Contact
Email:
gerald.aiken@liser.lu
Gerald Taylor Aiken's research interests focus on the role of community in the transition to low-carbon futures. These include: the way community is used to guide, arrange, and discipline top-down populations; the ways organising and acting as a 'community' can increase agency; why community as a form of togetherness is treated differently, including why community has such unswervingly positive policy and academic associations; and the geographic peculiarities that emerge when community and environment are co-implicated—one obvious example being the assumed semantic link between community and local as opposed to environment being linked with global. The project he will work on at the Rachel Carson Center began in a PhD (The Production, Practice, and Potential of 'Community' in Edinburgh's Transition Town Network, 2014), which was a study of tensions and relationships between a government scheme to target carbon emissions through community and the grassroots, activist, emergent groups they funded. This work has continued in a European, multilingual context.
RCC Research Project: Community Low Carbon Transitions
Lunchtime Colloquium Video - The Politics of Community Low Carbon Transitions
Selected Publications:
- "Community as a tool for low carbon transitions: Involvement and containment, policy and action." Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space (August 2018).
- with Lucie Middlemiss, Susie Sallu, and Richard Hauxwell-Baldwin. "Researching climate change and community in neoliberal contexts: an emerging critical approach." WIREs: Climate Change 8, no. 4 (March 2017).
- "Permaculture and the Social Design of Nature." Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 99, no. 2 (2017): 172-191.
- with Rob Shaw. "'The 2+n Ecosophies: Steps toward an Ecosophical Geography." Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 99, no. 2 (2017): 107-113.
- "The Politics of Community: Togetherness, transition and post-politics." Environment and Planning A 49, no. 10 (August 2017): 2383-2401.
- "Prosaic State Governance of Community Transitions." Political Geography 55 (November 2016): 20-29.