Overview
You will explore the transformative potential of social, solidarity, circular, and other grassroots economic initiatives such as repair cafés, community energy projects, alternative food networks, social enterprises, and transition towns to Just Sustainability Transformations in the North of England. As part of the JUST Centre team, your PhD will help marginalised communities shape the transformation of the North of England to a more just, equitable and sustainable future.
About this opportunity
Based in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Liverpool, you will join the JUST Centre, an UKRI-funded centre that is a collaboration between the Universities of Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Lancaster and Newcastle as well as other partners. Your 3.5 year PhD, match funded by the University of Liverpool, will contribute to the Social, Solidarity and Circular Economy work strand of the JUST Centre.
The JUST Centre’s ambition is to support a just transition to net zero by transforming the processes and structures that leave many people and places out of the Low Carbon Living agenda. The Centre will explore how to engage, enable and empower people and places often left out of discussions about sustainability transformations, and who might be antagonistic to it or unconvinced of it, to develop methods, tools and strategies for thinking and action on sustainability.
We would like to encourage proposals from suitable PhD students for projects that will explore this agenda. Suitable projects might examine: what innovations in socially just economic activity are emerging in the North of England to shape sustainability transformations? What alternative economic forms (e.g., repair cafes, community power, alternative food networks, social enterprises, transition towns) can be seeded, scaled up and proliferated elsewhere? Are there places (in the North of England or elsewhere) where members of marginalised communities congregate and are developing alternative SSE models from which others can learn through participatory action research, or an ethnographic study? Can we identify grassroots or local innovation niches from which we can learn? Might we learn from comparative or longitudinal analyses of grassroots SSE innovations in marginalised communities that contribute in a meaningful way to just sustainability transformations?
Please outline over around two pages how YOU would address this challenge – we are open to your ideas.
While your primary focus will be your PhD, you will be a member of the JUST Centre’s Thematic Working and Innovation Group (TWIG) on the SSE. Engaging with other PhD students and researchers, you will have the opportunity to contribute to the broad research across the Centre, including collaborative work across the five study regions, engaging with the JUST Centre’s wider themes, and engaging with Centre-wide activities such as workshops, calls for evidence, and other impact-orientated activities.
The JUST Centre is founded on principles of justice, respect and equality. We take intersectional approaches to responding to injustice and inequality, want to respect ways that marginalised communities in the North of England might be sceptical about the net zero agenda, so want the makeup of the JUST Centre to reflect this as much as possible. Consequently, we seek to actively recruit in ways that will maximise the diversity of membership in the JUST Centre. We welcome applications from people from backgrounds historically excluded from research institutions, who wish to work part time, remotely from a location outside Liverpool (but connected to one of the other JUST Centre universities and coming to Liverpool as agreed), and suitably qualified people already working in the SSE in relation to just sustainability transformations.
Further reading
Cumbers, A. Shaw, D. Crossan, J. and McMaster, R. 2018. ‘The Work of Community Gardens: Reclaiming Place for Community in the City’. Work, Employment and Society 32 (1): 133–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017017695042. [doi.org]
Dey, P and Steyaert, C. 2010. The politics of narrating social entrepreneurship
Journal of Enterprising Communities 4/1 85-108 https://www.emerald.com/jec/article/4/1/85/204381/The-politics-of-narrating-social-entrepreneurship
del Rio, SL. 2022. ‘Conceptualising the Commons as a Relational Triad: Lessons from the Grant of Use Cooperative Housing Model in Barcelona’. Geoforum 136:112–21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2022.09.007 [doi.org].
Gibson-Graham, JK. 2008. Diverse economies: performative practices for `other worlds’,
Progress in Human Geography 32/5 613-632 http://phg.sagepub.com/content/32/5/613.abstract
Kenis, A. and Mathijs. E. 2014. Climate change and post-politics: Repoliticizing the present by imagining the future? Geoforum 52 148-156 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718514000232
Klagge, B, and T Meister. 2018. ‘Energy Cooperatives in Germany – an Example of Successful Alternative Economies?’ Local Environment: Diverse and Alternative Economies 23 (7): 697–716. https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2018.1436045 [doi.org].
Longhurst, N. 2013. The emergence of an alternative milieu: conceptualising the nature of alternative places Environment and Planning A 45/9 2100 – 2119 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/a45487
Morrow, O. 2019. ‘Sharing Food and Risk in Berlin’s Urban Food Commons’. Geoforum 99:202–12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.09.003. [doi.org]
North, P. Nowak, V. Southern, A and Thompson, M. 2020. Generative Anger: From Social Enterprise to Antagonistic Economies, Rethinking Marxism 32/3 330-347 https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2020.1780669
Seyfang, G. and Smith, A. 2007 Grassroots innovations for sustainable development: Towards a new research and policy agenda, Environmental Politics 16/4 584-603 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09644010701419121