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My
interest in environmental and social justice issues is manifest in a number
of completed and ongoing research projects. Please click on the project
titles below to see the details:
1. Affordable eco-homes: low-income environmental
solutions
2. Greening the Economy: Environmental groups’
alternative economic solutions in Australia and Britain
3. Sustainability transitions: rethinking everyday
practices, identities and livelihoods
4. Adaptations to Rural Communities through Living
with Climate Change
5. Autonomous Geographies: Activism and everyday
life
6. Internet Activism: Anti-war movements in the
Information Age
7.
Finding
common ground: Environmental justice and the interrelationships between
Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups in Australia
8.
Environmentalists’
internet activism in Australia
Affordable eco-homes:
low-income environmental solutions
Funding source: Winston
Churchill Memorial Trust Travelling Fellowship £7,000. [PI]
Timeframe: 2010 (June) –
2011 (March)
Project website: http://naturalbuild.wordpress.com/
  
‘Affordable eco-homes’ is a one year research project
on low cost eco-housing. The aim of the project is to improve British
approaches and practices to affordable eco-building. It hopes to understand
how we can create more opportunities for people to self-build their own
eco-homes in rural areas. The project has three objectives:
1. to identify successful small-scale,
community-led, self-built eco-developments targeted at low-income potential
residents;
2. to understand how such
developments have overcome problems of planning, local resistance,
collective organisation, finance, and using non-conventional materials; and
3. to identify common successful
strategies in creating affordable eco-homes which could be adopted in
Britain.
To date the fieldwork for this project
has been completed (March 2011) and the results are being written up.
Information about each of the case
studies is available by clicking on the appropriate link below:
a.
Straw bale Waddington council house, Lincolnshire, Britain
b.
Lammas,
Wales
c.
Green Hills,
Scotland
d.
Brighton Earthship, East
Sussex, Britain
e.
Tinkers Bubble,
Somerset, Britain
f.
Landmatters,
Devon, Britain
g.
La ecoaldea del Minchal,
Motril, Spain
h.
El valle de
Sensaciones, Yator, Spain
i.
Panya Project,
Chiang Mai, Thailand
j.
Pun Pun, Chiang Mai, Thailand
k.
Amy’s Earth House, Mae
Hong Son, Thailand
l.
Straw bale house, Yacanto, Cordoba, Argentina
m.
Casa Tierra, San
Luis, Argentina
n.
Aldea Velatropa, Buenos Aires. Argentina
o.
Los Angeles Eco Village,
California, USA
p.
Lama Foundation, New Mexico, USA
q.
Thom Wheeler’s, New Mexico, USA
r.
Ampersand Learning Center, New Mexico, USA
s. Biotecture Earthships, New Mexico, USA
t. Crestone, Colorado, USA
u.
Kailash Eco-village,
Oregon, USA
v.
Peninsula Park
Commons,
Oregon, USA
w.
Dignity Village, Oregon, USA
x.
ReBuild Center, Oregon, USA
y.
City Repair Project, Oregon, USA
z. Columbia Eco-village, Oregon, USA
Greening the Economy:
Environmental groups’ alternative economic solutions in Australia and Britain
Funding source: British Academy
£7,423. [PI]
Timeframe: 2010 (Feb) -
2012 (Feb)
Project website: http://greeningeconomy.wordpress.com
It
is finally being acknowledged that environmental problems cannot be solved
without tackling economic issues, and environmental groups have begun to
engage more explicitly in designing economic alternatives. Using an
analysis of two environmental organisations’ (Friends of the Earth UK and
The Wilderness Society, Australia) policies and practices, this project
critically examines environmental groups’ approaches to taking
responsibility for, and offering solutions to, the economic consequences of
an environmental protection agenda.
It asks four
research questions:
1.
How is the economy conceived by environmental groups?
2.
What interventions into economic issues do
environmental groups espouse?
3.
What do these interventions mean in practice across
diverse places and populations?
4. How do these
policies and practices relate to, and reflect, the organisational form,
value and ideas of environmental groups?
This project seeks to understand how the
economy is considered by environmental groups, what economic interventions
are advocated, and what these interventions mean in practice. This will be
ascertained through a detailed analysis of campaign material, in-depth
interviews with campaigners, local activists and those affected by the
campaigns, and site visits to on-going environmental campaign targets in
London and the Kimberley, Western Australia.
Sustainability
transitions: rethinking everyday practices, identities and livelihoods
Funding source: Economic and
Social Research Council Seminar Series £17,570 [Co-I]
Timeframe: 2011 (Feb) –
2013 (Feb)
In the last decade a new research community has begun to
emerge around the notion of broad societal transitions to sustainable
patterns of production and consumption. In the Netherlands especially, a
new steering tool called Transition Management has been developed which
aims to facilitate practitioners through a process of initiating and
steering sustainability transitions (Geels 2005; Geels and Schot 2007).
This can be seen as part of a broader development in the research and
policy community that is exploring the contours of a new science of
sustainability and innovation programmes that are oriented towards societal
challenges (Foxon et al 2008; Shove and Walker 2007; Smith and Stirling
2010).
In
this seminar series we will aim to explore transitions from explicitly
social, political and economic perspectives. We will explore and critique
theories of transition from the specific perspective of the social; aiming
to build bridges to relevant social theory and social science disciplines.
The series will also explore the interrelationships between theory and
practice and how they inform and shape one another. Seminars 1-4 focus on
stimulating interdisciplinary academic dialogue - addressing themes of capacities
for transition (at various scales); the practices of earlier social
movements that provide a historical precedent for contemporary transitions;
how social identities may change through the process of sustainability
transitions; and the everyday politics of transition as enacted by social
movements and other political actors. In contrast, Seminar 5 has been
designed to have a practitioner and policy focus with academic input, will
utilise Open Space technologies to enable participants to set the agenda
for the day, and will be hosted in a non-academic environment at the Centre
for Alternative Technology.
Adaptations to Rural Communities
through Living with Climate Change
Funding source: Rural Economy
and Land Use £159,962 [Co-I]
Timeframe: 2011 (Jan)
-2013 (Jan)
The research seeks to explore how rural communities may
be impacted by social and environmental changes associated with climate
change. In particular it assesses the degree to which three drivers of
rural transition - governmental policies for climate change mitigation and
adaptation (CCMA), alternative/counter-cultural visions and practices, and
environmental changes associated with climate change - might present quite
contrasting futures for rural communities, and how rural communities might
variously engage with, adapt to and drive forward particular futures. This
is done through a programme of work that seeks to foster creative knowledge
exchange and learning between governmental policy makers, alternative
environmentalists, academic researchers and rural residential communities.
Attention is drawn to different rural futures presented
by the three drivers of transition and the degree to which they are
currently failing to engage with each other. The project seeks to
facilitate engagements between experts on the environmental impacts of
climate change, governmental climate change mitigation and adaptation
strategies, and alternative low-impact developments through the
establishment of a steering committee including representatives from each
discursive community. The interactions of steering group members will be
examined by the research team, who will also draw on steering group
discussions, their own knowledge and reviews of existing studies, in order
to develop rural climate change mitigation and adaptation scenarios.
These
scenarios will then be employed in an interdisciplinary examination of
three rural communities that are differentially positioned with respect to
the three drivers of rural transition being examined, with visual
representations of potential futures being created and then presented to
and discussed with residents in these communities. The degree of
engagement, resistance and transformation of the scenarios will be examined
by the research team, who will also present their findings on community
responses to the expert steering committee.
Autonomous Geographies:
Activism and everyday life
Funding source: Economic and
Social Research Council with Dr Paul Chatterton (Leeds), £120,977. [Co-PI]
Timeframe: 2005 (Oct) -
2008 (June)
Project website: www.autonomousgeographies.org
More information: Download the Frequently
Asked Questions document
  
The
focus of this 2 year project (jointly managed between the University of Leeds
and Leicester) was what we call 'autonomous geographies' - spaces where
there is a questioning of laws and social norms, and a desire to create
non-capitalist, collective forms of politics, identity and citizenship. We
looked at how activists make and remake these types of spaces in their
everyday lives in cities by asking four main questions: what are the core
ideas, beliefs and visions expressed by autonomous groups and projects? How
are such ideas translated into action? What kinds of spaces for participation
and identity do these ideas and actions create? What does it mean to live
in interstitial (in-between) and overlapping spaces? The research employed
a participatory action research approach, undertaking participatory
observation and interview work.
  
I lead
the case study theme: Living Autonomously, and worked with Lammas (www.lammas.org.uk),
a Low Impact Settlement Project at Pont y Gafel farm in South West Wales. I
also conducted interviews with people at Hockerton Housing Project, Hill
Holt Wood, Brighton Earthship, Project X,
and Steward
Woodland Community.
Key outputs from this project include:
Chatterton, P and Pickerill, J. 2010. In, against and beyond capitalism. The messy spaces, practices and
identities of everyday activism in the UK. Transactions
of the Institute of British Geographers, Volume 35, Issue 4, pages 475–490
The Autonomous Geographies Collective. 2010.
'Beyond Scholar activism: Making Strategic
Interventions Inside and Outside the Neoliberal University.
ACME,
9, 2, http://www.acme-journal.org/Volume9-2.htm
Pickerill,
J and Maxey, L (eds.). 2009. Low Impact Development: The future in our hands.
Pickerill,
J and Chatterton, P. 2006. Notes
towards autonomous geographies: creation, resistance and self management as
survival tactics Progress
in Human Geography, Vol.30, No.6: 1-17
Pickerill, J and Maxey, L. 2007. ‘The Lammas
Low Impact Housing Development' Sustainability:
The practical journal for green building, renewable energy and sustainable
communities, 1, 18-19.
Internet Activism: Anti-war
movements in the Information Age
Funding source: Economic and
Social Research Council with Professor Frank Webster (City), £134,222.
[Co-I]
Timeframe: 2006 (Jan) -
2007 (Dec)
Project website: www.antiwarresearch.info
  
This
project aimed to characterise and account for the distinguishing features
of anti-war movements in Britain while showing particular concern for their
use and adoption of new media/ICTs. It examined processes of informal
political participation in often transitory and heterogeneous mobilisation
round contentious issues. Of which the anti-war movements are a major – if
understudied – instance. Using recent coalitions mobilised against wars,
four foci were explored: representation, organisation, mobilisation and
coalition building. Representation concerns how social movements present
themselves internally and externally; organisation involves questions of
management of affairs; mobilisation is about the conditions of activity
amongst the social movements; and coalition building is about how alliances
are created and maintained. This project was funded by the ESRC and ran
from January 2006 until December 2007.
Writings from this project include:
Pickerill, J. 2009. Symbolic production,
representation, and contested identities: Anti-war activism online. Information, Communication and Society,
12, 7, 969-993
Gillan, K, Pickerill, J and Webster, F. 2008. Anti-War Activism: New Media and Protest.
Palgrave McMillan [available in paperback from 2011]
Gillan, K, Pickerill, J and Webster, F. 2008. The
Information Environment of War. Sociology
Compass, 2, 6, 1833-1847
Finding common ground:
Environmental justice and the interrelationships between Indigenous and
non-Indigenous groups in Australia
Funding source: British Academy
£4,986. [PI]
Timeframe: 2005 (June –
Dec)
Project website: www.jennypickerill.info/commonground.html
  
This
project examined the relationships between conservationists and indigenous
activists by exploring:
1.
Concepts of environment: by exploring
the different values and meanings given to ‘the environment’ and in
particular the concept of ‘wilderness’ by
environmental and indigenous activists.
2.
Spaces of dialogue: to begin to delineate how spaces
of dialogue are created, sustained and threatened. Do these spaces have to
be neutral to both groups?
3.
Working practices: how do activists’ practices
encompass, exclude or are shaped by indigenous engagement? how are productive working practices generated? Is there
a mutual sense of ownership over these processes? Have there been
successful outcomes? How has this success been defined?
Key outputs from this project include:
Pickerill, J. 2009.'Finding common ground? Spaces of dialogue and the
negotiation of Indigenous interests in environmental campaigns in Australia’,
Geoforum 40, 1, 66-79
Environmentalists’ internet activism in
Australia
Funding source: The Leverhulme Trust Overseas
Studentship, £34,267 (including fieldwork expenses).
[PI]
Timeframe: 2001 (Mar) - 2003 (Mar)
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This project explored the
ideals, practices and contestations of Indymedia collectives in
Australia. Indymedia has been an opportunity to put into practice the
ideals and principles of many of those involved in the broad and
multifaceted alter-globalisation movements. It has embraced open
publishing enabling any user to contribute their own
content and discussion to a website immediately, with only minimal
moderation.
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Key outputs from this project include:
Pickerill, J. 2007. ‘Autonomy
on-line’: Indymedia and practices of alter-globalisation,
Environment and Planning A,
vol.39
Pickerill, J. 2006. ‘Radical politics on the net' Parliamentary Affairs, Vol.59, No.2:
266-282
Pickerill, J. 2004. ‘Rethinking
political participation: Experiments in internet activism in Australia and
Britain’ in R.Gibson, A.Roemmele and
S.Ward, Electronic Democracy:
Mobilisation, Organisation and Participation via new ICTs. Routledge, London.
Funding
source: Economic and Social Research Council scholarship
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In the late 1990's I explored
the use of the internet by environmental groups and campaigns across the UK
using seven case studies (Centre for Alternative Technology, Friends of
the Earth UK, Green Student Network, McSpotlight, the Mobile Office, Save
Westwood Lyminge Forest campaign and SchNEWS). Using social movement
concepts the research examined how environmental activists negotiated the
tensions within techno-environmentalism and overcame problems of access
and the pressure of oligarchy. It explored how activists dealt with the
perceived threats from surveillance and counterstrategy and finally
considered whether through the use of such technology new forms of
environmental politics were developing. The results of this research
project have been published in a book - Cyberprotest: Environmental activism online,
a book chapter and several articles
(PDF copies available on my publications webpage).
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Last updated: 8th
March 2011
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