Research

My research considers three often interrelated themes:

1. Environmental Knowledge Politics

My work seeks to understand the environmental knowledge politics around realising post-carbon and ecologically sounder futures. My research examines the content, form, and exclusions of environmental knowledge, and the social, cultural, and political processes that shape whose voices are ‘heard’. Exploring the politics around overlooked voices and alternative perspectives is vital given the escalating climate crisis and the broader socio-ecological challenges facing the planet.

I am particularly interested in the politics of urban carbon accountability, the role of experts and expertise in shaping political change, and how they can work for or against more diverse, inclusive and egalitarian forms of knowledge production.

2. Conceptualising and Understanding Political Change

My research is theoretically driven by a desire to understand how political change can be realised and prevented, with a focus on the role that different practices, cultures, and subjects play in shaping these dynamics. My work explores how we might widen the aperture for political change in the context of various depoliticising forces.

To this end, I contribute towards the sub-disciplinary field of post-foundational political geography, which is concerned with the contingency and contestability of spatial and temporal orderings. I have worked to consider and conceptualise how depoliticisations, repoliticisations and politicisations occur on the ground, and how we can better integrate post-foundationalism’s conceptual interventions into political geographic research.

3. Aesthetics, Politics and Space

Whilst aesthetics might be commonly associated narrowly with beauty, I instead consider its wider understanding as relating to sense-making. I am particularly interested in the role of ‘common sense’ in ordering space and time, and how political change works to transform these sensory orders.

I have a longstanding interest in the aesthetic and political thought of Jacques Rancière (1999) and developing his work for thinking through geographical concerns, such as scale and politics. More generally, I have also co-edited a book on Aesthetics and the City (Routledge), which proposes aesthetics a fruitful concept through which we can critically reflect upon the enduring relevance of 'the city' to urban thought.