deliver a high level of valuable and transferable skills training through a skill-share model with participants acting as both students and trainers. Combining filmmaking with crafting to tell heritage stories that will be screened, exhibited and shared online will allow the local community to reach a wider international audience beyond direct tourist visitors to the region.


'Our Past, Our Future, All Together in Faynan’ AHRC 2019-21 Newton Prize Award Winner 2020
Faynan is an impoverished region of southern Jordan that is mostly populated by members of four different Bedouin tribes. It has a remarkable landscape of archaeology that has received more than 40 years of research, principally by UK, US and German research teams. The Department of Antiquities, supported by the AHRC has begun to develop a local museum with the joint aims of developing eco-tourism to generate income into the local community for sustainable development, and build community engagement with the museum for social cohesiveness and well-being. This project will build community engagement with the Faynan Museum and facilities for eco-tourism to support social cohesiveness, individual well-being and sustainable economic development in Faynan. The two year project is structured into six different sub-projects. I am mainly running the sub-project  ‘Local Voices’ with a Jordanian partner Dr Fatima Al-Nammari. I will be working with a team of artists who will be running a series of workshops with members of the tribal communities in Faynan. We will be devising, designing and manufacturing ‘community history/story maps’ using wool felt, and other local materials. These maps will be displayed in the museum alongside video and other material gathered during the research period.


A Different Sense of Space: How Bedouins mapped the Sinai  British Academy Leverhulme 2014-2017
While there have been Bedouin tribes living in the Sinai peninsula since the Islamic conquest of Egypt in the 7th century (mostly between 13th and 17th centuries) it is often assumed that because Bedouin culture relies on oral transmission of its history, there are no written documents relating specifically to this long and rich history, other than traveller accounts. Now online, this project set out to map an important an under-researched series of documents housed in St. Katherine’s monastery in order to build up a historical geography of the Bedouin in the South Sinai and explore the impact of Bedouin spatial imaginations on boundary development in the South Sinai.

 

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