Staff profiles
Dr Paul Gilchrist, Principal Lecturer in Human Geography
I am a human geographer and historian interested in the cultural politics of leisure environments. I examine the cultural and institutional mechanisms through which people engage with environments and how meanings and sensory experiences of environments are shaped by unequal power relations and contested social orderings. My teaching and research focuses on understanding forms of activism involved in claims to space; the negotiation and experience of power through embodiment and physical cultural activity in urban, mountainous and riverine environments; and the policy and planning agendas surrounding the provision of green, grey and blue spaces for recreation, wellbeing, community-making and convivial social relations.
I am interested in supervising postgraduate research students in the following areas: green infrastructure and post-COVID transitions; celebrity environmentalism and philanthropy; community supported agriculture and sustainable futures; access to nature and the politics of outdoor recreation.
Professor Rebecca Elmhirst, Professor of Human Geography
I am a human geographer and political ecologist with two decades of research and teaching experience on struggles over environmental governance, migration and social justice in the global South. I have an interest in exploring the relationships between society and the environment. My teaching focuses on the negative and socially uneven impacts of extractive environmental degradation, and on actions that challenge social and ecological injustice in different parts of the world. My work is informed by intersectional feminist theory, critical development studies and environmental advocacy-activism around resource extraction, with an empirical focus on the gendered ecological politics of displacement, resettlement and dispossession in forest and flood contexts in Indonesia and Thailand.
I am interested in supervising postgraduate research students in the following areas: feminist political ecology; social and environmental justice; climate and agrarian resource extractivism; decolonial thinking and critical approaches to sustainable development.
Dr Mary Gearey, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography
I am a geographer concerned with understanding contemporary human-nature relationships, particularly with regards to emergent forms of water governance. I explore processes of global water utility privatisation and financialisation, political austerity policies, rapid urbanisation and climate change activism to understand evolving ‘hydro-social’ relationships between humans and their access to, and use of, planetary water. My teaching and research focuses on: understanding patterns of environmental citizenship and activism in support of sustainability; exploring how renaturing cities, through the use of blue-green infrastructure can improve ‘liveability’; interrogating contemporary human health and wellbeing experiences in wetland environments, to understand the relationship between landscape forms, identity formation and our connectivity with other ‘more than human’ species.
I am interested in supervising postgraduate research students in the following areas: community-led water resource governance; sustainable water futures; elder environmental activism; nature-based solutions for climate change adaptation; degrowth theory in relation to environmental citizenship.