School of Geography & Geosciences
Department of Geography & Sustainable Development

Regenerating coastal communities: pathways to sustainable development
Supervisor: Dr Tim Stojanovic

There is an increasing understanding that coastal communities face unique challenges due to the restructuring of maritime economy, peripherality, and changing patterns of human activity. This study will focus on the under-researched and under-theorised field of coastal areas within studies of demography, economic regeneration and wellbeing. Previous research indicates deprivation and disadvantage amongst certain types of coastal community, when compared to other types or community or rural communities. However, the explanation is not straightforward and other explanatory factors such as the size of community and historical path of development seem important. The following avenues of research may prove particularly relevant: (1) Analysis of the changing economic opportunities and wellbeing in coastal communities (2) Exploration of the unique role of the coast in theories of urbanisation and counter-urbanisation; (3) Determination of strategies for coastal communities to encourage sustainable development in the context of an expanding maritime economy. The research will involve a mixed methods approach, using longitudinal data and qualitative research to explore development trends. The findings will be used to enhance understanding of how coastal communities can develop pathways to more sustainable futures, and to identify patterns of change in the UK. Candidates for this PhD would benefit from one of (i) a background in quantitative analysis of longitudinal datas, (ii) qualitative social-scientific methods, or (iii) knowledge of the UK and European policy framework in coastal areas.

Discourses of Energy Justice
Supervisor: Dr Darren McCauley

The PhD studentship would explore the three dimensions of energy justice within a geographical context of the student’s choice. Energy justice refers firstly to the distributional impacts of energy policy (e.g. siting of wind farms, radioactivity, poverty etc.). Secondly, energy justice suggests that equitable procedures must be put in place to ensure the sustainability of energy policy (e.g. stakeholder forums, deliberative democracy, new forms of participation). Lastly, the third tenet of energy justice research involves an exploration of such distributional and procedural issues within the framework of an energy system (e.g. from mining uranium to its disposal, form generating waste to its energy capture etc.). In this vein, the PhD studentship would attempt;

• To understand how ‘energy justice’ is being constructed/articulated by NGOs, businesses, politicians etc.
• To assess how differences in energy technologies and systems influence how discourses of energy justice are constructed
• To explore the political influences on these constructions- e.g. political opportunity structures, Europeanization, climate change, energy security

Crafting Sustainable Futures
Supervisor: Emilia Ferraro

“[D]espite the many obituaries issued on its behalf and the ever-proliferating forces of mass manufacture, modern craft is not just a symbolic matter”. What makes craft so “resilient”? What distinctive qualities do craft knowledge and thinking bring to the development of community resilience, and more generally to key areas of sustainable development (SD) such as, for example, the re-localization of the national economy; social regeneration; and wellbeing? Defining craft as “a distinctive set of knowledge, skills and aptitude centred on a process of reflective engagement with the material and digital worlds”, this research analyses the craft sector in the UK to uncover the wider role of craft in promoting social sustainability.

Homes don’t use energy, people do: exploring household energy demand
Supervisor: Dr Louise Reid

Housing has come to the forefront of energy debates (Lovell 2004, McManus et al., 2010) given high-profile recognition of the 24% contribution that it makes to carbon emissions in the UK (Stern 2006). One ‘solution’ to this problem has been the development of innovative domestic energy-efficiency technology. Yet some have argued that such technology will not sufficiently transform housing to reduce its impact on the environment as it will not challenge the way in which this impact is created (Seyfang 2010, Reid & Houston in press). Indeed, although the energy efficiency of homes has risen steadily over the last 30 years, there has not been a reduction in domestic energy consumption (McManus et al., 2010, Steg & Vlek 2009). Moreover, research has demonstrated that occupants of low carbon (LC) homes found methods to bypass environmentally friendly solutions in order to prevent the curtailment of their activities (Gill et al., 2010). Thus, instead of being solely concerned with changing the physical infrastructure of buildings, the focus ought to be on considering how such technology acts to produce and reproduce environmentally problematic lifestyles (Pickvance 2009). The household diary is one method particularly suited to this task (Reid et al., 2010). Keeping a household diary has been used as a tool to record household consumption and to increase householder awareness of and lead to improvements in environmental behaviour (Hobson 2003, Reid et al., 2011), presenting a significant opportunity to better understand household energy demand. For example, the act of writing down behaviour in a diary encouraged reflection about waste, travel and energy habits independently of changes in household infrastructure or information provision (Reid et al., 2011). Developing this work further, there is a need to assess the potency of an exclusively online diary, as opposed to a paper diary, in encouraging such reflexivity – a research method yet untested. Accordingly, the aim of this studentship would be to compare the experiences of householders living in LC and non-LC housing using an online household diary in order to better understand the way in which energy demand is created, and assess how diary-keeping and/or housing technology may instigate behavioural change.

The transition to a low carbon economy: implications for housing and urban development
Supervisor: Dr Louise Reid

The move to a low carbon economy is frequently presented as a solution to both the economic downturn and the anticipated impacts of climate change (While et al., 2010). An off-spin from the sustainable development meta-narrative (Raco 2005), the low carbon discourse has received criticism for being a weak form of ecological modernisation, where eco-efficiency and technology-led solutions dominate (Lovell 2004). As mechanisms through which the low carbon economy may be realised, housing and urban development have been at the forefront of recent campaigns; the code for sustainable homes and the zero-carbon standard are two prominent examples of the dominance of efficiency and technology in policy-making. However, many questions remain about the role that housing and householders can and should contribute to the low carbon economy, and whether the low carbon economy is indeed even desirable. For instance, is carbon management proving to be ‘less than progressive...reinforcing existing social and spatial inequalities, extending the reach of market environmentalism, and strengthening the power of the state and capital at the expense of consumers, workers and interests in social and spatial equity’ (While et al., 2010)? In short, who are the winners and losers of this transition, and what are the implications for those involved in housing and urban development: planners; managers; housing providers (and registered social landlords in particular); home owners; tenants; and, the homeless? The studentship would therefore critically evaluate the relationship between the low carbon economy, housing and urban development using innovative research methods.

Do good lives have to cost the earth?
Supervisor: Dr Louise Reid

Throughout history, there has been much discussion about what it means to be well or unwell (Diener and Biswas-Diener 2008, Mathews and Izquierdo 2009), how these understandings of wellness relate to life experiences (Christopher 1999), and continued debate about how personal well-being can be measured (Linley et al., 2009). Recently there has been a resurgence of political interest in personal well-being, symbolised by a request from the UK Prime Minister for an Office of National Statistics review of well-being measures, due in 2012 (Seaford 2011). Such interest has been fuelled by the recognition that until the recent economic recession, the UK, like much of the Western world, experienced a prolonged period of economic growth and relative stability which did not result in measurable improvements in personal well-being (Andreou 2010). As Ryan and Deci (2001) have argued, such material wealth created a ‘culture of surplus’ through which the pursuit of improved personal well-being has involved ever greater consumption of material goods, leaving in its wake a legacy of environmental problems.  Yet across the world, people have often reported having long and happy lives (‘happy life years’), whilst consuming different levels of resources (Seaford 2011). The security of these resources varies enormously too with potential implications for well-being, and much of this security is changing with increasing global connectivity and shifts from subsistence to monetary economies (Fazey et al., 2011). This studentship will seek to explore the extent to which resource security, sustainability and ‘the good life’ may be related using a mixed method research design.

Sustainable Tourism
Supervisor: Professor Colin Hunter

Studies interested in developing conceptual and practical understandings of, for example, wildlife tourism and agri-tourism in the rural development context and exploring links between tourist motivations and behaviour and notions of personal, subjective well-being are encouraged to apply.

Space, Environment and Knowledge
Supervisor: Dr Emilia Ferraro

The domain of enquiry on “ways of knowing” has a very long tradition rooted within philosophical debates about the nature of knowledge and its relation to human mind, and is enjoying full recognition in the field of sustainable development and education for sustainability. Is learning a process of transmission by which knowledge is passed from experts to novices by way of representations coded in language or other symbolic media, as cognitivists maintain? Or are cognition and perception social activities contextualized in the nexus of ongoing relations between persons and their environments, as ecological approaches to knowledge argue? This research addresses these questions by looking at silversmithing apprenticeship practices in Quito, Ecuador. Through a combination of library research, participant observation and in-depth interviews, it will analyse the “spatiality” of knowledge, and the relationship between knowledge production, learning and the environment.