Skip navigation

Natures, Cultures, Knowledges

Understanding of the concepts of nature has grown more plural, complex, and divergent. So too have our obligations and challenges to articulate the relevance, potential, and application of geographical analysis as a means to reveal more equitable and sustainable pathways for our globe's diverse societies and ecosystems. The importance of a more reflexive collective self-understanding is evidenced in on-going diagnoses of human-nature pathologies and potentials (e.g. the Anthropocene). Formulating new models of responsibility and action requires understanding how different 'ways of knowing' can be linked, oriented, and embodied across a diversity of social, cultural and economic spaces and scales. A shared priority is, broadly speaking, to understand the reflexive conditions and structures of environmental concern and engagement.

The Natures, Cultures, Knowledges Group run three meeting series: Political Ecology, The Magic Circle and Circumpolar History and Public Policy.

Themes

Natures

Our studies of nonhuman agencies pose new intellectual challenges for how we explain both continuities and radical disjunctures within knowledge communities, how we assess what is taken to constitute reliable knowledge, standards, and baselines, for which purposes and to what ends.

Cultures

Our engagement with the sources and character of resilience and diversity in knowledge traditions enables us to identify new or hidden strategies, modes, and ontologies of assemblage across heterogeneous material cultures and constellations of local and situated fields of practice.

Knowledges

Our multiple forms of engagement with processes of evidenced-based policy provide us with a set of platforms to analyse processes of negotiation and justification including deliberation, reciprocity, and accountability. To this end the foci of our research include the philosophical underpinnings of public enquiries, advisory bodies, participatory models of governance, protected areas of special ecological significance, environmental reviews and impact assessments.

Group members

The Natures Cultures, Knowledges thematic group consists of the following members:

Bill Adams The political ecology of socially constructed natures
Ash Amin Urban sentience and human being; and resilient states and subjects.
Tim Bayliss-Smith Agroforestry, intensification and social institutions in Melanesia
Michael Bravo Indigenous ontologies; geographies of mobility; cultures of navigation
Amy Donovan Science, knowledge and policy in the context of volcanic eruptions; volcanic risk and uncertainty; human and physical interface in volcanic areas
Rob Doubleday Cultures and politics of technoscience
Philip Howell Animal geographies
Nigel Leader-Williams Conservation policy and human-animal conflicts
Shane McCorristine Disembodiment/embodiment; cultures of 19thC exploration
Emma Mawdsley Environmental politics in India
Iris Moeller Scientifically-informed coastal management; scientific underpinning of coastal ecosystem service, risk, and uncertainty assessments.
David Nally The politics of global food provisioning
Clive Oppenheimer Volcanic risk management and the human ecology of volcanic regions.
Ivan Scales Political ecology of resource use and environmental change
Susan Owens Knowledge, expertise & policy; planning and the politics of sustainability
Sarah Radcliffe Postcolonial cultures and subaltern knowledges
Chris Sandbrook Political ecology; market-based conservation; role of evidence in conservation
Kendra Strauss Risk, responsibility, rationalities, work, social reproduction, geographical imaginations
Bhaskar Vira Political economy of natural resources, ecosystem services and development
Piers Vitebsky Indigenous cosmologies and ontologies in the Arctic and tropical forests
Elizabeth Watson Coping with risk and uncertainty in the Horn of Africa