Students

Omar Al Kindi

Project title: Naming Systems in Omani Vernacular Arabic.

Supervisors: Janet Watson and Jon Lovett

My PhD study comes in the context of ethnographic studies of cultural transitions in Oman, with great emphasis on the relationship between language and nature. The theory applied in the research focuses on the institutions as structures that regulate and constrain wide range of human actions including the linguistic practices such as: naming and terminology. According to this perspective, the analysis of the linguistic data is highly dependent on the institutional constraints imposed by the cultural and ecological settings. This study provides a new perspective for applying institutional economics for lexical semantic analysis of naming systems in vernacular Omani Arabic as examples of specialized linguistic data. The study also aims to recover some parts of the endangered cognitive and cultural background of the vernacular, especially the relationship between language and nature. The lexical knowledge of the generations born after 1970s witnesses a remarkable decline, especially nowadays in which the impact of globalization has become more severe.

 

Andrea Boom

Project Title: Language and Nature in South Arabia: Ethnographic description of traditional practices of Dhofar and Mahra

Supervisors: Janet Watson and Diane Nelson

Andrea Boom is a Commonwealth Scholar and PhD Candidate at the University of Leeds studying the link between endangered languages, cultures and ecosystems in southern Arabia. She is specifically interested in the human connection with the natural world and how languages and cultures adapt to their local environment. This research is particularly important today as people become disconnected from their immediate dependence on the natural world and knowledge of the symbiotic relationship between humans and their environment is disappearing. Her wider interests include partnership between academia and people with local knowledge to build collaborative projects making the local knowledge accessible to a wider audience.

 

Sicily Fiennes

Project Title: Opportunities for co-design of technology to address the Southeast Asian illegal bird trade

Supervisors: Chris Hassall, George Holmes and Tom Jackson

My doctoral research focuses on legal and illegal songbird trade in Asia and building machine learning tools to optimize species identification in markets. The main project is a machine learning-driven image recognition tool for species for use in bird markets in East Asia, targeted at law enforcement. I also seek to understand factors that influence the adoption and implementation of wildlife marketplace technologies amongst law enforcement and how this interacts with the risk of extinction of songbirds. I am also interested in opportunities for the co-creation of technology and decolonising design methods.

 

 

Alfie Howard

Project title: Animal speech and perceptions of threat in human-animal narratives from Kipling (1894) to Kivirähk (2007)

Supervisors: Graham Huggan and Diane Nelson

My PhD thesis examines anthropomorphism and representations of animal speech in fiction, with an emphasis on threats both to and from power. By analysing a range of texts, I explore different systems of power, including colonialism, class, patriarchy and human-animal relations. I am particularly interested in postcolonial studies and environmental humanities, and this year I am taking on the role of PGR coordinator for the Leeds Environmental Humanities Research Group.

 

 

Jenny Kennedy

Project title: Resisting cultural genocide: territorial destruction and resistance in Panama and Mexico

Supervisors: Thea Pitman and Adrian Gallagher

My research project focuses on understanding how Indigenous communities in Latin America are experiencing and resisting eco-genocidal processes. Specifically, I am looking at how development policies and megaprojects are driving territorial and cultural destruction in Mexico and Panama. As a trained journalist, I have reported on human rights, conservation and environmental issues in Latin America and beyond. Building upon my extensive experience working on Indigenous land rights and grassroots resistance to mining and hydroelectric dams in the region, I am conducting a year of ethnographic fieldwork in both countries, where I will take a collaborative and comparative approach.

 

Jonathan D Robert

Project Title: Hooking together Parasites and Societies: Biological and Social aspects of Human Hookworm Infection and Eradication in British Territories, c.1900-1935

Supervisors: Alison Dunn, Lorna Waddington and Graham Huggan

My current project involves the interdisciplinary entwining of epidemiology and history of medicine, in order to investigate how the actions of a parasite shapes the ways in which hosts understand the parasite, and how the host’s medical responses shape the parasite in turn. Exploring successful and unsuccessful attempts to induce extinction of parasites through eradication programmes, I aim to bring a different perspective on extinction through the study of human entanglement with the animals which we not only dislike but are actively attempting to make extinct.

 

Marie-Thérèse Talensby

Project Title: Surviving Extinction: Experiences of Eco-Anxiety and Environmental Grief in Climate Change Activism

Supervisors: Stefan Skrimshire and Katy Wright

My project explores how climate change activists navigate experiences of eco-anxiety and environmental grief, whether they differ when occurring within faith-based climate collectives, and how existing societal systems for grief and loss might interact with these experiences.

Using a broad interdisciplinary approach and bringing in themes of politics, eschatology, reflexivity, intersectionality and psychotherapy, this project is designed to further academic understandings whilst actively contributing to activist and therapeutic knowledge.

 

Serena Turton-Hughes 

 

Lydia Woods

Project Title: Ecosystem robustness through Earth history

Supervisors: Alex Dunhill, Maria Beger and Chris Hassall

My research project is looking into marine ecosystem structure over the Phanerozoic, from the Cambrian (541 million years ago) to today. Over deep time, marine biodiversity has been subject to major evolutionary events, including major mass extinctions. The effect of these events on the number of global species has been well-documented, however the effects on community-level interactions have been neglected. My project aims to reconstruct ancient food webs from before and after major mass extinctions to pinpoint permanent changes in structure caused by extinction, and to identify the origins of modern marine community structure. Food webs are often used to understand community structure because every species is linked to others through feeding interactions, creating a hierarchical network that can be visualised. As well as this, extinction simulations can test the robustness of a community, i.e. if certain species are artificially removed does a food web then collapse or is it robust enough to survive? Extinction cascade simulations can be used on reconstructed food webs to test if marine communities have been gaining robustness over deep time, and hence explain why there hasn’t been another mass extinction in the last 66 million years.