My academic CV is nothing if not eclectic, thanks in part to an insatiable curiosity about the entire world, and in part to a career that has been severely disrupted by major illness requiring four rounds of surgery.  However, I'm one of the lucky ones - someone who can be fully cured.

 

I'm now back as a full-time academic at the University of Oxford, where I'm delighted to have an independent fellowship. My official title is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Nature, Attention and Biodiversity. My work ranges across arts and humanities, social science, and ecological science to explore how natural and urban spaces are produced and contested, and why this matters socially, economically, politically, and in terms of human and more-than-human health and co-flourishing.

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There are six strands to my research.

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1. Disavowal: a problem beyond knowledge

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Much current work on climate change and biodiversity loss focuses on mechanisms of denial i.e. the ways in which the scientific truth is being repressed by powerful ideological forces.  This implies that the central problem is one of knowledge, which can be ‘fixed’ by propagating truths. My work uses a different and complementary concept - ‘disavowal’ - to explore the ways in which inaction on biodiversity loss (and, by extension, climate change) is fed by a system in which everyone already knows that we exist in a time of multiple and serious crises, but meaningful action nevertheless appears to be impossible. I use literary and film sources, from Diogenes to Jonathan Glazer’s ‘Zone of Interest’, to elucidate the workings of disavowal and to suggest ways out of the impasse in which we find ourselves.

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2. Value, aesthetics, and the making of suburbia 

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I am interested in the ways in which changing ways of valuing land and property play out in aesthetic debates about the relationships between green and grey spaces in our villages, towns, and cities. I recently published a paper on the the racialised politics of air pollution, spectral colour, and urban reform in mid century British cities, and I am currently writing about the landscaping of mid century Los Angeles suburbia as an aesthetics of segregation connected with the practice of redlining (the exclusion of black families from home ownership) I’m also coauthoring a paper on the ways in which the development industry’s processes for valuing land impact the provision of water infrastructure on new build estates. 

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3. Lost Nature: are developers delivering on their ecological commitments?

 

I lead the ‘Lost Nature project’, which draws together quantitative science, social science, and arts and humanities to draw attention to the failure of developers to install the ecological mitigations and enhancements that they have committed to as a condition of planning applications. 

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As part of this work, I led an audit of 42 new build housing estates, which was published by Wild Justice (a campaigning organisation run by Mark Avery, Chris Packham, and Ruth Tingay). My coauthors and I found that just 53% of ecological mitigations that had been promised were installed onsite, a figure that fell to just 34% when street trees were excluded. This is a piece of activist research: the central aim is to improve the situation on the ground. So far, the report has been mentioned in Parliament, and in multiple news sources. 

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A toolkit is available from our project website (and below) to enable community groups to carry out a similar audit in their own area.

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4. The social justice implications of biodiversity policy

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Urbanisation is a known driver of biodiversity loss meaning that the British planning system plays a crucial role in protecting nature. However, much of the research on new spatial policies to protect biodiversity, most notably Biodiversity Net Gain and the Nature Recovery Fund, has been written by economists who have viewed these measures in isolation from the wider spatial decisionmaking system in which they sit.

 

Yet planning is a system that is designed to find a balance between a multitude of different social, economic, and environmental goals, meaning that the significant social justice and democratic implications to these policies has tended to be overlooked. 

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I am Co-Investigator on an interdisciplinary £1m ESRC-funded bid, with Malcolm Tait, Tom Wild, Karl Evans, Andy Inch, Rob Davies and Andy Lockhart. My work package charts the way that new conflicts over the definition of ‘more-than-human value' are now emerging in response to policy-oriented definitions of biodiversity and the changing economics of ecological mitigation and enhancement. I use a mixture of scientific, social scientific and arts and humanities narrative methods to work with a range of community groups who are trying to oppose the development of ecologically sensitive sites for housing, seeking to understand how their ways of viewing and narrating ‘everyday nature’ are getting lost within an increasingly technocratic and quantitative approach to biodiversity loss.

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5. Seasonality and ways of reckoning time 

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I am also a creative writer: my coauthored books  Nature's Calendar: the British Year in 72 Seasons, and The Ritual Year, both published by Granta, take an interdisciplinary approach to everyday nature and its coimbrication in community rituals.

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6. Radical Planning Manifesto

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With Andy Inch, Malcolm Tait, and Jason Slade, I have written the Radical Planning Manifesto, a fun proposal that suggests ways to alter the planning system so that it works for people, nature - and redistribution! 

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