Broadly, my research examines the relationships between humans, nonhumans, and technologies. My research background is in ecological and environmental sciences, however I became more interested in why ecologists were asking the questions they were asking rather than the production of scientific knowledge itself. My research spans disciplinary trends in cultural and environmental geography, science and technology studies, and the cognate social sciences and humanities. I have grouped ongoing projects into distinct, yet interlinked themes below.

What might it mean if extinction does not last forever? My doctoral work examined the case of the bucardo, the only extinct animal to have been brought back to life—albeit briefly. In this work I argue that the presence of novel biotechnologies are changing the very meaning of life, unsettling preheld epistemologies of extinction and species. I explore the implications of aspirations to resurrect absent biota for the various ways biotic loss and recovery and made sense of by a range of social groups, across institutional and governance frameworks. Technologies of reanimation, and their social imaginaries, are deconstructing the firm ontological binary between extinct/extant—and by implication, absence/presence, loss/recovery—which I call ‘de/extinction’. I outline the theoretical and empirical grounding of this work in Environmental Humanities, the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, and cultural geographies.

I am increasingly preoccupied with the biopolitics of applied biotechnologies at the genomic scale, and how such interventions are being mobilised by certain social groups to repurpose nonhuman genomes as infrastructure for societal function. I have a keen interest in genetic engineering techniques and their development, with an empirical focus on their deployment in regenerative agriculture and rewilding. This work seeks to conceptualise ‘postgenomic biopolitics’, posing questions concerning the regulation of bodies, populations, and planet from the molecular—and genetic—scale. Related to this work is an ongoing collaboration with Catherine Oliver and Jonathon Turnbull which explores the discursive politics of ‘climate-friendly’ cattle and the regulation of cattle metabolism used to reduce methane emissions from enteric fermentation (rumination). This work has been featured in the Heroes and Villains of the Anthropocene seminar series.

In 2021, I co-founded the Digital Ecologies research group, which consists of early career researchers in geography and media studies examining the changing role of digital technologies, digital mediation, and digital spaces in the ways certain humans engage with, and govern, nonhuman life. In March 2021 we held an online, free, two-day conference with speakers from five continents presenting their work on these themes. Conceptually, the Digital Ecologies research group has been exploring the interdisciplinary intersections of more-than-human and environmental geographies with media studies and theories of mediation. With other members of the Digital Ecologies research group, I am the editor of the upcoming book Digital Ecologies, which is currently under review and expected published in early 2023.

With Jonathon Turnbull and Bill Adams, I have published on the political potentials of digital encounters with digitalised nonhuman life in the Journal of Environmental Media. A large portion of this work has been empirically focussed on the conservation histories of urban peregrine falcons in the UK, and the importance of digital media for their ecological success, for paradigmatic shifts in the production of ecological knowledges, and for broader public engagement with online environmentalism. Jonny and I recently presented an overview of this project to the Winged Geographies research group seminar series, which can be watched online. I have worked collaboratively with anthropologists, ecologists, and historians on the emergence of surveillance technologies in the ‘Digital Anthropocene’, recently published as a paper in EPE: Nature and Space.

My work in more-than-human geographies explores the relationships between humans, nonhumans, spaces, and temporalities. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I have been working collaboratively with Jonathon Turnbull, Jamie Lorimer, and Bill Adams on ‘lockdown natures’, largely critiquing the notion that nonhuman life will flourish in the absence of human presence, mobilities, and activities. Aspects of this work have been published in Dialogues in Human Geography, Cultural Anthropology, and the Geographical Journal, in addition to being featured on BBC Radio 4.

I am also interested in experimenting with alternative modes of research and representation in more-than-human geographies. With Jonathon Turnbull, I have recently been writing about the potentials of filmmaking as a geographical research technique to understand the lives and spaces of animals in the city. On this theme, we have a published an intervention in cultural geographies, and will be hosting a range of workshops in late 2021 with filmmakers working on the relationships between humans and animals.