Academic interests
I am an interdisciplinary researcher with a broad training in the humanities and social sciences. Focusing on food and agriculture, I use geographical, anthropological, STS, sociological, and philosophical methods to understand how humans and nature are connected through agricultural landscapes. I am particularly interested in the way complex ecosystems get known through different scientific and cultural representations. I work closely with those in the natural sciences to understand the ways in which science, technology, society, and dynamics of environmental change are entangled in an age of socio-ecological crisis.
Normative theories of territory: dynamism and socio-ecological crisis
I am currently a post-doctoral researcher on the Dynamic Territory: A Normative Framework for Territory in the Post-Holocene where I am exploringthe way in which the food system complicates traditional territorial approaches to social and environmental governance. I am working to generate political and philosophical frameworks to better account for its spatial complexities.
As part of this project, I am considering post-territorial forms of governance and political identity. This work is culminating in a study of post-human planetary citizenship and the politically significant attachments people form to the biophysical systems that make the planet habitable.
STS: metrics and data-intensive modelling
I use critical data-studies methods, actor-network-theory, and critical metrology tools to understand the power invested in the ability to determine which tools of quantification get used to organise environmental governance. I have publications in two leading STS journals - Social Studies of Science and Science Technology and Human Values. The first article focuses on the politics of Global Warming Potential metrics (those that allow emissions of different gases to be made commensurate with one another and governable in shared political frameworks). The second offers a critical study of Earth Systems modelling technologies and the political consequences imbued into the parameters, assumptions, and methods that compress complex socio-ecological systems into governable entities. Both pieces speak to a sustained research interest I have in the calculative tools used to make complex socio-ecological systems tractable through metrics and modelling.
Which methods and framing devices get used for the purposes of environmental governance; and what power do they have once they are put to work in political and economic contexts?
Metabolism
I am the PI on a project entitled Metabolic Sentinels. Based on an ethnography of wild swimmers swimming in polluted waters, I am working with Oscar Hartman Davies (KTH Stockholm) to explore how and why people use their bodies as sensors to understand the river health crisis in the UK.
This work is part of a broader programme of work focusing on metabolism. Across the social sciences and environmental humanities, metabolism is figuring as provocation to think about the mutual entanglement of bodies and their environments. Together with close collaborators, Jonny Turnbull (University of Durham) and Adam Searle (The University of Nottingham) we are producing papers and a collected volume, along with multiple conference panels, centred on metabolism's emergence as a tool of socio-ecological remediation.
How are bodies and environments mutually constituted through metabolic relations; and how are those connections being enrolled into the operations of biopower, accumulation, and control?
Microbes, disease, and repair
As part of this environmental geography and political ecological component of my work, I have also done research on agricultural biosecurity and pest management. Working closely with an entomologist, I produced an interdisciplinary dictionary to help broker dialogue between social scientists interested in alternative low-impact forms of land management, and agronomists developing organic ways of controlling agricultural pests. More recently, this work has resulted in an article in Nature's Sustainable Agriculture journal. The article promotes a model of what my colleagues (an interdisciplinary team of soil scientists from CIFAR and social scientists from the University of Oxford) and I termed Microbial Repair.
How are landscape-scale agro-ecosystems conditioned by the microbial communities they are made up of; and how can improved social and ecological conditions in the food and land use sectors be secured through microbial intervention?
Political ecology: environmental performativity and natural capital commodification
I am also interested in the relationship between scientific measurement, environmental protection, and natural capital commodification. Working with Theo Stanley (University of Southampton), we have explored how the legitimacy of woodland carbon offsetting schemes are upheld by accreditation officials who determine how carbon gets measured and monetised. This work built on some theoretical and review work we did on the notion of Environmental Performativity.
How do environments, thick with variation, get known through metrics and measures; and what happens as we seek out fixes for complex socio-ecological problems in market-friendly governance mechanisms?
Environmental geography: cattle, legumes, and soil
This work is building on a long-standing research interest I have in soil health and livestock agriculture (particularly ruminant grazers like cattle and sheep). Using relational materialist ontologies and more-than-human geographies, I have studied the emergence of new modes of producing food and caring for agricultural landscapes. Empirically, this work has studied the Regenerative Agricultural movement (RegenAg to its advocates), and the promises being made about the soil carbon sequestration benefits of livestock-arable integration, rotational grazing, and cover cropping. This work produced several journal articles, a policy-facing report, and two book chapters.
This agricultural work has also studied the importance - though frequent exclusion - of legumes (peas, beans, lentils) in industrialised farming systems. This neglect is a structural inheritance from legumes' exclusion from programmes of research and development and the lopsided investments made into crops like wheat, barley, soya, and corn.
What happens as the diversity and pace of agro-ecosystems are traded in for simplicity and acceleration; and how are uneven histories of agricultural research and development inscribed into farmed landscapes, today?
Collaborations and research activity
As well as a varied training in the social sciences and humanities, I also work closely with natural scientists. These dialogues help improve the insights I offer in my scholarship. They also feed back into the way my collaborators go about their work, improving the reflexivity, sensitivity, and political engagement of their methods. I collaborate with a team of agronomists in the UK, and a number of food system and climate modellers scattered across Europe and the US.
I am an enthusiastic collaborator and an active and contributing member of a number of different projects, reading groups, and research clusters.
For three years at the University of Oxford, I convened the TechLife reading group, focussing on early-career research development and work-in-progress. I am part of a similar group, the OCEH Writing Colloquium, in Oslo.
At UiO, I have given talks to the STS-VTK Group, to the Multispecies Landscapes Laboratory, to the OCEH Environmental Humanities Group, to the LandBruk NordicLab, to the Medical Anthropology group, to the Practical Philosophy Seminar Series.