Lancaster Environment Centre

My research focuses on aesthetics, social theory and environmental change.

Broad research specialisms

• Climate Change & Society:climate knowledge, narratives and practices.
• Political Aesthetics or the ‘aesthetics of existence’
• GeoPhilosophy: philosophies of nature, dynamic earth processes, time and climate.
• Animality: animal forces in human and non-human life; configurations of the human; exuberance and extinction; posthumanism.

Professional activities

• Editorial Board, Environment and Planning D (EPD)
• Editorial Board, The Geographical Journal (GJ)
• Member and author of Working Group II: Interdisciplinary, European Science Foundation (ESF) RESCUE (Researching Environmental, Societal Change on an Unstable Earth) research programme.

Research overview

My primary research interest is in the political aesthetics and biopolitics of environments within the context of climate change (past and present) and biodiversity loss.

Currently, I am working on two projects:

• The political aesthetics of climate change: I am particularly interested in how we understand dynamic earth processes and environmental change through aesthetic experience, and how these experiences configure our political relations to human and non-human worlds. Part of this work concentrates on thinking about what knowledge economies exist between human non-human worlds and how ideas of animality, multispecies living and biopolitics are articulated through co-joined aesthetic experiences/experiments. Within this work, I have been interested in a range of visual artefacts, from polar bears and to ice cores, and a range of ways of seeing, practicing, and thinking politics. Theoretically, this work has sought to understand how we might configure an “aesthetics of existence” in relation to abrupt climate change, and to investigate how aesthetics constitutes a space of practice and a space of thought in environmental politics.
• Prehistoric art, animality and climate change: Thinking back to the Last Glacial Maximum and the Art of the Prehistoric, this project investigates the aesthetics of cave painting as a key practice in becoming human. Set within the context of climates past and climates future, this work investigates the role of art in human evolution (and the parallel development of theories of evolution and theories of prehistory). Specifically, it focuses on the relation of humans to non humans in the context of understanding and experiencing environmental change. Theoretically this project is informed by the work of Georges Bataille, Elizabeth Grosz, Gilles Deleuze and Fredric Nietzsche.