University of East Anglia

Post-Doc, School of Environmental Sciences

ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow

About

My research focuses on developing socio-cultural understandings of sustainable consumption. In particular, I am interested in how ideas and discourses about ‘the environment’ and ‘environmental change’ come to have significance within and across different contexts and communities, and how these processes impact upon social practices at different levels. My work is broadly situated in the fields of cultural geography and environmental sociology, but I am also interested in how transdisciplinary collaboration can inform this project, and in the application of innovative methodological techniques to these issues.

My PhD (entitled ‘Making Pro-Environmental Behaviour Work: An ethnographic case study of practice, process and power in the workplace’, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council) explored these issues through the lens of a team-based pro-environmental behaviour change intervention that was conducted in a workplace. Through 9 months of ethnographic research (participant observation and semi-structured interviews) around the workplace during the course of the intervention, it attempted to apply emerging ideas in ‘social practice theory’ to behaviour change debates. In particular, it explored how social practices are assembled, negotiated and interacted around differently in different contexts and by different communities of practitioners. Furthermore, it examined the means by which, through processes of auditing and group deliberation, individual practitioners may be able to escape from and reflect upon the practices they perform, and so potentially change them. In addition, it considered the power relations inherent to behaviour change interventions by applying some of Michel Foucault’s ideas about discipline and governmentality to consider how these interventions serve to ‘make up’ different kinds of environmental citizen and, in turn, how they can also become sites of resistance. From 1st November 2009 I will be taking up a 12-month ESRC Post-doctoral Fellowship to develop these ideas.

For my early post-doctoral research I am exploring these ideas in relation to energy transitions. Specifically, I am involved in a large multi-university and interdisciplinary project to develop plausible transition pathways to a low carbon energy economy (Project website: www.lowcarbonpathways.org.uk). Initially this project has focussed on how different actors, such as ‘the energy public’, are represented within energy debates and the implications this has for energy system development. Further work will focus on the impact of ‘smart meters’ on household practices. As part of this project I have also conducted a study exploring collaborative interdisciplinary research practice among the project partners. This has employed semi-structured interviews, Q methodology, and social network analysis as means of understanding how different academic disciplines relate to one another around the concept of energy transitions.

Previously I have worked as a research assistant in ‘Sustainable Production and Consumption’ at Imperial College, and I hold a PhD in Environmental Sciences from the University of East Anglia; an M.Sc in ‘Environment, Science and Society’ from University College, London; an M.Prof in ‘Leadership for Sustainable Development’ from Forum for the Future/Middlesex University; and a BA in Geography from Cambridge University.