ABOUT US
Initiated in 2021, the Fi Wi Road Internship began as a collaborative project to provide a collective of Black-heritage Geography and Geoscience undergraduate students across the UK with a space to develop a new idea of what Geography could look like. Initially funded through Antipode’s ‘Right to the Discipline’ grant, the project has grown in the years since into an independent annual Summer internship that continues to provide our interns with one-to-one mentoring, skills workshops, and hands-on research experience, culminating in our annual Fi Wi Road Fair.
The internship continues to support Black students across the UK in building networks, voice and experience, encouraging them to stay within a discipline in which Black geographers are consistently under-represented, and often brutally marginalised and squeezed out.
WHY ‘FI WI ROAD’?
The phrase ‘Fi Wi Road’ comes from Jamaican poet Kei Miller (2014), in a collection of poems that contend with cartography’s connection to colonial violence and consider Jamaican people’s own modes of place-making.
Within a similar mood of working towards the joyful freeing of our own futures, the Fi Wi Road Internship centres Black geography undergraduate voices and their own modes of making place and space, valuing the joy and creativity (and voicing the pain and isolation), through which they are making their own futures.
OUR TEAM
DIRECTOR / PROGRAMME LEAD
PROF. PAT NOXOLO (SHE/HER)
Pat is Professor of Human Geography and Chair in Postcolonial Geographies at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research centres around cultural and postcolonial geographies, particularly thinking about creative practices in the Caribbean and its diaspora. Pat currently co-leads on a project to develop the Stuart Hall Archive in collaboration with the University of Birmingham and the Stuart Hall Foundation.
CYNTHIA NKIRUKA ANYADI (SHE/HER)
DIRECTOR / PROGRAMME LEAD
Cynthia is completing a PhD in the Centre for the Geohumanities at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research analysed Igbo Nigerian traditional spiritualities and contemporary material burial culture through the use of domestic memorial souvenirs. Cynthia also currently works for AfroPolitan Berlin.
IMPACT & OUTREACH LEAD
KAILA DESAI (SHE/HER)
Kaila is a PhD researcher in Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham. Her current research explores the predictability of the Benguela Current, with broader interests in ocean-climate systems, environmental justice, and indigenous environmental knowledge. Kaila was part of the Fi Wi Road 2025 Cohort.
We commit to paying all of our interns above a London Living Wage, regardless of their location, to ensure that participation is accessible to people from all backgrounds. We rely on generous support and donations to continue running the internship. If you or your organisation are interested in further supporting the Fi Wi Road Internship you can contact us here.