I am a Political Geographer interested in conceptualising and understanding political change, aesthetics, and environmental knowledge politics. My research is driven by the need to understand the depoliticisation of marginalised voices and perspectives, and how knowledge about the environment is produced, contested, and mobilised in response to the global climate and ecological crises.

I joined the Department of Geography in 2018, following a BA in Geography, an MSc in Geographical Science and a PhD in Human Geography at The University of Manchester. 

I am also the SEED Associate Director for Teaching Assistants.

My research considers three often interrelated themes:

1. Environmental Knowledge Politics

My work seeks to understand the environmental knowledge politics around realising post-carbon and ecologically sounder futures. My research examines the content, form, and exclusions of environmental knowledge, and the social, cultural, and political processes that shape whose voices are ‘heard’. Exploring the politics around overlooked voices and alternative perspectives is vital given the escalating climate crisis and the broader socio-ecological challenges facing the planet.

I am particularly interested in the politics of urban carbon accountability, the role of experts and expertise in shaping political change, and how they can work for or against more diverse, inclusive and egalitarian forms of knowledge production. 

2. Conceptualising and Understanding Political Change

My research is theoretically driven by a desire to understand how political change can be realised and prevented, with a focus on the role that different practices, cultures, and subjects play in shaping these dynamics. My work explores how we might widen the aperture for political change in the context of various depoliticising forces.

To this end, I contribute towards the sub-disciplinary field of post-foundational political geography, which is concerned with the contingency and contestability of spatial and temporal orderings. I have worked to consider and conceptualise how depoliticisations, repoliticisations and politicisations occur on the ground, and how we can better integrate post-foundationalism’s conceptual interventions into political geographic research.

3. Aesthetics, Politics and Space

This strand of my research explores aesthetics, understood as relating to sense-making rather than narrowly as beauty, and its relations with politics and space. I am particularly interested in how ‘common sense’ understandings of the world shape socio-spatial power configurations and inequalities, and how political change reconfigures these sensory and spatial orders.

Specifically, my work seeks to develop the aesthetic and political thought of Jacques Rancière (1999), applying his aesthetic thought to key geographical concerns, such as scale and politics. This research contributes an aesthetic understanding of how social and political orders are constructed, contested, and reimagined. More recently, my work has also stressed aesthetics as a productive lens through which to critically and reflexively engage with the continuing significance of ‘the city’ in urban theory, as demonstrated in my co-edited volume Aesthetics and the City (Routledge).

A short animation about Aesthetics and the City can be viewed here.

I contribute to teaching across the undergraduate and postgraduate programme within the Department of Geography. I teach around my core research agenda on environmental knowledge politics in my MSc course GEOG70492 Climate Change Knowledge Politics.

My wider teaching focuses on climate change, the Anthropocene more generally, environmental governance, political geography, and discourse analysis. I also oversee the Department's second year field-course offering and lead the Amsterdam field trip.

I have also contributed to student-facing texts such as Introducing Human Geographies (4th edition) and the Concise Encyclopedia of Human Geography.

Current PhD Students:

• Niamh Nelson-Owens - Agonising about vegan encounters: Exploring the role of vegan activism in the pursuit of (net)zero carbon (supervised with Aurora Fredriksen).
  
• Joseph Lane - Performativity, colonialism, and AI agronomy: Exploring the socio-ecological effects of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ chatbots in Kenyan smallholder farming (supervised with Sam Hind)
• Hannah Gardiner - NGOs in the Brazilian Amazon: Shaping public perceptions of the rainforest through Indigenous knowledges (supervised with Noel Castree and Polyanna Da Conceicao Bispo)
• Fehmican Şimşek - Wind Energy and Rural Change in Turkey: Land, Livelihoods, and Community Dynamics under Neoliberalism (supervised with Saska Petrova)

Previous PhD Students:

• Dr Patricio Cleary - A Million Hectares More: Agro-capitalism's solution to climate change in Chile (supervised with Erik Swyngedouw and Noel Castree).

I maintain a strong commitment to producing socially-relevant and impactful research. I am a member of The Manchester Zero Carbon Advisory Group, working to ensure that Manchester's carbon reduction commitments are in line with the Paris Agreement and that the city has in place a mechanism for monitoring its progress.

Alongside colleagues in the aviation sub-group, I have worked to establish and provide reporting for aviation emissions at a city-level and lead the sub-group on consumption-based / indirect emissions. I also led a project on the need to decarbonise consumption in the economic recovery from COVID-19 lockdowns.

My work has also featured on City Metric (New Statestman), The Conversation, Policy@Manchester and Die Welt amongst other places.

I draw upon (auto)ethnography, scholar activism, interviews, workshops, and discourse analysis in my work. Whilst I am primarily a qualitative Human Geographer, I often draw upon skills around carbon accounting that I have developed through my auto-ethnographic work with accountants.

In my research, I have worked with both policymakers, wider policy communities, businesses, activists, charities and governance groups.