Email: [email protected]

Room: 1.041 Arthur Lewis Building

I arrived at the University of Manchester in September 2010 to undertake doctoral research and began teaching in 2015 as Lecturer in Human Geography. In September 2018 I became Simon Research Fellow, starting a three-year project on green infrastructure and environmental restoration. This built on my PhD research which examined the role of engineers in state formation and governance in Singapore, through the roll-out of different types of water infrastructure. Previously, I completed an undergraduate degree in Sociology at the University of Sheffield, followed by an MSc degree in Environmental Politics and Policy at the University of Leeds. I became Senior Lecturer in Environmental Geography in 2023.

I have published in a range of high-ranking academic journals including Progress in Human Geography, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Mobilities, Technological Forecasting and Social Change and Environmental Politics. I am an active member of both the Cities, Politics, Economies and Society and Environment research groups, and have convened undergraduate and postgraduate modules on environmental policy and governance, and environmental geography.

Drawing on environmental, political and urban geography, my research explores how urban ecological management, planning and design impacts on social and political life. I am interested in the social, economic and political impacts of environmental technology and infrastructure, particularly in the urban context, and how they mediate and configure the boundary between the public and private, state and citizen. Past research projects have focused on the politics and governance of water and green infrastructure in Singapore and England. My general research interests include the following:

• Green and blue infrastructure
• States, territory and government
• Public life, ecology and the city
• Urban planning and design
• Material politics of infrastructure
• Socio-technical systems and transitions
• Governmentality, biopolitics and citizenship
• Critical theory and science and technology studies

Research projects:

Governing green infrastructure

This project investigated how the roll-out of green infrastructure (GI) has transformed urban governance in Manchester, England. While the technical aspects of GI have been widely addressed, the governance arrangements of GI implementation requires further research. The main aim of the research was to elucidate how GI is changing the nature of environmental governance, as a design best practice is incorporated into government policy. After a decade of GI implementation in England, the way that urban nature is perceived, represented and managed has dramatically changed.

Funding: Simon Research Fellowship

Engaging urban waterways

With colleagues from human and physical geography, I have considered how water de-culverting can potentially facilitate community engagement through a process of ‘participatory daylighting’. As knowledge of the negative consequences of culverting has grown in recent years, concealed waterways have started to be uncovered once again in a process known as daylighting. The supposed benefits of these schemes are multiple and are therefore attracting growing levels of academic attention, yet there has been minimal research conducted on the civic potential of these initiatives.

Funding: SEED Strategic Funds

Government of water, circulation and the city

This PhD project was based on a historical geographical study of water management and infrastructure in Singapore, from 1819 to 2014. It examined how the nation-state was consolidated and subsequently restructured through the infrastructural components of the water supply system, enabling alternative institutional arrangements and styles of government. Focusing on the role of hydraulic engineers, this project demonstrated that nation-building can be conceived literally as a physical process of manufacture, where mundane water technologies have been integral to state formation, restructuring and territorialisation. Publications from this project have demonstrated how canal restoration materials and techniques facilitated a neoliberal form of government oriented towards lifestyle-based active citizenship (International Journal of Urban and Regional Research), and how reverse osmosis membranes in desalination plants have acted as technological ‘switches’ to new state forms (Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers). Through this research, I have sought to develop new theoretical insights on the hydraulic state; underline the importance of power to sustainability transitions; and reorient governmentality around Michel Foucault’s original concern with infrastructure, engineering and the ‘urban problem’. 

Funding: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) [Grant number ES/1903437/1]

I see the following as areas of research and teaching expertise: political ecology and environmental governance; political geography and the state; socio-spatial and critical theory; infrastructure and material politics; and qualitative methodologies. 

Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society

Member of the American Association of Geographers

2010 - 2015    PhD in Human Geography, University of Manchester 

2008 - 2009    MSc Environmental Politics and Policy, University of Leeds (Distinction)

2005 – 2008    BA Sociology, University of Sheffield (First Class)

Course convenor:

GEOG21242 Nature, Society and Social Power

GEOG70481 Metabolic Manchester

GEOG70952 Political Ecologies

GEOG70472 Doing Environmental Research

Lecturer/supervisor:

GEOG10192 Key Concepts in Geography 

GEOG20072 Research Design and Fieldwork

GEOG30000 Dissertation

GEOG70912 Issues in Environmental Policy 

GEOG70930 Environmental Governance Dissertation