Owain Jones

• PhD, MSc, MA, MA, BA(Hons)
• Professor at Bath Spa University

Climate change, rapid urbanisation, pandemics, as well as innovations in technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) are all impacting urban space. One response to such changes has been to make cities ecologically sustainable and ‘smart’. From real-time bus information, autonomous electric vehicle...

This paper explores practices of citizen bat conservation in the city through the lens of becoming-with animal. It draws on insights gained from practices related to bat conservation efforts through interviews and participant observation with bat advocates in the city of Groningen, Netherlands. We show how becoming-with happens and why it is signif...

The contributors to Kin draw on the work of anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose (1946–2018), a foundational voice in environmental humanities, to examine the relationships of interdependence and obligation between human and nonhuman lives. Through a close engagement over many decades with the Aboriginal communities of Yarralin and Lingara in northern...

This article sets out the authors' attachments to, and memories of, two tidal river/channel landscapes and how these are being folded into collaborative work, which brings these places to attention through art practice and shared reflection. The rivers/channels in question are given voice in the introduction and ideas of the ecologies of mouths and...

This book brings together a host of internationally recognised scholars to provide an interdisciplinary perspective on the representation of the child in cinema. Individual chapters examine how children appear across a broad range of films, including Badlands (1973), Ratcatcher (1999), Boyhood (2014), My Neighbour Totoro (1988), and Howl’s Moving C...

In responding to the spatiotemporally specific geographies of extinction charted in the articles in this special section, this article reflects on the sociocultural factors that inform the ways in which extinction is framed and impede recognition of the enormity of the anthropogenic extinction event in which we are all bound. This article argues th...

This article provides the first international overview and detailed discussion of teaching in the environmental humanities (EH). It is divided into three parts. The first offers a series of regional overviews: where, when, and how EH teaching is taking place. This part highlights some key regional variability in the uptake of teaching in this area,...

Was haben Moskitonetze in Ghana mit Küstenschutz in Neuseeland oder Rohmilchkäseproduktion in den USA gemeinsam? Was verbindet Plastikmüll in den Meeren mit der Frage, ob Fleisch von Tieren stammt? Dieser Band vermittelt Einblicke in ein neues Forschungsfeld an der Schnittstelle von Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie, Geografie und Science & Technolog...

Socio-environmental crises are currently transforming the conditions for life on this planet, from climate change, to resource depletion, biodiversity loss and long-term pollutants. The vast scale of these changes, affecting land, sea and air have prompted calls for the ‘ecologicalisation’ of knowledge. This book adopts a much needed ‘more-than-hu...

This article summarises a project undertaken at the Newton Park campus of Bath Spa University over 1 week in October 2015. The project provided a space for interdisciplinary collaborations between geography and art students to explore the commonalities and differences in how they saw, interpreted and creatively re-presented the campus, using a vari...

This article proposes the concept of sustainable flood memory as a critical and agentic form of social and cultural remembering of learning to live with floods. Drawing upon research findings that use the 2007 floods in the South West of England as a case study, we explore and analyse the media representations of flooding, the role of community and...

The paradigm shift to more distributed flood risk management strategies in the UK involves devolved responsibilities to the local, and the need to enhance risk ownership by communities. This poses questions about how communities build resilience to future flood risk, and how agencies support these processes. This paper explores results from interdi...

This paper explores sound infused creative responses to grief and related emotions of loss and landscape in the context of the tidal Severn Estuary (UK) and its particular sonic qualities. We draw principally on the practice of artist Louisa Fairclough, linking to wider discussions of emotion, sound and the body, in shared autotopological explorati...

In Emotion Online: Theorizing Affect on the Internet (2013), Garde-Hansen and Gorton textually analyse the online debates around climate change media that entangle the threat of bad weather with fears over race relations, war and political dissent. Drawing upon Brian Massumi’s work, which combines extreme weather and war into a discursively connect...

In this paper we seek to further develop the concept/methodology of data sonification (see Palmer and Jones 2014) as an experimental aesthetic, geo-poetic, and techno-scientific creative procedure for making explicit the generative processuality of elemental landscape/ ecosystems/ habits. In continuing our explorations of data sonification using th...

This paper contributes to discussions about landscape and place and how they are practised in relation to time, displacement, memory and loss. I develop a multi-dimensional account of how landscape is generated in the moment by spatio-temporal topologies and topographies in which memory, movement and materiality play full parts. I consider absence,...

Severe floods on the Somerset Levels in winter 2014, and a series of other recent extreme floods across the UK, pose questions about the research needed to unravel the complex nature of flood risk and its implications for society. While much emphasis is placed on research in the natural and engineering sciences to better predict flood risk and deve...

This paper consists of a discussion of data sonification-a procedure in which information gathered from systems such as bodies or environmental processes is analyzed and reprocessed into audio models, so aspects of the process generating the data (for example, emotional or tidal ebb and flow) can be apprehended by human senses. This serves various...

Landscapes are complex outplays of intersecting flows of agency in which humans and non-humans combine in a series of registers, and in cycles of comings and goings to make meshworks of life in place. The presence of animals in some landscapes can be particularly culturally, politically, ecologically, and economically significant but are often over...

This experimental article seeks to bring new approaches to landscape emerging in cultural geography into conversation with arts and humanities practice and scholarship which are focusing on matters of community, landscape and environment, and particularly vulnerable, watery landscapes. These approaches raise a whole host of questions about how chan...

This article explores aspects of media/visual representation of children's geographies and links that exploration to notions of what I have termed the 'otherness of children'. The term is about how children's everyday experiences are, in some ways, quite distant from adult views and experiences of the world, and that adults cannot expect to easily,...

A UK Cabinet Office review after the 2007 floods highlighted different types of knowledge needed for effective flood risk management, along with knowledge gaps. This paper explores key, emerging aspects of this expanded knowledge base, namely relationships between expert and local/lay knowledges, the changing nature of local knowledge of community...

The UK policy change from ‘flood defence’ to ‘flood risk management’ in the 1990s has involved shifts to more distributed flood risk management responsibilities. This poses questions about roles of floodplain residents in community-led adaptation planning for changing flood risk, and how these roles can be supported/strengthened. Research evidence...

This collection shifts the focus from collective memory to individual memory, by incorporating new performative approaches to identity, place and becoming. Drawing upon cultural geography, the book provides an accessible framework to approach key aspects of memory, remembering, archives, commemoration and forgetting in modern societies.

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The movements of the oceans, and the liminal margins of sea, land, and fresh water have profound implications for human/nonhuman life. Those movements and margins are rhythmically affected by tides which are thus a key means by which the forceful materiality of water is animated. Where salt water meets land and river mouths, ceaseless, varying, dai...

This chapter explores linkages between forests and identity. It does this in a number of interrelating ways by considering how the very striking and rich materialities of trees and forest landscapes can become entangled in the creation of both individual and collective identities in many ways. This is often articulated through ideas of place and la...

Scrutiny reviews after the 2007 floods, UK (Cabinet Office 2008; DEFRA 2008) have highlighted different types of knowledges needed for effective flood risk management, along with knowledge gaps. This paper evaluates critically the changing nature of local flood knowledge in community settings, based on research undertaken after the 2007 floods. The...

In a sense, to be a child is to be under surveillance. Parents watch their children to keep them safe and to correct their behaviour. Teachers keep an eye on students to enforce classroom rules and to maintain discipline. Managers of shopping malls and many other semi-public places use a variety of methods to keep young people under control in orde...

IntroductionUnderstanding the World ‘After’ NatureMethodologies, Ethics and Politics Suitable for an ‘After Natural World’Final Thoughts: Destructive or Creative Entanglements?Bibliography

This paper draws out linkages between non-representational theory (NRT) and pragmatism. In doing so it sets NRT in a much wider, historical anti-representational movement. This should add momentum to its progress, and open up the considerable pragmatist and neo-pragmatist heritage as a resource for dealing with questions about methods, politics and...

In this paper I seek to explore the idea of the otherness of childhood. I suggest that there are considerable differences between the becomings of children and the becomings of adults. In the face of these a number of questions need to be asked about adult–childhood relations in society and about academic approaches to children and childhood, parti...

We spend ever‐increasing periods of our lives travelling in cars, yet quite what it is we do while travelling, aside from driving the vehicle itself, is largely overlooked. Drawing on analyses of video records of a series of quite ordinary episodes of car travel, in this paper we begin to document what happens during car journeys. The material conc...

We spend ever-increasing periods of our lives travelling in cars, yet quite what it is we do while travelling, aside from driving the vehicle itself, is largely overlooked. Drawing on analyses of video records of a series of quite ordinary episodes of car travel, in this paper we begin to document what happens during car journeys. The material conc...

Abstract This paper outlines exploratory research undertaken by the “A New Sense of Place?” Project in Bristol, UK, into the potential new, location sensitive, computing technologies may have for enhancing urban children's socio-spatial practices. The paper describes a series of workshops held with children in which mapping activities and use of th...

This paper explores adult discourses in literary references which revolve around the relationship between childhood and disordered space. This association is often constructed as a positive expression of the romantic innocence of childhood and nature, but it can also be construed as negative in cases where ‘little devils’ are let loose in hazardous...

In this paper, we describe design work with 36 children aged 9 and 10 in Bristol, United Kingdom. The design work was conducted using emerging mobile and wireless technology which has the potential to impact on the problematic issue of children's access to, use of, and safety within the wider urban environment. A series of workshops are described i...

This paper explores the historical development of a Victorian cemetery in Bristol - Arnos Vale - in order to discuss how the nonhuman agency of trees has been enrolled into particular networks of environmental change and conservation. We argue that trees have both acted as socialized actors in the narrative of the changing nature of Arnos Vale and...

In this paper we examine attempts to reframe the ethics of nature-society relations. We trace a postmodern turn which reflects a distrust of overarching moral codes and narratives and points towards a more nuanced understanding of how personal moral impulses are embedded within, and inter-subjectively constituted by, contextual configurations of se...

In this paper we describe a new research initiative, 'A New Sense of Place?', which involves the collaboration of private- and public-sector partners. Its purpose is to explore and develop the interface between children and new mobile 'wearable' computing and communication devices. The research team is particularly interested in how these new techn...

This paper describes a workshop run as part of 'A New Sense of Place?' an initiative exploring and developing the interface between children and new mobile 'wearable' ICTs. This initiative is one part of 'Mobile Bristol', a wider project developing wearable devices, their applications and understandings of their potential in social terms. 'A New Se...

The intention of this article is to expand some of the contexts and some of the conceptual and methodological trajectories presented Philo's (2003) paper. In particular I explore the relationship of adulthood and childhood as articulated through memory and how this may impinge upon the practices of adults researching into, and writing about, childh...

This paper describes a workshop run as part of 'A New Sense of Place?' an initiative exploring and developing the interface between children and new mobile 'wearable' ICTs. This initiative is one part of 'Mobile Bristol', a wider project developing wearable devices, their applications and understandings of their potential in social terms. 'A New Se...

The aim of this paper is to explore the idea that in the UK 'the urban' can be constructed as an intrinsically unsuitable space for childhood. My suggestion is that romantic constructions of 'nature', 'childhood', the 'rural' and the 'urban' remain active symbolic legacies within contemporary culture and these can make the presence of the 'natural...

This paper focuses on the 'otherness' of childhood. I argue that this otherness has to be acknowledged and respected within the various, welcome attempts in social science study, and society more widely, to somehow bring children into various practices, to listen to their voices and to see things through their eyes. Some ethical and methodological...

In this paper we seek to develop the concept of dwelling as a means of theorising place and landscape. We do this for two interconnected reasons. First, dwelling has come to the fore recently as an approach to nature, place, and landscape, but we argue that further development of this idea is required in order to address issues relating to romantic...

Abstract This paper explores the operation of gender relations in the context of rural policy. Framed by debates on new rural governance, it considers how both the content and the culture of recent rural regeneration policy reflect highly masculine values and the maintenance of traditional power relations. New forms of decision making in rural area...

In this paper we consider issues surrounding the formation of partnerships for the delivery of rural regeneration. Partnership processes are of vital importance because of the central role they play in the emergent culture of governance which is now receiving a great deal of theoretical attention. We argue that the characteristic forms of governanc...

By following and connecting certain well-trodden routes through constructions of childhood, it is possible to arrive at a point at which the 'natural' gender of childhood is apparently male. This is indicated by the fact that girls are often termed 'tomboys' in both popular and lay discourses, even when they are partaking in what are seen to be the...

Considerations of lay discourses of the rural - people's everyday interpretations of rural places and ideas of the rural - have become increasingly evident in some key articles addressing the theory and practice of academic rural studies. A major element of the retheorization of rural studies, which itself is set within the broader contexts of rece...

This paper outlines exploratory research being undertaken by the 'A New Sense of Place?' project in Bristol into the potential wireless mobile computing technologies has for enhancing urban children's socio-spatial practices. The paper introduces the project and its overall aims and the nature of emerging mobile computing technologies. It then outl...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Bristol, 1997.