Associate members
Ilona Biernacka-Ligięza
University of Maria Curie-Sklodowska in Lublin
Professor Ilona Biernacka-Ligieza's research concerns media and social communication, focusing on political science and relations between globalisation and society, especially regionalism and localism. She analyses traditional and ICT media systems, producing research that examines how these and other factors shape aspects of the public sphere, including the understanding of environmental issues.
Joanna Boehnert
Bath Spa University
Dr Joanna Boehnert works in Design for Sustainability at Bath Spa University. She is author of Design/Ecology/ Politics: Towards the Ecocene (2018) and a fellow at the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP). Her work includes two UKRI-funded research projects, 'Transition Templates: Pathways to Net Zero' and 'Enacting Gregory Bateson's Ecological Aesthetics in Architecture and Design'.
Melina Campos Ortiz
Concordia University in Montreal
Melina Campos Ortiz is a postgraduate research student at the department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal. She holds a MA in Media Practice for Development and Social Change from the University of Sussex. She uses feminist science and technology studies to explore human-soil relations in organic farming in Quebec, paying particular attention to Central American migrant workers' experiences. Melina is also an active member of the Concordia Ethnography Lab, where she coordinates a project which seeks to strengthen the ties between five ethnography labs in North America while exploring ethnography at its innovative margins.
Alice Dal Gobbo
Trento University
Alice Dal Gobbo researches at the Department of Sociology and Social Research, Trento University, having completed her PhD at Cardiff University School of Social Sciences. She is interested in ecology, socio-economic transitions, and crisis in late capitalism. Her substantive research looks at environmentally relevant everyday practices as they connect to processes of socio-ecological transformation, including social movements. This empirical work holds together data, theoretical reflections, and methodological innovation to bring new conceptual and analytical insights to the field. Her critical approach draws on neo-Marxist, eco-feminist, and new materialist approaches, to study how value, labour and subjectivity are embodied, reproduced, and resisted in everyday life. After studying everyday energy assemblages, she now concentrates on food consumption and food systems. Alongside field research, she cultivates theoretical interests in political ecology, decoloniality and feminism.
Andrea Garcia Gonzalez
Dr Andrea García González is a postdoctoral researcher whose work undertakes a critical feminist and anthropological approach to the study of peace-building processes. She is particularly interested in delving into social dynamics of violence and peace and the intersection with emotions, silences and bodily memory. She has conducted ethnographic research in Northern Ireland and in the Basque Country. As a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow she studies the Colombian peace process as part of the project ‘Memory Reimagined: Gender and Intersectionality in Participatory Memory Configuration'. She is co-founder of the feminist non-profit organisation Pandora Mirabilia.
Arabel Lebrusan
Arabel Lebrusan is a visual artist working in sculpture and jewellery and based in the UK. She was awarded a research fellowship at the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics at the University of Brighton in 2021 for her long-term project Toxic Waves, where she explored issues around extractivism and ecofeminism. She was awarded Designer of the Year (2022) by the National Association of Jewellers, UK and was the winner of Eastern Approaches (2014) at UH Galleries. She has exhibited and created installations at, for example, The Higgins Bedford (2021); Brighton CCA (2021); Women’s Support Centre, Surrey (2021); Museum of St.Albans (2015); St.Paul’s Square, Bedford (2012); Art in Fuse, Rotterdam (2005) and Gesundbrunnen bunker, Berlin (2000).
Annika Lundkvist
Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw
Annika Lundkvist's research focuses on issues of sustainable urbanism, mobility behavior, environmental psychology and civic engagement. A Fellow at the Schumacher Institute, and student at the Institute of Geography and Spatial Organisation (Anthropos Doctoral School, Polish Academy of Sciences), her PhD work is on walkability as a quality of life component in the built environment and explores the many dimensions of walkable communities, including issues of public transportation, spatial equity, inclusive urban planning and public health. Central in her approach is collaborating with various actors across communities and learning from best practices globally. As founder of pedestrianspace.org, she is also engaged in visual media and narratives on mobility in daily life.
Elodie Marandet
With interests across neoliberalism, subjectivities, governance and social policies, Elodie Marandet's research has focused on aid relations and global governance as well as the restructuring of the welfare state in the United Kingdom, particularly with regards to family and welfare-to-work policies, gender and post-compulsory education.
Brenda McNally
Dublin City University
Brenda McNally is an interdisciplinary social scientist specialising in climate politics and communication. Her research examines how mediated discourses and visual communication about climate action shape socioecological relations and possibilities for radical social transformations. A postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Climate and Society at Dublin City University, Ireland, she is investigating the climate change countermovement in Ireland focussing on the visual representation of climate obstruction by sectoral actors. She also researches the representation of post-carbon futures and the use of digital media to engage communities with climate action
Gabriel Moreno
Northumbria University
Gabriel Moreno researches discursive actors and practices on Twitter concerning climate change and questions of environmental sustainability. This involves developing a platform to connect different environmental communicators from across various communities of practice, with the objective of finding ways to establish on- and off-line contacts.
Johan Nordensvärd
Uppsala University
Dr Johan Nordensvärd's interests are the intersection of environmental politics, international development and social policy, especially low carbon development, innovation policy and energy policy; developing broader understandings of environmental justice, identity and ecological citizenship in relation to renewable energy technologies.
ONCA
ONCA is a Brighton-based arts charity that bridges social and environmental justice issues. Since 2012 it has cultivated art that engages with environmental change, social justice and wellbeing, hosting exhibitions and events by diverse UK and international artists at the Brighton gallery and online. The charity runs free weekly art and repair workshops and focuses on accessible, inclusive curatorial and organisational practices. It is embedded in regional creative and environmental communities, making links between arts organisations and environmental partners. Their innovative education work has included collaborations with universities and international researchers to nurture climate change self-efficacy in teens and support communities facing environmental injustice.
John Parham
University of Worcester
Professor John Parham is Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Worcester. He has authored or edited six books including Green Media and Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and the Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene (CUP, 2021). He was co-editor of the Routledge/ASLE-UKI journal Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism for almost 20 years. John has published widely in the area of ecomedia, including recent or forthcoming articles on digital cli-fi, documentary, Japanese TV anime, and punk and the Anthropocene.
Florin Prună
Dr Florin Prună is an environmental humanities scholar, philosopher and visual ethnographer. His work is the result of an experimentation process, of intercrossing and overlapping diverse environmental communication and knowledge-(re)producing practices. While exploring (eco)epistemologies and (eco)genealogies he is keen on surfacing postdualist perspectives, the coming to being of postnatural landscapes, and articulating the anthropocene. His visual work and scholarly output circulate throughout academic and alternative outputs.
Louise Purbrick
Dr Louise Purbrick is an activist and writer and a former reseacher at the University of Brighton. Her long-term project Traces of Nitrate has been examining the effects of copper and lithium extraction on the ecologies and communities of the central Andes and the Atacama Desert, co-researching with photographer Xavier Ribas to use creative, collaborative and decolonial research practice to address radical change.
Yuliya Samofalova
UCLouvain, Belgium
Yuliya Samofalova studies at the Department of Information and Communication at UCLouvain, Belgium. Her research focuses on analyzing climate change visuals from social media and audiences’ responses to them. Yuliya’s research interests include environmental education, social activism, creative approaches to climate engagement, and corpus linguistics.
Stanley Thangaraj
Stonehill College, Massachusetts
Stanley Thangaraj is the inaugural James E. Hayden Chair for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Social Justice at Stonehill College in Massachusetts. His scholarship focuses on race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class and citizenship in the experiences of immigrant and refugee communities, Kurdish diasporas particularly, in the US South. His 2015 book, Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity, investigates how South-Asian-American men cultivate a sense of belonging in the United States through sports. Stanley has collaborated on centre-related projects and research with Daniel Burdsey, and Nichola Khan.
Niina Uusitalo
Tampere University, Finland
Dr Niina Uusitalo is a post-doctoral researcher at the Visual Studies Lab and the Faculty of Social Sciences at Tampere University, Finland. Her research interests include climate visuals, attention and aesthetics in digital media environments. Her project Envisioning climate change studies how media users visualise climate emotions on social media.
Niina creates photography and video pieces based on her empirical and theoretical work. Her visual works have been featured in the Finnish Museum of Photography and the Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool. Recent work includes studying the agency and flows of waste in the project Disrupted Waste Flows in a Broken World (DECAY).
Valeria Vegh Weis
Universität Konstanz, Germany, Buenos Aires University, Argentina
Valeria Vegh Weis is an Argentinean/German researcher. She is Zukunftkolleg Research Fellow at Universität Konstanz and a professor of Criminology and Transitional Justice at Buenos Aires University.
Marina Wainer
Marina Wainer is a Paris-based artist. She develops a transdisciplinary practice at the crossroads of arts, sciences and technology. First deployed in the field of interactive creation, then turned towards curatorial events and education, her work proposes sensitive experiences and places the audience at the heart of the device.
She explores both societal issues and spaces of representation to create new perceptions and open up horizons. The interaction proposed in her work, which encourages participation, has sometimes turned into collaboration, involving the public upstream, from the writing phase, including different communities such as energy insecure people, amateur photographers and the general public.
A decade ago, after a strong urban anchor, Marina Wainer started a work in natural landscapes, which questions our anthropocentric relationship to nature under different perspectives.
Belinda Wheaton
University of Waikato, New Zealand
Professor Belinda Wheaton is a feminist cultural sociologist, with research spanning interdisciplinary areas; sport/leisure, social policy, gender/ethnicity, wellbeing, human-nature relationships and the environment, and a focus on identity, inclusion and inequality. Belinda is best known for her research on informal and lifestyle sport cultures which includesThe Cultural Politics of Lifestyle Sports and Action Sports and the Olympic Games: Past, Present, Future. She is co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Feminism and Sport, Leisure and Physical Education, and Managing Editor of Annals of Leisure Research.