Dr Judith Tsouvalis

Senior Research Associate

Research Interests

I am a geographer and science and technologies studies (STS) scholar concerned with the changing interrelations between science, technology, people and the natural world and their role in making/remaking the world. To grasp how the material, physical, and biological are intertwined with the socio-cultural and political I use what have become known as ‘more-than-human’ modes of enquiry which are informed by concepts and approaches from STS, multispecies geographies, anthropology, process philosophy and new materialism.

My empirical work to date has focused on:

  • Reimagining and remaking public participation and democracy from a relational, constructivist STS perspective;
  • policy co-design in the UK (England’s post-Brexit Environmental Land Management (ELM) approach);
  • how digital technology figures in achieving participatory democracy and how it can impact harder-to-reach stakeholders (ELM co-design);
  • the role of power relations, competing epistemologies, and political legitimacy in environmental governance (industrial forestry, precision farming, plant biosecurity; ash dieback);
  • science and expertise and their role in depoliticizing environmental issues (catchment management; plant biosecurity);
  • the inclusion of more-than-humans in environmental politics and practice;
  • the driving forces and transformative effects of large-scale systems transformations (forestry and farming).

My research is characterized by a sustained engagement with a broad range of intellectual resources from STS, philosophy, geography, anthropology, political ecology and design theory, and a commitment to experimental, collaborative, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and inclusive research practices.

In 2011, I received a Lancaster University Staff Price for ‘Making complicated research or topics accessible and exciting to the general public, young people and non-specialists’ (Loweswater Care Project, 2008-2012).

My research tends to be highly policy-relevant and often involves close collaborations with Government civil servants and policymakers. I have sat on two UK Government Expert Panels:

  • Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs/Natural England’s joint expert panel on social science evidence for improving agri-environment outcomes (co-design of England’s post-Brexit agri-environmental policy (2018-2022) and
  • Environment Agency’s “Science Task Group for the Bassenthwaite and Windermere Restoration Program” (2008-2010)

I am a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Design and Policy Network and the Ecosystems Knowledge Network.

Academic profile

In April 2023, I joined the University of Lancaster’s School of Computing and Communications to work as a Senior Research Associate on the EPSRC-funded project Equity for the Older – Beyond Digital Access. A key concern of this project is to ensure that older adults are regarded as key stakeholders in decision-making processes about the digital economy and fully included in the co-production of digital futures. Previous research I conducted as a Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield (2018-2022; ESRC-funded project Agri-Environmental Governance Post-Brexit – Co-Production of Policy Frameworks) is highly relevant here as it entailed looking at the role played by digital technology and the ‘digital divide’ in participatory democracy. Recommendations based on our findings there resulted in the Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra) investing in the provision of digital assistance and training on digital tools to end-users (chiefly farmers) to enable them to fully participate in the co-design of England’s post-Brexit Environmental Land Management (ELM) approach.

Between 2012-2018, I was a Research Fellow on the Leverhulme Trust-funded Making Science Public Program (University of Nottingham), where I contributed to the projects Models of Managing Science/Politics Boundaries in the Advisory System (plant biosecurity/ash dieback) and The Public Good of Global Food Security Research. The latter awoke my interest in the notion of ‘the public good’ and the idea of ‘environmental public goods’, both central to post-Brexit agri-environmental policy thinking in England. Between 2008-2012, I worked as a Research Associate for Lancaster University’s Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC), where I contributed to the development of a new, more-than-human, participatory approach to catchment management in the Lake District. This approach was informed by ideas of the late STS scholar Bruno Latour and the feminist philosopher and physicist Karen Barad and the project was funded under the Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) program (Loweswater Care Project).

I have also held a three-year lectureship in Human Geography at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, where I had obtained my D.Phil. under the supervision of Prof. David Harvey, Prof. Erik Swyngedouw, and Prof. Michael Williams. My first class B.Sc. (Hons.) degree in Geography is from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), University of London.

  • Critical Geographies