- Subject Co-Ordinator, Human Geography: Life in a Globalising World (1st year Geography)
- Subject Co-ordinator ,The Future of Food (2nd Year Geography)
- Subject Co-ordinator Social Science Research Internship (2nd and 3rd Year Geography)
- Guest Lecturer, Sustainable Cities (2nd Year Geography)
My teaching focuses on four key areas.
1. Situating contemporary rural, regional and urban problems in their wider economic context. My subjects situate a wide range of spaces and landuses in relation to Keynesian political-economic frameworks, the rise of neoliberalism and in relation to urban processes of gentrification, studentification and globalisation. In environmental subjects, I have explored the nexus between rural and urban economics, political economy and ecological systems. Theories of socio-ecological assemblage further encourage students to explore complex human and non-humans alliances in disruptive events. In developing-nation contexts, my teaching shows how declining economic opportunities in subsistence agriculture along with the ‘globalisation of the countryside’ places pressure on urban systems in fulfilling urban settlement demands. Even in contributing to informal settlement, these precincts becomes a key labour supplier for mainstream economies, blurring clear boundaries between formality and informality in urban systems. The social and economic drivers underpinning transport and fossil fuel dependency in the post WWII period, and in relation to a rising middle class in Asia and India, and subsequent patterns of vulnerability have also been developed as core themes.
2. Interrogating the uneven position of cities and suburbs within contexts of globalisation and neoliberalism. In undergraduate courses my subjects develop an account of cities in global competition for high-income or wealthy residents, tourists, and investment. While recognising the uneven impacts of globalisation, particularly in terms of social differentiation and inequality, my teaching does not position city futures as inevitably neoliberalist. Rather, it charts the potential for innovation and variation that may unsettle or challenge the inequities of global capitalism. While attendant to the processes of gentrification, revanchism, and austerity that characterise many contemporary cities, my subjects explore the diverse economies that characterise urban life, including examples of housing and urban policy innovation and social movement activism in responding to and adapting to social and ecological uncertainties.
3. Situating communities in relation to resilience and social justice. Recognising the deliberative turn in social research, my teaching engages with multiple aspects of community engagement in cities and urban planning. It also offers a critical account of community development, highlighting the potential for discourses of resilience and community empowerment to be incorporated into the revitalisation of colonial and capitalist legacies. In relation to planning theory more broadly, my teaching situates community planning at the intersection of welfare state failure, the rise of identity politics and the post-rational critique of planning as a ‘top down process’.
4. Cities of diversity and social inclusion. Themes of disadvantage and inclusivity are explored through distributive paradigms of social justice. Matters of gender, race, sexuality, health and (dis)ability are equally significant axes of differentiation in cities leading to the study of frameworks of recognition (and the politics of identity). This includes inviting students to engage with cities from the perspective of the stranger or the outsider and to interrogate changing policy frameworks from assimilation to multiculturalism to the emergent interest in encounter. Recognising the intimate turn in social urban research, students are encouraged to interrogate the affects generated through routine and everyday encounters with difference.
