My background is in interdisciplinary feminist studies. I have worked at the universities of Sussex, Plymouth, Keele and UEA before coming to CRESC in 2005. My research contributes to a growing body of work on sustainability in CRESC.

My research is centrally concerned with (re)visioning an eco/feminist politics of sustainability. This is a holistic sustainability, focused on interconnections and relationalities, which links planetary sustainability with human and non-human health and well-being; which asks how we can sustain collective and personal movements towards social justice; and which explores how the very practice of research might be reworked for sustaining a more-than-human world.

I am currently working on a number of projects, including:

Sustaining Feminism

How - and indeed why - to sustain feminism, when so many have declared its end? What if the end of feminism was less a statement of fact and more an announcement of a sense of crisis for - some - feminists? How might we generate other stories of feminism, to disrupt any certainties about what it is and where we might find it? Two projects in particular address this; both involve documenting stories of marginal feminisms: ecofeminism, and feminist youth work as a site of transgenerational feminist practice.

The Changing Nature of Eco/feminism

Through a case study of ecofeminist activism on the West Coast of Canada, I explore the persistence of feminism in the 1990s, as well as the specificities of ecofeminist attention to nature. This research draws on ethnographic research, including oral history interviews with activists involving in campaigning against clear-cut logging of temperate rainforest in Clayoquot Sound, on Vancouver Island. As well as addressing what it might mean to describe the Clayoquot Peace Camp of 1993 as ‘ecofeminist’, the book addresses the disavowal of ecofeminism by other feminists because of its purported ‘essentialism’. The book examines the politics of naturecultures on the West Coast through (re)creating genealogies, through tracing the unnatural histories of ecofeminists and ecofeminism, following movements, through history and across the global, and ultimately asks how we might tell more hopeful stories of feminism, insisting that the future - of feminism and of the planet - relies on this. The Changing Nature of Feminism is forthcoming in 2013 with University of British Columbia Press.

Feminist Webs

I am involved in a collaborative feminist network across Manchester and the North West. Feminist Webs is a vibrant, entangled transgenerational network of young women and young(er) and old(er) youth work practitioners, academics, artists and activists based in the North West of England. Feminist Webs offers a fertile site for developing an engaged feminist research practice. Read more about this project here.

Sustaining a More-than-Human World

Sustaining Transport: Changing Mobilities

I am Co-I on an EPSRC funded SUE3 project: Step-Change (Sustainable Transport Evidence and modelling Paradigms: Cohort Household Analysis to support New Goals in Engineering design). I lead strand 3 of the project on 'intergrating diverse data sources'. See http://www.changing-mobilities.org.uk/ for further details.

Sustaining Food: Food as Everyday Health and Medicine

Current projects include participatory research with a Manchester-based Young Women's Group on their organic allotment. This project is also in partnership with Spitalfields City Farm and Tablehurst and Plawhatch Organic Biodynamic Farms in Sussex. With Andrew Church, from University of Brighton and other project partners, we are working on a paper on 'Growing intimate privatepublics: the material and affective practices of the likt allotment'. Memories of Mr Seel's Garden is another collaborative participatory project on memories of local food in Liverpool.

Essential Fatty Activism

In the next year I am planning to begin work on a paper on ‘Essential Fatty Activism’. This paper will bring together debates within queer fat studies, the growing raw food movement, and work on vital materialism (by Jane Bennett) to reflect on the vitality of fat.

Sustaining Movement: Ageing with the Alexander Technique

I am developing research on embodied practices such as the Alexander Technique and yoga. I have co-written a systematic review of evidence for the effectiveness of the Alexander Technique with Julia Woodman, member of the Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique (STAT). I am developing a small qualitative project, in conjunction with members of STAT, which will explore experiences of ageing while undertaking lessons in the Alexander Technique.

Sustaining Research

How can the very practice of research be reworked in and for a more-than-human world? How do we sustain our data? How might we rework qualitative rseearch methods in and for more-than-human times? How do we, as researchers, find ways of sustaining ourselvs, in th demanding institutional contexts which characterise contemporary higher education? How might we engotiate the engagement, participation and impact agendas?

Archiving and Reusing Qualitative Data

This programme of research relates to key CRESC concerns – the challenging of epochalist accounts of sociocultural change through theoretically informed empirical research; research which not only relies on the generation of new data, but which examines the possibilities afforded by existing data sources. These issues dovetail with an increasing interest across the social sciences in reusing qualitative data. Yet despite the increasing turn to reuse, it has proved a controversial practice with continuing concerns about methodological pitfalls and clashes over its epistemological status.

Qualitative Research in and for a More-than-Human World

I am working on a paper which explores the possibilities of reconceiving such apparently ‘humanist’ methods as oral histories in the context of what have variously been termed, posthumanism, the posthumanities, a more-than-human world, and turns to affect, materiality and practice. However, rather than take up the technologically enhanced world of some posthumanisms, I turn to the stories of environmental activists in Clayoquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

See also Feminism and its Methods.

Sustaining Community-based Participatory Research

Good ethical practice is essential to community-based participatory research (CBPR), and to sustaining ongoing community-university partnerships. Along with partner organisation, the Young Women's Group, we have been involved in a project on ethics in CBPR led by Sarah Banks at Durham University. This has led to: a set of ethical guidelines on CBPR; a series of case studies and case examples; and a research paper.

PhD Supervision

I am keen to supervise PhD students whose research interests relate to these areas:

• ecofeminist and feminist theory, history, politics, methodology;
• the politics of nature
• qualitative methods and methodology: research using and/or examining methodologies including oral history, narrative interviewing and narrative analysis, using archives and (re)using qualitative data; genealogy; participatory research; community-based research; ethics; Mass Observation; transdisciplinary working

Key Partner Organisations

Key organisations I work with regularly include:

The Young Women's Group: http://www.likt.org.uk/

LGBT Youth North West: http://www.lgbtyouthnorthwest.org.uk/

Feminist Webs: http://www.feministwebs.com/