Centre for Landscape Early Career Researcher Academy
We are pleased to introduce our Landscape ECR Academy cohort for 2024-25
About the ECR Academy
The Landscape ECR Academy provides a platform for landscape researchers from diverse academic backgrounds – Science, Engineering, Arts and Humanities, Medicine – to interact across a programme of events, stimulating discussions and collaboration at the ‘intersections of disciplines’. The 2024-25 Landscape Academy will deliver unique training, development and networking opportunities to a cohort of Newcastle University ECR researchers. This project has been funded through the Newcastle University Research England Enhancing Research Culture Fund, and is led by Dr Charlotte Veal and Dr Maria Duggan.
Jun Zhou
Jun’s research investigates the borderscape between Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Chinese inland as transformative apparatus between the state and local. He is interested in how built environments and their knowledge, methods and phenomenon get produced, used and (re)shaped as geopolitical landscapes. He is also intrigued by developing creative mappings, texts and visual methods to tell the story of sites, objects and materials.
Rachael Priest
Rachael's research project is 'Understanding the potential de facto protection that shipwrecks offer to carbon stores'. The UK’s coastline is surrounded by over 24,000 shipwrecks, which have been largely overlooked as potential ecosystems. Her PhD research seeks to uncover the ecological significance of these shipwrecks by assessing the carbon stocks they support and the role they may play in marine carbon storage.
Minki Sung
Minki is a PhD student in heritage and landscape with research interests in heritage values, heritage impacts, conservation planning, historic landscapes and cultural landscapes. He often likes to think about how the perception and use of history is mobilised in society, especially in the form of heritage and landscape concepts, and how these are influenced by international, national, regional or local policies.
Julia Heslop
Julia Heslop is an artist and research fellow in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. She is interested in land from a political-economic, cultural and ecological perspective. Her work questions the ecological impacts of development, land and property ownership, housing precarity, urban planning and local democracy. She often works in participatory ways with groups/communities on long-term projects.
Robert Swinbank
Rob is currently researching the relationship between archaeology and the rewidling movement in the UK. By working with five case study sites across England and Scotland he is developing an understanding of this current relationship with the aim of developing a toolkit to improve and increase engagement for the benefit of both heritage and nature.
Lotte Dijkstra
Lotte is a landscape architect and researcher, storyteller and artist. She researches and teaches about urban forestry, intersectional environmentalism, radical more-than-human engagement and place-based creative methods in landscape architecture.
Alison Hutchinson
Alison is a Research Associate with the Modelling, Evidence and Policy research group. As a critical social scientist and green criminologist, her research interests include wildlife and environmental harms and crimes, global biodiversity governance, and issues surrounding social and ecological justice. Her current research centres on the implementation of Target 4 of the Global Biodiversity Framework (preventing species extinctions) and approaches to support holistic, justice-orientated, and rights-based conservation action.
Charlotte Osborne
Charlotte researches peatlands which have been degraded by human activity. In Malaysia, she is aiming to quantify aqueous nitrogen pollution from oil palm plantations on former peat swamp forest, and work to understand the fate of nitrate-based fertilisers in the environment. In Northumberland she looks at soil health in recovering peat bogs, and how this links to changing vegetation. She also interested in science communication and making science accessible for everyone.
David de la Haye
David is a field-recordist, freelance musician and sound technician whose research focuses on raising the cultural value of freshwater through sonic arts. Using meticulous underwater recordings and bioacoustic technologies, his musical compositions explore our perception of beauty, microsound, and more-than-human interaction with nature. Recent art-science commissioners include the Freshwater Biological Association, World Biodiversity Forum, and the Swiss National Park.
Frances Wright
The aim of Frances's research is to explore whether the concept of a human-natural system might be practically applied by rural communities as an aid to developing integrated context-specific strategies that foster community regeneration and advance long-term sustainability and resilience. Frances intends to use causal loop diagrams, a simple qualitative systems thinking tool, and carry out this research in the Isles of Uist, Scotland.
Megan Leake
Megan is a zooarchaeologist, completing her PhD in Archaeology at Newcastle. Her research focuses on the Anglo-Saxon monastic site of Jarrow, using the faunal remains to assess the impact of Viking raids on the site. She is also investigating how the site fits into its broader landscape contexts, including what environments were exploited for animal grazing, and how far the influence of the monastery reached. Her broader research interests include food distribution networks, how diet and animal husbandry practices are impacted by social change, bone and antler craft working, and early medieval itinerant craft networks.
The Landscape ECR Academy aims to furnish researchers with the contacts, skills and confidence to meet the increasing calls for multi-disciplinary, challenge-led, and impactful research.
