Ms Aoife Maher

About me:

Dr Aoife Maher is a social scientist who specialises in research with horticultural growers and their supply chain intermediaries. She joined academia following a career in professional horticulture and brings this hands-on horticultural experience to her research practice. Trained in rural sociology, Aoife’s current role in the Centre for Rural Policy Research at the University of Exeter involves project management of research projects, carrying out rapid to-specification research as well as longer-term research projects with the farming community and food system actors. In a previous role within the University of Exeter Business School, she supported Cornish SMEs to achieve their net-zero ambitions through bespoke research projects. Aoife is able to draw on training in a range of social science methodologies including: interviews, focus groups, surveys, spatial mapping and large-scale datasets.

Aoife’s research interests include sustainable food systems, particularly the production of fruit and vegetables for regional and national markets. Her interdisciplinary PhD research investigated the production of fruit and vegetables in Devon and Cornwall and the relationships between growers and their marketplace intermediaries. In particular, she is interested in the complex ways that marketplace relationships shape on farm production practices. Aoife’s research looks at this question from a number of perspectives; historical and contemporary, conventional and agroecological, and also from a number of production and marketing scales.

Research interests:

• Sustainable food systems
• Horticultural production and marketing – relationships within supply chains – historical, contemporary and projected futures
• Horticultural production in a changing climate - role of perennial vegetables 
• Choice, consumer knowledge and de-commoditisation within food systems
• Crop rotations and the relationship with occupancy and tenure arrangements

Qualifications:

• 2019 – 2025 PhD sociology
• 2008 – 2009 PdDip Local Government Management
• 2005- 2006 MA Politics and Contemporary History
• 2002 – 2005 BA hons History with Chinese studies