Profile

Research overview

I combine 15 years’ experience of working with NGOs with an academic approach informed by Science and Technology Studies and the idea of public sociology. My interests are interdisciplinary and impact-oriented, building on my experience beyond academia in influencing environmental, planning, transport and economic policy.

I am interested in the relationships between society and environment, and in particular:

• how we make public decisions about environmental change
• how public participation in decision-making is facilitated or excluded
• experiments in democracy and innovative governance practices that seek new ways of engaging publics in decision-making
• different ways of generating and representing knowledge about environment, and what happens at the interfaces of these knowledges
• how different forms of knowing and valuing are included or excluded, legitimised or silenced by decision-making processes

These interest have been shaped by my earlier career. I previously worked as an independent environment & planning consultant and as a Senior Policy and Campaigns Officer for CPRE, the countryside charity. I chaired North West Environment Link, an alliance of the major environmental NGOs in North West England, and have been a member of various innovative governance structures, e.g. the North West Regional Assembly and the Lancaster Local Strategic Partnership.

Research projects and funding

• Senior Research Associate: Eden Project North. Developing and delivering multidisciplinary projects in partnership with the Eden Project
• Senior Research Associate: CarbonFreePorts - Freeports as opportunities, not threats, for place-based decarbonisation of transport

Previous research projects

• ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow: Experiments in democracy - Knowing, caring and acting in neighbourhood planning and beyond
• Senior Research Associate: Supporting local officers and politicians in three UK cities to implement rapid climate action, 2020
• Senior Research Associate: Impacts of Neighbourhood Planning in England, 2019-2020
• Research Associate: Exploring opportunities for circular nutrient economies in grassland farming systems, 2019-20
• ESRC-funded PhD: Knowing and caring: performing legitimacy in Neighbourhood Planning, 2014-2019

Teaching

I convened the MA in Environment, Culture and Society in the Department of Sociology in 2019-2020, teaching the two core modules: Theories and Debates in Environment and Culture - Welcome to the Anthropocene; and Methods in Science and Technology Studies.