Overview
I am a PhD candidate with an undergraduate degree in Social Anthropology from University of Edinburgh and a MSc in Research Methods from Cardiff University. Prior to starting my postgraduate studies, I worked at Wadhurst Park, a conservation site in the High Weald, and was involved in projects with University Museums in Scotland and Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. I am interested in nature-society relations and the societal and cultural responses to changes in our 'natural' spaces. In particular, my PhD research focuses on the responses to tree diseases and the UK's changing treescape.
Research
Research interests
Tree Pests and Diseases:
My ESRC-funded PhD focuses tree pests and diseases and the conservation efforts responding to disease outbreaks. In particular, my research focuses on Dutch Elm Disease (DED) and Ash Dieback (ADB) and the conservation efforts that aim to protect and restore UK's treescapes from these diseases.
Urban Orchards:
My Masters research focused on the community groups across London are reversing the loss of the city’s historic orchards by planting new collections of fruit trees. It sought to understand why these sites are important, the processes by which they are made valuable, and how this could change in the future. This project questioned what plant autonomy is in these sites, and how it acts in close relation to human intention. Additionally, it investigated how fruit trees are valued as heritage objects and native species - and how these values are reworked in the face of climate change.
Thesis
The Biopolitics of Tree Disease: Valued and unvalued species in ‘authentic’ treescapes
My ESRC-funded PhD focuses tree pests and diseases and the conservation efforts responding to disease outbreaks. In particular, my research uses interviews and ethnography to investigate Dutch Elm Disease (DED) and Ash Dieback (ADB) and the conservation efforts that aim to protect and restore UK's treescapes from these diseases.
The primary focus is to ask - what are DED and ADB-related conservation trying to conserve? For example, are they being conserved as: cultural heritage, native genetics, an ideal bodily type, a habitat and/or a rarity? I will ask: what are the ways my subjects consider ash and elm important? And how the threat of a trees likely disappearance/reappearance impact these values? In particular, how are ideas about purity, authenticity and a species ‘belonging’ deployed by those involved tree disease related conservation?
My research draws from literature across the humanities and social sciences including:
- Biopolitical analyses of conservation, in particular work seeking to investigate what it means to conserve a species as such and how ideas about genetic purity are used in conservation.
- Extinction Studies' multidisciplinary attempts to explore ‘what extinction means, why it matters and to whom’?
- More-than-human theory's highlighting of the agential roles other beings play. In particular, vegetal geography's close attention to plant life.
Funding source
ESRC
