Cecily Maller
Biographic Data
| ID | 335584 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Cecily Maller |
| GIVEN NAMES | Cecily |
| FAMILY NAME | Maller |
| SIGNATURE | MALLER C |
| AFFILIATIONS | RMIT University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8322-2124 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 305 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
The multiple values of nature show the lack of a coherent theory of value—In any context
Pathways to sustainability require a broader and fuller representation of the multiple values of nature in policy and practice. In this People and Nature special feature entitled ‘The Multiple Values of Nature’, researchers interpreted all three key words differently: multiple, values and nature. The articles also engaged variously with concepts, theory, practice and data. In the face of this diversity, some see a burgeoning field and others see …
Freezing time, freezing in time
Considering that many fresh food items require domestic cold storage, understanding the role of appliances such as freezers is critical to reducing greenhouse gas emissions relating to domestic food waste and energy use. Using a social practices approach, this article reports on a study of cold storage and food waste practices, particularly freezing relating to meat, in 20 Australian households. Householders were interviewed twice, over winter an…
Revitalizing Air
The cleanliness, mobility and quality of urban air has regained political legibility in debates on post-pandemic cities. To contextualize the political and epistemological significance of air in urban contexts, we suggest looking at the under-researched experience of premodern cities and bodies, how they developed a complex ecological imagination and solutions guided by findings from Hippocratic-Galenic medicine. While we do not romanticize these…
Wet market biosecurity reform
In 2020, Covid-19 led to global policy statements promoting bans and reforms to wet markets in Asia and Africa to prevent future pandemics. We conducted a comparative, exploratory qualitative study in 2021 in three countries (Kenya, Vietnam and the Philippines) to understand the social and political dimensions to biosecurity reform at wet markets. This included 60 key informant interviews and rapid ethnographic research in 15 markets, as well as …
Turning things around
This special feature concerns understanding human‐nature relations through the lens of values to comprehend how values of the natural world connect with wider processes of change, action and transformation in social‐ecological systems. The relationships between values and action have preoccupied several disciplines and multiple discourses concerned with implementing change, including sustainability and health, and conservation. Focusing on the co…
Resetting urban human-microbial relations in pandemic times
Microbes, particularly of the viral kind, are currently preoccupying human activity and concerns due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although for a long time there has been fear associated with 'germs', notably viruses and bacteria and the diseases they cause, the pandemic has set these fears into overdrive. As serious as this ongoing event is, there are broader interests and important alternative narratives about the microbial world permeating current…
Wastelands to Wetlands
With a myriad of associated health, ecological and social benefits, urban greening has become a prominent policy strategy to renew historically neglected sites in cities, so popular that its implementation often eludes scrutiny. Utilising resident interviews, this paper investigates the distribution of 'wellbeing' narratives and objectives in such transformations. We demonstrate how affinities with nature are utilised to hasten green happy-future…
Smartphone interactions and nature benefits
Whether new technologies will have a positive impact on how societies experience nature depends on how particular devices and populations come to interact. This paper reviews two bodies of work that have sought to understand and influence these interactions with reference to the smartphone. The first is associated with a group of researchers interested in how smartphone apps might help people to engage with their surroundings in beneficial ways. …
Urban greening for health and wellbeing in low-income communities
Urban greening is a popular nature-led regeneration policy based on the assumption that provision of greenspace improves the health and wellbeing of proximate communities. Entangled within these objectives are environmental justice principles that seek to remedy historical and contemporary concerns related to contaminated areas of post-industrial cities. This paper draws upon findings from an evaluation study of an urban greening project in a soc…
People and nature
It is now 3 years since People and Nature was launched as the British Ecological Society's journal of relational thinking. Since that formative and auspicious moment, the Journal has published over 160 papers exploring critical linkages between, and assemblages of, these highly interdependent, if not co-constructed, worlds of 'people' and 'nature'. We wrote in the opening editorial of the motivation and opportunity for conducting broadly defined …
Enablers and challenges when engaging local communities for urban biodiversity conservation in Australian cities
Across all landscape types, environmental managers work with communities to conserve biodiversity. The effectiveness of conservation practice, however, relies on acknowledging differences in preferences and values of nature. Implementing urban conservation is challenging because cities have diverse social, cultural and ecological attributes, meaning there are no simple solutions for the management or co-management of biodiversity. There is little…
Re-orienting nature-based solutions with more-than-human thinking
Dynamic Bodies in Theories of Social Practice
Dynamic Non-humans in a Changing World
People and Nature —A journal of relational thinking
The vital importance of nature to people, and of people to the future of that nature, is self-evident. The understanding of those linkages is, nonetheless, being critically transformed and enriched by research that transcends the barriers between ecology and other traditional disciplines. Such studies are not new, but the dramatic growth in their number and influence is, and reflects the growing need for such work in rapidly changing times and ci…
Addressing health and equity in residential low carbon transitions – Insights from a pragmatic retrofit evaluation in Australia
More-than-human cities
Beyond Threshold Approaches to Extreme Heat
One of climate change’s most certain impacts is increasingly frequent and extreme heat. Heat management and climate adaptation policies generally utilize temperature and humidity thresholds to identify what constitute “extreme” conditions. In the workplace, such thresholds can be used to trigger reductions in work intensity and/or duration. In regions that routinely exceed proposed thresholds, however, this approach can be deeply problematic and …
Studying social practices and global practice change using scrapbooks as a cultural probe
Empirical work on household consumption informed by theories of social practice has grown exponentially in the last few years. This is partly due to conceptual developments positing practices as being comprised of materials, meanings and skills. Such formulations are readily applied to empirical investigations. As the aim of a growing body of empirical work with theories of social practice is to present evidence for how practices can, should, hav…
Social Practices and Dynamic Non-Humans
Collaboration with Caveats
Researcher and practitioner collaboration in urban planning is both critical to good outcomes and problematic to achieve in reality. Collaboration has the potential for new partnerships, better research problem definition, improved research design and greater impact on practice and policy. However, politics, stakeholder agendas and funding bodies bring pressures and constraints, for which research professionals require a broader set of skills to …
Understanding the contextual influences of the health outcomes of residential energy efficiency interventions
Residential energy efficiency interventions are complex social and construction programmes that may benefit health, yet the interactions between the material improvements, health and health-related outcomes, and householder responses are not well understood. While indoor winter warmth and householder satisfaction have been identified as the key mediators for physiological, mental and social health outcomes, this paper explores how programme conte…
Adapting to 'extreme' weather
Recent climate change adaptation policy positions previously mundane weather events, such as heatwaves and coldsnaps, as increasingly dangerous. Within this discourse of 'extreme' weather, the health sector is promoting climate-controlled indoor environments as a sensible coping strategy. Such responses mask our constant and ongoing adaptations to weather, which are becoming more dynamic and varied in mobile and globalised societies. In this pape…
Planning for community
Master-planned estates are a major source of new housing for growing cities. Much research finds these residential developments lack genuine social connections between residents despite marketing of 'close-knit' community. Selandra Rise is a new residential development on the urban fringe of Melbourne, Australia. The estate was planned with a focus on community infrastructure and resident well-being. The resident population was younger and more c…
Towards explaining the health impacts of residential energy efficiency interventions – A realist review. Part 1
Understanding health through social practices
The importance of recognising structure and agency in health research to move beyond methodological individualism is well documented. To progress incorporating social theory into health, researchers have used Giddens' and Bourdieu's conceptualisations of social practice to understand relationships between agency, structure and health. However, social practice theories have more to offer than has currently been capitalised upon. This article delve…
The global migration of everyday life
More-than-human cities
Curious energy consumers
In international energy policy, programmes and consumer research, a dominant ideal consumer is emerging. This consumer is typically a human adult who has the agency to make autonomous, functional and rational decisions about his or her household’s energy consumption. This article seeks to disrupt this dominant anthropocentric conceptualisation of the consumer and provide new ways of knowing and potentially intervening in the lives of energy consu…
Green Renovations
Undertaking home renovation is complex and traumatic, but remains a ubiquitous phenomenon. Home renovators wishing to reduce their environmental impact encounter added layers of complexity. Increasingly, opportunities to improve a dwelling’s performance present themselves in the course of home renovations, giving rise to “green renovations”. Policy makers encourage green renovations through market mechanisms and rational response incentives. Yet …
Materialising energy and water resources in everyday practices
Social Practices and Dynamic Non-Humans
Re-orienting nature-based solutions with more-than-human thinking
Adapting to 'extreme' weather
Recent climate change adaptation policy positions previously mundane weather events, such as heatwaves and coldsnaps, as increasingly dangerous. Within this discourse of 'extreme' weather, the health sector is promoting climate-controlled indoor environments as a sensible coping strategy. Such responses mask our constant and ongoing adaptations to weather, which are becoming more dynamic and varied in mobile and globalised societies. In this pape…
Addressing health and equity in residential low carbon transitions – Insights from a pragmatic retrofit evaluation in Australia
Understanding the contextual influences of the health outcomes of residential energy efficiency interventions
Residential energy efficiency interventions are complex social and construction programmes that may benefit health, yet the interactions between the material improvements, health and health-related outcomes, and householder responses are not well understood. While indoor winter warmth and householder satisfaction have been identified as the key mediators for physiological, mental and social health outcomes, this paper explores how programme conte…
Studying social practices and global practice change using scrapbooks as a cultural probe
Empirical work on household consumption informed by theories of social practice has grown exponentially in the last few years. This is partly due to conceptual developments positing practices as being comprised of materials, meanings and skills. Such formulations are readily applied to empirical investigations. As the aim of a growing body of empirical work with theories of social practice is to present evidence for how practices can, should, hav…
Planning for community
Master-planned estates are a major source of new housing for growing cities. Much research finds these residential developments lack genuine social connections between residents despite marketing of 'close-knit' community. Selandra Rise is a new residential development on the urban fringe of Melbourne, Australia. The estate was planned with a focus on community infrastructure and resident well-being. The resident population was younger and more c…
Wastelands to Wetlands
With a myriad of associated health, ecological and social benefits, urban greening has become a prominent policy strategy to renew historically neglected sites in cities, so popular that its implementation often eludes scrutiny. Utilising resident interviews, this paper investigates the distribution of 'wellbeing' narratives and objectives in such transformations. We demonstrate how affinities with nature are utilised to hasten green happy-future…
Urban greening for health and wellbeing in low-income communities
Urban greening is a popular nature-led regeneration policy based on the assumption that provision of greenspace improves the health and wellbeing of proximate communities. Entangled within these objectives are environmental justice principles that seek to remedy historical and contemporary concerns related to contaminated areas of post-industrial cities. This paper draws upon findings from an evaluation study of an urban greening project in a soc…
Resetting urban human-microbial relations in pandemic times
Microbes, particularly of the viral kind, are currently preoccupying human activity and concerns due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although for a long time there has been fear associated with 'germs', notably viruses and bacteria and the diseases they cause, the pandemic has set these fears into overdrive. As serious as this ongoing event is, there are broader interests and important alternative narratives about the microbial world permeating current…
People and nature
It is now 3 years since People and Nature was launched as the British Ecological Society's journal of relational thinking. Since that formative and auspicious moment, the Journal has published over 160 papers exploring critical linkages between, and assemblages of, these highly interdependent, if not co-constructed, worlds of 'people' and 'nature'. We wrote in the opening editorial of the motivation and opportunity for conducting broadly defined …
Enablers and challenges when engaging local communities for urban biodiversity conservation in Australian cities
Across all landscape types, environmental managers work with communities to conserve biodiversity. The effectiveness of conservation practice, however, relies on acknowledging differences in preferences and values of nature. Implementing urban conservation is challenging because cities have diverse social, cultural and ecological attributes, meaning there are no simple solutions for the management or co-management of biodiversity. There is little…
The learning garden
Rediscovering Nature in Everyday Settings
The learning garden
Housing, heat stress and health in a changing climate
In many places extreme heat causes more deaths than floods, cyclones and bushfires. However, efforts to manage the health implications of heat and increase the adaptive capacity of vulnerable populations are in their infancy, requiring urgent attention from research and policy. This paper presents a case for research exploring the influence of social and contextual factors on vulnerable populations' capacity to adapt to heat in the context of cli…
Green Renovations
Undertaking home renovation is complex and traumatic, but remains a ubiquitous phenomenon. Home renovators wishing to reduce their environmental impact encounter added layers of complexity. Increasingly, opportunities to improve a dwelling’s performance present themselves in the course of home renovations, giving rise to “green renovations”. Policy makers encourage green renovations through market mechanisms and rational response incentives. Yet …
Materialising energy and water resources in everyday practices
The global migration of everyday life
Curious energy consumers
In international energy policy, programmes and consumer research, a dominant ideal consumer is emerging. This consumer is typically a human adult who has the agency to make autonomous, functional and rational decisions about his or her household’s energy consumption. This article seeks to disrupt this dominant anthropocentric conceptualisation of the consumer and provide new ways of knowing and potentially intervening in the lives of energy consu…
Towards explaining the health impacts of residential energy efficiency interventions – A realist review. Part 1
Understanding health through social practices
The importance of recognising structure and agency in health research to move beyond methodological individualism is well documented. To progress incorporating social theory into health, researchers have used Giddens' and Bourdieu's conceptualisations of social practice to understand relationships between agency, structure and health. However, social practice theories have more to offer than has currently been capitalised upon. This article delve…
Collaboration with Caveats
Researcher and practitioner collaboration in urban planning is both critical to good outcomes and problematic to achieve in reality. Collaboration has the potential for new partnerships, better research problem definition, improved research design and greater impact on practice and policy. However, politics, stakeholder agendas and funding bodies bring pressures and constraints, for which research professionals require a broader set of skills to …
Understanding the contextual influences of the health outcomes of residential energy efficiency interventions
Residential energy efficiency interventions are complex social and construction programmes that may benefit health, yet the interactions between the material improvements, health and health-related outcomes, and householder responses are not well understood. While indoor winter warmth and householder satisfaction have been identified as the key mediators for physiological, mental and social health outcomes, this paper explores how programme conte…
Adapting to 'extreme' weather
Recent climate change adaptation policy positions previously mundane weather events, such as heatwaves and coldsnaps, as increasingly dangerous. Within this discourse of 'extreme' weather, the health sector is promoting climate-controlled indoor environments as a sensible coping strategy. Such responses mask our constant and ongoing adaptations to weather, which are becoming more dynamic and varied in mobile and globalised societies. In this pape…
Planning for community
Master-planned estates are a major source of new housing for growing cities. Much research finds these residential developments lack genuine social connections between residents despite marketing of 'close-knit' community. Selandra Rise is a new residential development on the urban fringe of Melbourne, Australia. The estate was planned with a focus on community infrastructure and resident well-being. The resident population was younger and more c…
Beyond Threshold Approaches to Extreme Heat
One of climate change’s most certain impacts is increasingly frequent and extreme heat. Heat management and climate adaptation policies generally utilize temperature and humidity thresholds to identify what constitute “extreme” conditions. In the workplace, such thresholds can be used to trigger reductions in work intensity and/or duration. In regions that routinely exceed proposed thresholds, however, this approach can be deeply problematic and …
Studying social practices and global practice change using scrapbooks as a cultural probe
Empirical work on household consumption informed by theories of social practice has grown exponentially in the last few years. This is partly due to conceptual developments positing practices as being comprised of materials, meanings and skills. Such formulations are readily applied to empirical investigations. As the aim of a growing body of empirical work with theories of social practice is to present evidence for how practices can, should, hav…
Social Practices and Dynamic Non-Humans
Dynamic Bodies in Theories of Social Practice
Dynamic Non-humans in a Changing World
People and Nature —A journal of relational thinking
The vital importance of nature to people, and of people to the future of that nature, is self-evident. The understanding of those linkages is, nonetheless, being critically transformed and enriched by research that transcends the barriers between ecology and other traditional disciplines. Such studies are not new, but the dramatic growth in their number and influence is, and reflects the growing need for such work in rapidly changing times and ci…
Addressing health and equity in residential low carbon transitions – Insights from a pragmatic retrofit evaluation in Australia
More-than-human cities
Enablers and challenges when engaging local communities for urban biodiversity conservation in Australian cities
Across all landscape types, environmental managers work with communities to conserve biodiversity. The effectiveness of conservation practice, however, relies on acknowledging differences in preferences and values of nature. Implementing urban conservation is challenging because cities have diverse social, cultural and ecological attributes, meaning there are no simple solutions for the management or co-management of biodiversity. There is little…
Re-orienting nature-based solutions with more-than-human thinking
Smartphone interactions and nature benefits
Whether new technologies will have a positive impact on how societies experience nature depends on how particular devices and populations come to interact. This paper reviews two bodies of work that have sought to understand and influence these interactions with reference to the smartphone. The first is associated with a group of researchers interested in how smartphone apps might help people to engage with their surroundings in beneficial ways. …
Urban greening for health and wellbeing in low-income communities
Urban greening is a popular nature-led regeneration policy based on the assumption that provision of greenspace improves the health and wellbeing of proximate communities. Entangled within these objectives are environmental justice principles that seek to remedy historical and contemporary concerns related to contaminated areas of post-industrial cities. This paper draws upon findings from an evaluation study of an urban greening project in a soc…
Sociology (21 works) · Political science (20 works) · Geography (15 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Engineering (12 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Ecology (11 works) · Economics (10 works) · Environmental ethics (10 works)