Simon Batterbury, Visiting Professor. Inaugural Chair in Political Ecology at LEC 2017-19.  Now Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia simonpjb@unimelb.edu.au. My interest is in how people sustain livelihoods and their identities in adverse environmental, political and social conditions. I'm most interested in environmental justice and struggles, and sustainable livelihoods in drylands and international development issues, led by social science investigations and the exciting interdisciplinary and multi-scalar field of political ecology, where LEC has particular strengths. 

I worked on agricultural futures, rural development, 'desertification' and soil and water conservation in the West African Sahel as an academic, and with development projects (in Burkina Faso and Niger). Then  in East Timor with Australian and Timorese colleagues (on land tenure struggles and rural livelihoods); and most recently with Kanak and European collaborators on the social and environmental complexities of unique Indigenous-controlled mining interests in New Caledonia (francophone islands in the South Pacific), where mining has geopolitical importance.

I have worked collaboratively and across disciplines for 27 years, latterly with a fantastic PhD group, that has had 15 PhD and 38 Masters and Honours graduates; and students currently working in Indonesia and on resource scarcity. 

Closer to home, I am enthusiastic about alternative social and environmental movements working outside prevailing neoliberal norms, particularly community bicycle cultures - working with a range of activists and volunteering to fix bikes for disadvantaged groups in Melboune and formerly Lancaster.   

As a commitment to Open Access publishing, I have co-edited the flagship Journal of Political Ecology since 2003 (http://jpe.library.arizona.edu - free to authors and readers) and I curate a listing of reputable OA journals that are free or affordable in geography, anthropology, planning, environmental studies and the social sciences. 

I no longer teach at Lancaster, where I delivered LEC 320 on Africa and a Masters module on Poltiical Ecology.  I have taught every semester except 3 since 1993, to over 4,500 students. I was also Director of the unique, interdisciplinary 370-strong Master of Environment at Melbourne.

I studied human and environmental geography (BA Hons. Reading University, 1985; MA and PhD Clark University USA, 1990/1997). I have lectured in human geography and development studies, at Brunel University (1993-1999), the LSE (1999-2001), the University of Arizona (2001-2004), and most recently Environmental Studies at the University of Melbourne (2004-2016, 2019->), with fellowships at Colorado, Roskilde, Oxford (ECI) and VUB (Cosmopolis). 

Further information and cv is available at http://www.simonbatterbury.net, publications in English and French since 1993 are linked here, and general ruminations are at  http://simonbatterbury.wordpress.com. I'm on Researchgate and Academia (unless they get shut down or start charging).