About
58
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Introduction
My research explores the knowledge that informs environmental risk, development, and flood management. Over the past five years I have (attempted to) establish myself as a geographer of risk working at the interface of Human Geography and Science and Technology Studies (STS). I use the social sciences to analyse ‘how’ and ‘why’ particular knowledge persists. More recently, my work has expanded to include the link between knowledge and behaviour, particularly as understood by risk managers.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
September 2008 - October 2011
May 2012 - present
January 2011 - February 2012
Publications
Publications (58)
Presented as a panacea for the problems of environmental management, participation' conceals competing frames of meaning. Ladders of participation' explain insufficiently why public engagement is often limited to consultation, even within so-called higher level partnerships. To explain how participation is shaped to produce more or less symmetric e...
This review is written for climate experts dissatisfied with current approaches for contributing to societal responses to climate change via their interactions with publics. We review the origins and contemporary manifestations of the deficit model, showing that it is the underlying basis for how experts imagine and conduct their interactions with...
Participation with publics' has been embraced in both government and academic literatures as a necessary but currently unrealized means of governing socio-environmental challenges. This near-universal embrace carries global significance. Long-standing efforts in the context of disaster risk reduction (DRR) provide an opportunity to consider how exp...
This paper investigates the ways that intersecting desires to control flooding, evict informal settlements and build a modern global city play out in Jakarta. We explore resistance to eviction in two riverbank settlements: in one case playing by the formal rules led to a legal win but a loss of livelihood; the more successful case was self-organize...
The prolonged border closures associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have inspired novel approaches in field-based research. In this paper, we review methodological and collaborative practice reflections on the use of a team photo-diary activity generated by research associates working with smallholder farmers in Northwest Cambodia. Team photo-diari...
Agricultural extension depends substantially on extension agent-farmer relations and interactions, which contribute to enhancing livelihoods, agricultural and rural development. These social engagements are influenced by the spheres of institutions that underpin extension practices on the ground. This paper examines how rural institutions shape ext...
This paper applies the dual labour market migration concept to Cambodia and Thailand. We examine the migration patterns of 9066 individuals from 2507 households in rural Northwest Cambodia, distinguishing between internal migration within Cambodia and international migration to Thailand. We find that individuals from households with fewer resources...
In an era of growing environmental, socioeconomic, and market uncertainties, understanding the adaptive strategies of smallholder farmers is paramount for sustainable agricultural productivity and environmental management efforts. We adopted a mixed-methods approach to investigate the adaptive strategies of smallholders in Northwest Cambodia. Our m...
Emerging climate-development processes jeopardize water supply , especially in the Global South. In the Vietnamese Mekong Delta, disrupted water flows driven by climate change and hydro-power development have caused water scarcity, threatening agricultural systems in both upstream and coastal areas. Based on insights from desk reviews, stakeholder...
This historical overview uses a political ecology approach to examine agricultural change over time in Northwest Cambodia. It focuses on key historical periods, actors, and processes that continue to shape power, land, and farming relations in the region, emphasizing the relevance of this history for contemporary investments in agricultural extensi...
There is a growing recognition that community engagement generates spillover effects, though few empirical analyses have accounted for these often intangible and nonlinear impacts. In the broader political economy of disaster risk reduction (DRR), spillovers present participatory research and practice with opportunities for leveling the resource ar...
Objective
Evaluate the impact of a broadened theoretical and empirical model of community engagement aimed at coastal drowning prevention via relationship building between lifeguards and beachgoers through the delivery of skill development sessions on the beach.
Setting
A lifeguard-patrolled beach in Lorne, Victoria, Australia, during the 2023 pea...
Sustainable agricultural development not only addresses global food insecurity but may also alleviate poverty by enriching the lives of millions of smallholder farmers. Improving the sustainability and profitability of agriculture where smallholders are dominant creates profound impacts because small landholding farmers produce approximately 70–80%...
This article explores the contours of modernization in the unmaking and remaking of homes among evicted and resettled families in highrise housing. We examine the trajectories of forced eviction by drawing upon interviews with 17 individuals from nine evicted families who have transitioned from living in informal settlements to highrise social hous...
Despite reduced drowning incidence at lifeguard patrolled beaches, 71 drowning fatalities occurred on Australian beaches last year (2021–2022). Prevailing drowning prevention practices on beaches include patrolling lifeguards positioning safety flags in less hazardous locations and encouraging beachgoers to swim between them. Such methods represent...
Most drowning deaths on Australian beaches occur in locations not patrolled by lifeguards. At patrolled locations, where lifeguards supervise flagged areas in which beachgoers are encouraged to swim between, the incidence of drowning is reduced. To date, risk prevention practices on coasts focus on patrolled beaches, deploying warning signs at unpa...
Responding to societal challenges requires an understanding of how institutional change happens or does not happen. In the context of flood risk reduction, a central impediment of transformational change is a struggle over how public participation is understood and practiced. Risk institutions are often portrayed as resistant to change, which overl...
This paper explores how the state-led ‘freshening the coastal zones’ policy has been implemented in pursuit of sustainable development in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta. Drawing on a case study of the Ba Lai irrigation scheme in a coastal district of Ben Tre Province, the paper argues that the state’s ideology of ‘freshwater over saltwater’ results in...
Community engagement for disaster risk reduction has become central to participatory emergency management. In neoliberal contexts, publics are increasingly portrayed as responsible for preparing and responding to disasters, while at the same time and contradictorily, they are engaged by the state to encourage compliance with top-down policies and d...
Risk tends to be conceptualized at the individual scale, with global risk communication and governance efforts fixated on an individual's knowledge and behavior. While individuals are undoubtedly influenced by those who surround them, such human–human interactions tend to be excluded from empirical and field‐based analyses of risk taking. This stud...
Agricultural extension is booming. This interest is critical in the context of numerous pressing issues linked to agrarian change and rural development. Because of its importance, extension has attracted significant critique for its persistent exclusion of social and political factors. In this light, the history of extension can be thought of as a...
Feedback is at the heart of debates over student satisfaction and academic workload, an issue likely to increase in importance as the tertiary sector responds to the funding crisis sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic. In this light, the development of approaches to improve feedback is essential for teaching and learning, with many approaches involving...
This article presents an innovative mixed methodology that integrates qualitative geographic information systes (GIS) methods to expand the examination of space in the context of people’s lived experiences and risk. We emphasize the specific ways in which individuals perceive risk by treating risk as relational. Conceptualizing risk as relational c...
Hazardous rocky coasts are a leading site for coastal drowning deaths worldwide. Between 2004 and 2017, 149 rock fishers have drowned on Australia's rocky coasts, making rock fishing one of Australia's deadliest sports. Most portrayals of drowning frame the event with high-energy waves inundating shore platforms, washing fishers off balance and int...
Research '(In)action': rethinking traditional understandings of disaster risk reduction
This study invites readers to experience risk on Australia’s hazardous rocky coasts with the rock fishing community. In the paper, we offer an understanding of risk that is relational, a process that emerges within human–environment interactions in a dynamic coastal space that is constantly changing. Exploring the in situ and ongoing sensory attune...
Drowning on rocky coasts is a problem with global significance, but it is a particularly acute issue in Australia where rocky coasts account for 19% of coastal drownings. The risk of drowning is often framed as a consequence of waves washing over shore platforms, which sweep unsuspecting victims into the sea. Although the physical processes of ‘wav...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical insights into urban household perceptions and (in)action towards the perceived impacts of climate change, based on a case study in Kensington, Victoria, Australia. This case utilises households as sites of active agency, rather than as passive recipients of climate change or associated gove...
This paper explores how social networks and bonds within and across organisations shape disaster operations and strategies. Local government disaster training exercises serve as a window through which to view these relations, and ‘social capital’ is used as an analytic for making sense of the human relations at the core of disaster management opera...
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to explore how flood management practitioners rationalise the emergence of sustainable flood management. Key to this analysis are differences rooted in assumptions over what flood management is and should do.
Design/methodology/approach
– The popularity of natural flood management offers a case with which to...
River flooding is a serious hazard in the UK with interest driven by recent widespread events. This paper reviews different approaches to flood risk management and the borders (physical, conceptual and organisational) that are involved. The paper showcases a multi-method approach to negotiating flood risk management interventions. We address three...
Active learning is increasingly promoted within institutions of higher education to assist students develop higher order thinking and link knowledge to meaning. In this paper, the authors evaluate the use of weekly online quizzes based on prescribed preparatory material as a tool to incentivize preparatory reading in order to enable and encourage a...
Human activities have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of Nature' (Steffen et al., 2007, 614). Introduction If humans have become a rival to Nature, then the epic nomenclature of the great forces – the eras, periods, and epochs of geological time – have finally been reconciled with the social, something geographers...
The Anthropocene is not amenable to the senses but, like many modern concepts, must be made visible. We explore the 'Great Acceleration' imagery as an immu-table mobile to explore how this human-made geological epoch is constituted through the aggregation of disparate elements of extreme complexity. Our analysis explores how disparate issues such a...
Knowledge of suicide is made through violent epistemologies that sever self-destruction from space, time, and place. As an inherently incomprehensible issue, efforts to make sense of suicide through abstraction have the paradoxical effect of inhibiting understanding. This paper argues that the incoherences characteristic of suicide are not an obsta...
Major natural disasters are events where day-to-day governance activities are disrupted and a large range of different actors – governmental and non-governmental – are required to (re)act. Given the inherently chaotic nature of disaster events, and the diverse groups responding to their attendant impacts, clarity about how authority and responsibil...
Water management in Australia is complex and inter-connected. It is also vitally important to Australia’s prosperity; as the country continues to grow, water contributes to the prosperity of our own population, our export revenues, the sustained quality of our environment and the well-being of our regional communities.
Catchment management in the developed world is undergoing a fundamental reconfiguration in which top-down governance is being challenged by local organisations promoting collaborative decisionmaking. Local, participation-based organisations are emerging as mediators of relations between governments and publics. These organisations, defined here as...
The two concepts that presently dominate water resource research and management are the Global Water Partnership's (GWP, 2000) interpretation of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) and Ecosystem Services (ES) as interpreted by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA, 2005). Both concepts are subject to mounting criticism, with a significant...
The purpose of this paper is to review and discuss the relationship between government publications and academic studies of flood management in Bangladesh. The paper reviews these literatures while also emphasizing the assumptions, objectives and national issues that have influenced modern flood management. This approach aims to engage with the evo...
This paper traces the integration of a particular set of knowledge claims into flood management in Bangladesh following the instigation and collapse of the Flood Action Plan. Using the work of Goodbred and Kuehl (1998) as an entry point and partially in response to Nicholls and Goodbred's (2004) call for integrated assessments to improve understand...
