School of Social and Political Science

Background

I completed my MA in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh in 2016. My dissertation research focused on social movements to address environmental sustainability and risk. This was framed through how people imagine the future and how that informed their actions in the present. I am particularly interested in how people's imagined futures are used in the present to create positive change.

My current PhD research is an ESRC (1+3) funded project that explores the intersection between the new outer space industry in Scotland and rewilding projects in the Scottish Highlands. Building on my previous research, I look at how imagined futures are constituted, consolidated and contested through building spaceports. Broadly, I consider how large scale infrastructure projects are planned, anticipated, speculated about and understood at the community level. By examining how this interacts with rewilding projects and environmentalism - and their particular narratives about the Scottish Highlands - the notion of wilderness is put into tension with locals' understandings of the land that is their home.