Bangor University
Lead supervisor:
Dr Sophie Wynne-Jones 
Other supervisor(s):
- Dr Neal Hockley
Start date: October 2025 (Full time)
Award: Collaborative
Subject Pathway:
Environmental Planning
Thematic Cluster:
Place, Environment and Development Cluster
In partnership with:
Restoring the Celtic Rainforest for Net Zero – A Just Land Use Transition?
I am an interdisciplinary social scientist, rooted in anthropological sensibilities. My PhD project at Bangor University aims to learn alongside efforts to restore fragments of Celtic rainforest, with a focus on questions of social justice, inclusion and equity. The project will integrate and build on work spanning archaeology, geography, anthropology and science and technology studies.
My academic interests more broadly are guided by the question, "how might we live together well?", where 'we' denotes local to global multispecies communities. . This question orients me to address issues of belonging, inclusion, wellbeing, and equity. For instance, my Bachelor’s thesis focused on the issue of loneliness among student communities, designing and evaluating a conversational intervention to foster student belonging. In another example, my Master’s thesis considered food sharing and how this might enable more equitable, healthy and sustainable ways of living with other humans and nonhumans.
In addition, my academic work is guided by curiosity in methods. My Bachelor’s in the Human Sciences grounded me in multiple disciplinary repertoires from ecology, physiology and genetics to human geography, anthropology and human behaviour. The course encouraged us to make creative linkages between the theoretical and methodological offerings of different disciplines, to better understand human life. I grew particularly interested in anthropological methods, as there seemed more room for, and examples of, cross-pollination with other disciplines such as molecular biology (e.g.: Daly and Shepard Jr, 2019), ecology (e.g.: Tsing, 2015), and human evolution (e.g.: Ingold, 2014). This curiosity about the interdisciplinary potential of anthropological study brought me to study a Master’s course in medical anthropology, sociology and science and technology studies. While my thesis topic is more related to the environmental humanities, studying this Master’s enabled me to draw on the tools of these disciplines in new ways.
Finally, I am interested in an academic approach that is highly reflexive and infused with activist sensibilities. Reciprocity is a key element of research practices for me; I seek to find ways in my work to give back to participants, interlocuters and collaborators, both human and nonhuman. This can entail involving and informing participants as possible and desired, and seeking ways for my research to contribute actively to change, in this case climate mitigation.
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