Tough Girl Podcast

EmmaLucy Cole is a UK-based speaker, writer, explorer and researcher. She is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Associate Fellow of Higher Education Academy as a lecturer and co-director of the Vicarious Festival of Travel Storytelling. EmmaLucy is currently studying towards a PhD at the University of Bristol, researching how travel writers represent Arabic and Middle Eastern (SWANA) cultures.   After over two decades spent studying and representing North African and Middle Eastern cultures, in 2011 EmmaLucy decided to sell everything she owned in order to spend six weeks with a Bedouin tribe in Sinai, learning Arabic and researching local culture. Two years later she finally left, not only having gained a ginger Bedouin cat (called Bryan) and a myriad of stories, but also witnessing first-hand some of the ways in which marginalised groups can be misrepresented.   With this habit of visiting places and forgetting to leave, she has developed the concept of Downward Exploration: rather than travelling