POSTGRADUATE STUDY
I have a PhD in Human Geography awarded by Open University's Department of Geography. My thesis was titled Doing food security in practice: seeds, seed banking, and material preparations for the future, and was supervised by Dr. Nick Bingham and Prof. John Allen. It was examined by Dr. Simon Carter and Prof. Sarah Whatmore.
The starting point for my research was the increasingly dominant role discussions around food security have come to take in contemporary agronomic discourse. This intrigued me. If food security is so important, I wondered, how does this somewhat nebulous concept actually come into being? Or, in other words, how is food security practiced?
The preservation of plant genetic resources, known also seed banking, has been suggested by influential governmental and non-governmental organisations to be one of the multitude of practices which may contribute to the broader aim of bringing food security into being. My research investigates the practice of seed banking and, following the approaches of scholars such as Annemarie Mol, John Law and Bruno Latour, does so with a particular interest in its materials and practices.
My research was supported by affiliation with the ESRC funded Biosecurity Borderlands project, based at the Open University and Exeter University.
The starting point for my research was the increasingly dominant role discussions around food security have come to take in contemporary agronomic discourse. This intrigued me. If food security is so important, I wondered, how does this somewhat nebulous concept actually come into being? Or, in other words, how is food security practiced?
The preservation of plant genetic resources, known also seed banking, has been suggested by influential governmental and non-governmental organisations to be one of the multitude of practices which may contribute to the broader aim of bringing food security into being. My research investigates the practice of seed banking and, following the approaches of scholars such as Annemarie Mol, John Law and Bruno Latour, does so with a particular interest in its materials and practices.
My research was supported by affiliation with the ESRC funded Biosecurity Borderlands project, based at the Open University and Exeter University.