Dr Steven Emery

I am Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of Agriculture at the Centre for Rural Policy Research. My research and teaching is informed by rural sociology, social anthropology and rural geography and broadly concerns the intersection of rural land-use management, cultural values, power and governance.

I joined the University of Exeter in 2022 and am 50% seconded to Rothamsted Research (Sociology of Farming Systems Group, Net Zero and Resilient Farming Directorate).

Biography:

I completed undergraduate and masters degrees at Lancaster University in Environmental Management and Policy. I then worked for three years in Environmental Consultancy for Scott Wilson (RIP, now several times swallowed up by mergers and and acquisitions!), based in Peterborough, specialising in sustainable waste management, environmental impact assessment and sustainabilty appraisal.

My combined yearning to return to academia and to move into agricultural research then took me to Durham where I completed my PhD in Anthropology and Geography (2010). My research involved long-term ethnographic fieldwork with hill farmers in the North York Moors and I became intimately and infinitely interested in the cultural values of farmers, their ideological entanglements and how these shape their practices, engagements with the landscape and responses to external policy interventions. The single word 'Fettle' structured much of my analysis and it has remained an academic and personal pre-occupation ever since (read: foundational principle for the conduct of life).

After the PhD I worked for three years as a Post-Doc at the Centre for Rural Economy, Newcastle Unversity on a variety of projects, and here became particularly interested in farmer cooperation and collaboration (for environmental and other purposes). I then took up a lectureship in Human Geography at the University of Birmingham, where I taught primarily in the fields of environmental and rural geography. I was delighted to join the Centre for Rural Policy Research at the University of Exeter in 2022.

Research supervision:

Doctoral supervision with completion dates:

Septin Puji Astuti - 2016

Bakare Hakeem Oladimeji - 2018

Tzu-Hsiang Liao (Watan Basaw) - 2021

Faye Shortland - 2021

Augustine Ifedi Nwankwo - 2022

Jill Smith - 2024

Jennifer Knight - 2023

Rob Booth - 2024

May Appleby (Rothamsted Research) -

Hatty Hopkinson - 

James Jennings -