Access, disadvantage and exclusion
Our work seeks to reveal and address the myriad injustices associated with access to various resources, including land and landscapes, social institutions and culture. We are interested in examining the processes and powerplays through which access is realized or denied, and through which practices of disadvantage and exclusion may be produced. In this strand, group members draw on a range of social and cultural theories to provide key interventions into debates on:
- landscape, disability and affect (for example, investigating the way in which the disadvantage of disability is reproduced or contested through socio-embodied and inter-corporeal relationships established during rural visits)
- geographies of sexualities (for example research on the socio-spatial variability of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) lives in an era of legal equality)
- the spatial politics of leisure and recreation environments (for example, the disputes between recreationalists, landowners and government agencies over access to inland water)
- gendered geographies of migration, natural resource access and the spatialities of enclosure (for example, the ways rural migrants invoke norms of heterosexuality as they seek access to land in the context of conservation enclosures in Indonesia)
- human responses to environmental variability (for example, archival research on responses to past climate change in sub-Saharan Africa)
These concerns are examined across a variety of rural and urban contexts, in Europe, North America, Africa and in Southeast Asia.
