I am an interdisciplinary researcher with a focus on critical agricultural geographies, applying a socio-cultural and political ecology lens. My research is grounded in qualitative understandings of micro and socio-spatial relations that govern farmer engagement with, and understanding of, their environment. This frequently combines anthropological perspectives with history and ecology, and has incorporated gender-nature relations, and relationships between social institutions and local knowledge holders and their practices. My current research focuses on the intersection between environmental governance and the politics of knowledge(s), popular education and critical pedagogies.

Before entering academia, my NGO background since the early 1990s spanned both humanitarian and development sectors in Europe, the Middle East, South East Asia, Pacific and sub-Saharan Africa. It was this engagement with the on-the-ground realities of those exposed to political injustice and resulting social division and shattered infrastructure that first drew me to agroecology. Since co-founding GardenAfrica in 2001, I have co-developed innovative plant-based health and livelihoods approaches with researchers and NGOs, and farmers and civil society organisations to explore strategies to navigate social-ecological complexity and change. Over this time, I have also established a solid track record in collaborative project design, implementation, management and monitoring, evaluation and learning.

Agroecology for food sovereignty, stabilisation agriculture; equitable resilience; participatory action research; political ecology; peacebuilding; critical pedagogies; Peoples' knowledges; bio-cultural diversity; rooted networks & collective agency; gender & power; disaster risk reduction; co-generative approaches to climate change adaptation.

My research is interested in the politics of fragility, and particularly in transformative potential of agroecological processes and relationships through which communities of practice may be more able to mobilise and shape change on their own terms. This has included the potential of agroecology to address forms of violence by supporting social farming and deliberative democratic processes framed around the co-management of resources. It has explored the extent to which small ‘non-movements’ employ non-threatening, practice-based co-generative processes not only to shape physical landscapes, but to negotiate social change by re-forging networks based on principles of reciprocity and trust.

My research interests also involve understanding how transdisciplinarity helps us to link the socio-cultural, ecological and political dimensions - acting as a bridge between peace formation, disaster risk reduction and/or climate change adaptation on one hand, and equitable resilience and epistemic and cognitive justice on the other.

By integrating agroecology into the heart of prevention, preparedness, response and recovery strategies, I believe that we can disrupt normative and a-political narratives that hold inequality and injustice in place. In this way, a transformative agroecology also represents an opportunity to go beyond the biophysical to consider social and political change through emancipatory practice-led social learning. This is capable of strengthening social-ecological relationships by restoring eroded knowledges, recovering lost resources and rebuilding bonds between people and their landscapes. For this to happen, we need to facilitate inclusive processes that invite people into decision-making, and to stimulate new ways of thinking and acting together. In applying these principles to stabilisation agriculture, my vision is to co-create and disseminate a body of transdisciplinary research that generates new insights, thought and practices that more clearly demonstrates pathways to social and environmental justice through equitable resilience. Seen in this way, stabilisation agriculture rooted in agroecological principles and practices can and should play a more prominent role in institutional formations, policies and processes dedicated to the prevention of, and recovery from, human-induced and natural disasters for more inclusive, equitable and ultimately durable outcomes.