Sarah Jewitt

My research interests lie mainly at the interface between environment and development and most of my field research has been undertaken in India. My doctoral research was conducted in Jharkhand on community-based forest management and gendered environmental knowledge and was followed by a DfID funded project on the production and management of non-timber forest products in Jharkhand and Odisha. From 2001, I undertook collaborative research with Dr Kathy Baker in Uttar Pradesh on agrarian change in the post Green Revolution period. This in turn fed into research on alternative household energy systems and the socio-economic and gendered geographies of dung. Particular emphasis was placed on how the redistribution of dung (including human excreta) within the agriculture/household energy/livestock-rearing nexus can help to address declining yields and water pollution from chemical fertilizers as well as health and socioeconomic issues relating to indoor air pollution, poor sanitation and inadequate household energy supplies. Building on these interests, I am currently working on a project investigating rural decentralised hybrid energy enterprise systems in India and the UK (RHEES) as well as wider sanitation-related issues. Outside India, recent research has focused on the restoration of tropical peatland in SE Asia, the impacts of menstruation and puberty on girls' spatial mobilty in Kisumu Kenya and barriers to the adoption of improved cook stoves in southern Africa.