Undergraduate fieldcourses to destinations in the global South have received much critical scholarly and pedagogic attention. This article reflects on a third‐year Geography fieldcourse to Kenya, which aimed to collaborate with local partners in providing an immersive and co‐constitutive learning environment that transcended the politics of knowledge production defining the global South as a distanciated object of study. We shape our reflections on this fieldcourse through a conceptualisation of responsibility as a relational, inter‐subjective achievement borne out of negotiation and encounter. Focusing in particular on the trade‐offs that are required when taking into account different staff, students and partner organisations' positionalities, expectations and experiences, we argue that scholarship concerning the responsibilities of geographers' engagements with the global South needs to account for the emotional, embodied and affective challenges inherent in practising collaborative academic endeavour.

Anyone, of any gender, at any age, can leak urine or faeces. What would you do if it happened to you? Imagine if you’d woken up this morning and you’d wet the bed. What would you do? Have a wash, put on clean clothes, change the bedding and put it in a washing machine? You may go to the shop and buy an incontinence pad. And perhaps if you knew that there was help available for leaking urine you’d make an appointment to see a doctor next week and then just carry on with the rest of your day, dignity intact. Now imagine if you’d woken up this morning and you’d wet the bed. But to have a wash, or clean your clothes and bedding, you’d have to walk for an hour to collect water. Imagine you are frightened to walk there alone, the path is steep and you struggle to use the hand pump. Even if you did get water, you don’t have enough soap so the smells would linger anyway. And after all that effort, you have nothing to wear to soak up urine if it happens again. What if you didn’t know that leaking urine was common, and you spent the rest of the day worried about your health and too embarrassed to go to work in case people could tell? What if you were worried that your partner would hit you again for making a mess so you had very little to drink all day for fear of it happening again? What can you do to support people living with incontinence? To start, we need to talk about leaks.

Institutional inclusivity and diversity have been an increasing focus of debate within the academy. For the discipline of geography and universities more broadly to become fully inclusive, greater attention is warranted within these debates on the intersection of race and disability. An existing lack of discussion on relations between race and disability in the academy draws attention to the invisibility of disabled academics of black and minority ethnic backgrounds. Drawing on examples of spaces of (mis)recognition and of indifference inside and outside the space of the British academy, this paper calls for greater attentiveness in geography and beyond to the socio‐cultural and spatial issues faced by ethnic minority disabled members of the university community that are otherwise hidden. A focus on these hidden issues in research agendas, institutional practices, and the academy more broadly is warranted to enable the university to strive towards greater inclusivity.

Meeting the needs of an ageing population, particularly in the global South, is increasingly an issue for WASH service provision. An ageing-related issue for women, warranting specific attention from the WASH sector, is the perimenopause, but this is often not discussed publicly. Drawing on data from the UK and Ghana, this paper provides recommendations for meeting the additional WASH needs of women as they experience the perimenopause (the transition period to menopause). Finding these ‘hidden’ needs involved a UK-based phenomenological review and mixed feminist methods in two low-income urban communities in Accra and Kumasi, Ghana. The hidden WASH needs of perimenopausal women included understanding the perimenopause, menstrual hygiene management, urine incontinence management, bathing, and laundry. Community awareness, engagement and empowerment, and ensuring good perimenopausal health can begin to address these needs. Infrastructural measures for perimenopausal women include a continuous water supply, user-friendly bathing and laundry infrastructure, and gender-sensitive, accessible toilets with discrete sanitary disposal bins. High-absorbency sanitary products are important for managing heavy menstruation. A better understanding of the needs of perimenopausal women and training on how to meet these would benefit the WASH sector in ensuring that perimenopausal women are not left behind in efforts to meet the Sustainable Development Goals.

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