Dr Steven Emery
Senior Lecturer
Overview
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).
Research
My primary research interest is in the relationship between cultural values, practices and power in the management of the farmed landscape. I am interested in how cultural values shape farmers' decison-making, practices and responses to exogenous policy interventions. I view values as dynamic and incessantly negotiated through social interaction (using the lens of rhetoric-culture-theory) but also as subject to ideological manipulation.
I have applied this approach, more specifically, to the study of farmers' agri-environmental and collaborative behaviours,demonstrating how a more nuanced understanding of farming culture allows for a critical reflection on behavioural theory, policy interventions, and neoliberal food systems more broadly.
Between competing demands for food security, climate change mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity protection and landscape heritage, debates over land-use have perhaps never been so critical and contested. By working in interdisciplinary teams and alongside multiple stakeholder groups my research seeks solutions to such debates that are both socially and environmentally just.
Research group links
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 -
Jennifer Knight - 2023
Rob Booth -
May Appleby (Rothamsted Research) -
Publications
Copyright Notice: Any articles made available for download are for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the copyright holder.
| 2023 | 2021 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2007 |
2023
- Kastrinou M, Said S, Jarbouh R, Emery SB. (2023) Still There, Conflict and Society, volume 9, no. 1, pages 147-166, DOI:10.3167/arcs.2023.090110. [PDF]
- Morse AL, Emery SB. (2023) Avoiding the ‘easy route’: Young people's socio-spatial experience of the outdoors in the absence of digital technology, Geoforum, volume 141, DOI:10.1016/j.geoforum.2023.103727.
2021
- Kastrinou AMA, Fakher El-Deen S, Emery SB. (2021) The stateless (ad)vantage? Resistance, land and rootedness in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights, Territory, Politics, Governance, volume 9, no. 5, pages 636-655, DOI:10.1080/21622671.2020.1743203.
2019
- Astuti SP, Day R, Emery SB. (2019) A successful fuel transition? Regulatory instruments, markets, and social acceptance in the adoption of modern LPG cooking devices in Indonesia, Energy Research and Social Science, volume 58, DOI:10.1016/j.erss.2019.101248.
2018
- Darragh HS, Emery SB. (2018) What Can and Can't Crowding Theories Tell Us about Farmers’ ‘Environmental’ Intentions in Post-Agri-Environment Scheme Contexts?, Sociologia Ruralis, volume 58, no. 2, pages 370-391, DOI:10.1111/soru.12159.
2017
- Perks MT, Warburton J, Bracken LJ, Reaney SM, Emery SB, Hirst S. (2017) Use of spatially distributed time-integrated sediment sampling networks and distributed fine sediment modelling to inform catchment management, Journal of Environmental Management, volume 202, pages 469-478, DOI:10.1016/j.jenvman.2017.01.045.
- Emery SB, Forney J, Wynne-Jones S. (2017) The more-than-economic dimensions of cooperation in food production, Journal of Rural Studies, volume 53, pages 229-235, DOI:10.1016/j.jrurstud.2017.05.017.
2016
- Phillipson J, Proctor A, Emery SB, Lowe P. (2016) Performing inter-professional expertise in rural advisory networks, Land Use Policy, volume 54, pages 321-330, DOI:10.1016/j.landusepol.2016.02.018.
- Emery SB, Carrithers MB. (2016) From lived experience to political representation: Rhetoric and landscape in the North York Moors, Ethnography, volume 17, no. 3, pages 388-410, DOI:10.1177/1466138115609380.
2015
- Emery SB, Mulder HAJ, Frewer LJ. (2015) Maximizing the Policy Impacts of Public Engagement: A European Study, Science Technology and Human Values, volume 40, no. 3, pages 421-444, DOI:10.1177/0162243914550319.
- Emery SB, Hart A, Butler-Ellis C, Gerritsen-Ebben MG, Machera K, Spanoghe P, Frewer LJ. (2015) A Review of the Use of Pictograms for Communicating Pesticide Hazards and Safety Instructions: Implications for EU Policy, Human and Ecological Risk Assessment, volume 21, no. 4, pages 1062-1080, DOI:10.1080/10807039.2014.953894.
- Emery SB. (2015) Independence and individualism: conflated values in farmer cooperation?, Agriculture and Human Values, volume 32, no. 1, pages 47-61, DOI:10.1007/s10460-014-9520-8.
2014
- Emery S. (2014) hard work, productivity and the management of the farmed environment in anthropological perspective, Contemporary Issues in Management.
- Emery SB, Hannah DM. (2014) Managing and researching floods: Sustainability, policy responses and the place of rural communities, Hydrological Processes, volume 28, no. 18, pages 4984-4988, DOI:10.1002/hyp.10258.
- Stock PV, Forney J, Emery SB, Wittman H. (2014) Neoliberal natures on the farm: Farmer autonomy and cooperation in comparative perspective, Journal of Rural Studies, volume 36, pages 411-422, DOI:10.1016/j.jrurstud.2014.06.001.
2013
- Franks JR, Emery SB. (2013) Incentivising collaborative conservation: Lessons from existing environmental Stewardship Scheme options, Land Use Policy, volume 30, no. 1, pages 847-862, DOI:10.1016/j.landusepol.2012.06.005.
- Emery SB, Perks MT, Bracken LJ. (2013) Negotiating river restoration: The role of divergent reframing in environmental decision-making, Geoforum, volume 47, pages 167-177, DOI:10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.01.008.
- Mckenzie AJ, Emery SB, Franks JR, Whittingham MJ. (2013) FORUM: Landscape-scale conservation: Collaborative agri-environment schemes could benefit both biodiversity and ecosystem services, but will farmers be willing to participate?, Journal of Applied Ecology, volume 50, no. 5, pages 1274-1280, DOI:10.1111/1365-2664.12122.
2012
- Emery SB, Franks JR. (2012) The potential for collaborative agri-environment schemes in England: Can a well-designed collaborative approach address farmers' concerns with current schemes?, Journal of Rural Studies, volume 28, no. 3, pages 218-231, DOI:10.1016/j.jrurstud.2012.02.004.
2011
- Carrithers M, Bracken LJ, Emery S. (2011) Can a Species Be a Person? A Trope and Its Entanglements in the Anthropocene Era, CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY, volume 52, no. 5, pages 661-685, DOI:10.1086/661287. [PDF]
2010
- Emery S. (2010) In Better Fettle: Improvement, Work and Rhetoric in the Transition to Environmental Farming in the UK.
2007
- Emery S, Smith DN, Johansson S, Cope J. (2007) Demonstrating how plasterboard can be collected more efficiently on construction and demolition sites in the UK, Sustainable construction materials and technologies, 575-588.
- Emery SB, Smith DN, Gaterell MR, Sammons G, Moon D. (2007) Estimation of the recycled content of an existing construction project, Resources, Conservation and Recycling, volume 52, no. 2, pages 395-409, DOI:10.1016/j.resconrec.2007.03.009.
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.
