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Judith Tsouvalis

Senior research associate, Lancaster University

I'm a geographer/science and technology studies (STS) with a B.Sc. (Hons.) in Geography from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a D.Phil from the School of Geography and the Environment, the University of Oxford, where I held a full-time, three-year lectureship before deciding to embark on a full-time research career.

My research interests are in the changing relationships between science, technology, people and the natural world and how they figure in the making/remaking of the world. To grasp how the material, physical, and biological intertwines with the socio-cultural and political I use ‘more-than-human’ modes of enquiry informed by concepts and approaches from STS, multispecies geographies, anthropology, process philosophy and new materialism.

Work to date has encompassed: reimagining and remaking public participation and democracy from a relational, constructivist STS perspective;
policy co-design (England’s post-Brexit Environmental Land Management (ELM) approach); digital transformations and their impacts on people and democratic processes (focusing on harder-to-reach stakeholders among older adults (health/care) and farmers (policy co-design)); power relations, competing epistemologies, and political legitimacy in environmental governance (catchment management, industrial forestry, farming, and plant biosecurity); the role of science and scientific knowledge in environmental politics; and the role of more-than-humans in large-scale systems transformations.

My research tends to be experimental, collaborative, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary in nature and I'm committed to inclusive research practices. Between 2018-2022, I sat on the joint Defra-Natural England Expert Panel on Social Science Evidence for Improving Environmental Land Management Outcomes and between 2008-2010, was a member of the Environment Agency’s Science Task Group for the Bassenthwaite and Windermere Restoration Programme. In 2011, I was awarded a Lancaster University Staff Prize for "making complicated research or topics accessible and exciting to the general public, young people and non-specialists".

Throughout my career I have continued to teach intermittently (master students, Lancaster University; undergraduate students (fieldtrip), Sheffield University), and have been invited to deliver seminars to master/doctoral students by the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), the ETH Zurich (Switzerland), and Sweden.

Experience

  • 2022–present
    Senior Research Associate, University of Lancaster

Education

  • 1997 
    The University of Oxford, D.Phil
  • 1992 
    The London School of Economics and Political Science, B.Sc. (Hons.)