Simon Batterbury, Visiting Professor in Sociology. I was the inaugural Chair in Political Ecology at LEC, 2017-19. My ongoing job is Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia simonpjb@unimelb.edu.au. Interests are broad: how people sustain livelihoods and their identities in adverse environmental, political and social conditions. I'm most interested in environmental justice and struggles in New Caledonia-Kanaky, and international development issues led by social science investigations and the exciting interdisciplinary and multi-scalar field of political ecology, where Lancaster has particular strengths. At Lancaster I have a British Academy fellowship to study the social and environmental contributions of community bike workshops.
I formerly worked on agricultural futures, rural development, 'desertification' and soil and water conservation in the West African Sahel.
I have worked collaboratively and across disciplines for 30 years, latterly with a fantastic PhD group, that has had 18 PhD and 51 Masters and Honours graduates.
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 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.