Alex Arnall
Biographic Data
| ID | 1405765 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alex Arnall |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alex |
| FAMILY NAME | Arnall |
| SIGNATURE | ARNALL A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Reading |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6218-5926 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 212 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
“One Foot in the Sea”: A Community-Focused Exhibition on Adaptation, Identity and Coastal Change in Borth, Wales
In this paper, we explore how coastal communities, often portrayed through narratives of risk, socioeconomic decline and displacement, might instead be represented in ways that foreground local identity, resilience and everyday lived experience. Drawing on a community-focused exhibition held in the village of Borth, West Wales, we examine how residents experience, remember and adapt to life on the shifting shoreline. Situated at the frontline of …
Enacting Sediment: Shifting Human-Sand Relations in a Coastal Community
How Does Small-Scale Mining Stabilize Rural Livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa? The Case of Mozambique
This paper examines the linkages between subsistence farming and artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) – lowtech, labor-intensive mineral extraction and processing – in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on the case of Mozambique. While the body of literature on this subject is burgeoning, it is comprised mostly of conceptual pieces and country case studies that rely heavily on qualitative data. Focusing on Manica Province, long an epicentre of small-…
Encountering the Anthropocene: Reconfiguring human-nature relations on the North Norfolk Coast, UK
The Anthropocene, proposed as a new era in human-nonhuman relations, is potentially both profound and far-reaching. However, it has also been critiqued as a universalising concept detached from the realities of people’s day-to-day lives. The aim of this paper is to address this shortcoming by examining the situations of coastal communities on the ‘frontline’ of global environmental change in North Norfolk in the UK. In this region, sea defences t…
Disaster mobilities, temporalities, and recovery: Experiences of the tsunami in the Maldives
Large‐scale disasters are frequently portrayed as temporally bounded, linear events after which survivors are encouraged to ‘move on’ as quickly as possible. In this paper, we explore how understandings of disaster mobilities and temporalities challenge such perspectives. Drawing on empirical research undertaken on Dhuvaafaru in the Maldives, a small island uninhabited until 2009 when it was populated by people displaced by the Indian Ocean tsuna…
Climate change imaginaries: Representing and contesting sea level rise in Fairbourne, North Wales
Geographical imaginaries – as discourses that are both representationally and performatively constituted – are vitally implicated in the making of the world and therefore profoundly political. In this paper we introduce the notion of the ‘sea level rise imaginary’ (SLRI) to explore the implications of these insights for how rising seas caused by climate change are being understood and acted upon in the UK. Drawing on empirical research undertaken…
Where land meets sea: Islands, erosion and the thing-power of hard coastal protection structures
In the last few decades, hard coastal protection structures, such as seawalls and groynes, have become increasingly commonplace around the world. Conventionally, the effects of such structures have been considered within a modernist framework that evaluates the degree of human control over the land-sea interface. However, this dominant viewpoint overlooks the central role that sea defences play in the ongoing production of coastal communities, pa…
Spatial and temporal ways of knowing sea level rise: Bringing together multiple perspectives
Sea level rise presents risks to ecosystems, populations, and infrastructure in low‐lying areas. This article considers diverse ways of knowing, understanding, and experiencing these risks. It explores differences and connections between knowledge produced through the technological methods of scientific research and that which emerges through the experiences and insights of local people. For example, while scientific assessments measure and forec…
Walking with farmers: Floods, agriculture and the social practice of everyday mobility
Presenting rurality: The Land Settlement Association in interwar England
Becoming an island: Making connections and places through waste mobilities
Islands, long portrayed in the Western imaginary as remote, static, and bounded entities, have increasingly come to be viewed as places constantly in the making: as connected sites formed by complex and shifting relations and assemblages of people and things. This paper considers the role that waste plays in this process through exploration of how discarded and unwanted matter decays, moves, and comes to rest in relation to a small island in the …
Resettlement as climate change adaptation: What can be learned from state-led relocation in rural Africa and Asia?
There is growing interest in helping people in developing countries cope with climate change by reframing population relocation as an adaptation strategy. However, there is also ongoing uncertainty surrounding what the advantages and disadvantages of resettling poor and vulnerable communities might be. This article helps address this knowledge gap by considering what might be learned from recent and ongoing state-led relocation programmes in rura…
Climate and Culture: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on a Warming World
Climate and Culture: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on a Warming World
How does culture interact with the way societies understand, live with, and act in relation to climate change? While the importance of the exchanges between culture, society and climate in the context of global environmental change is increasingly recognised, the empirical evidence is fragmented and too often constrained by disciplinary boundaries. Written by an international team of experts, this book provides cutting-edge and critical perspecti…
Employment until the end of the world”: Exploring the role of manipulation in a Mozambican land deal
Shifting sands: The rhythms and temporalities of island sandscapes
This article explores the different timescales and temporalities of the movement of sand. In recent years, growing scholarly attention has focused on the qualities of sand and the increasing demands for its use worldwide. However, the dynamics of this complex substance and the ways in which it flows through entangled human and non-human environments remains largely under-explored. In drawing on recently collected empirical data, this article expl…
Everyday life and environmental change
This paper explores how daily changes in the physical environment intersect and connect with people's everyday lives, routines and practices in the Maldives. Day-to-day life is often regarded as mundane and ordinary, and therefore not particularly worthy of study. As this paper argues, however, the everyday is central to understanding how environmental change occurs and how people respond to it. Much recent work has challenged the ontological sep…
Here and now: Perceptions of Indian Ocean islanders on the climate change and migration nexus
Empirical studies exploring the links between climate change and migration are increasing. Often, perceptions are not fully explored from the people most affected by the climate change and migration nexus. This article contributes to filling this gap by eliciting and analysing perceptions regarding climate change and migration from an understudied population labelled as being amongst those most immediately and directly affected by climate change:…
Contestation over an island imaginary landscape: The management and maintenance of touristic nature
This article demonstrates how maintaining high-end tourism in luxury resorts requires recreating a tourist imaginary of pristine, isolated and unpeopled island landscapes, thus necessitating the ceaseless manipulation and management of space. This runs contrary to the belief that tourism industries are exerting an increasingly benign influence on local environments following the emergence of 'sustainable tourism' in recent decades. Rather than pr…
What is carbon? Conceptualising carbon and capabilities in the context of community sequestration projects in the global South
Carbon has been described as a ‘surreal commodity.’ While carbon trading, storage, sequestration, and emissions have become a part of the contemporary climate lexicon, how carbon is understood, valued, and interpreted by actors responsible for implementing carbon sequestration projects is still unclear. In this review paper, we are concerned with how carbon has come to take on a range of meanings. In particular, we appraise what is known about th…
Challenging climate change and migration discourse: Different understandings of timescale and temporality in the Maldives
Resilience as transformative capacity: Exploring the quadripartite cycle of structuration in a Mozambican resettlement programme
Introduction to politics of climate change: Discourses of Policy and Practice in Developing Countries
This Themed Section aims to increase understanding of how the idea of climate change, and the policies and actions that spring from it, travel beyond their origins in natural sciences to meet different political arenas in the developing world. It takes a discursive approach whereby climate change is not just a set of physical processes but also a series of messages, narratives and policy prescriptions. The articles are mostly case study-based and…
A climate of control: Flooding, displacement and planned resettlement in the Lower Zambezi River valley, Mozambique
In recent years, the potential role of planned, internal resettlement as a climate change adaptation measure has been highlighted by national governments and the international policy community. However, in many developing countries, resettlement is a deeply political process that often results in an unequal distribution of costs and benefits among relocated persons. This paper examines these tensions in Mozambique, drawing on a case study of floo…
NGOs, elite capture and community-driven development: Perspectives in rural Mozambique
This article examines the problems of elite capture in community-driven development (CDD). Drawing on two case studies of non-governmental organisation (NGO) intervention in rural Mozambique, the authors consider two important variables - (1) the diverse and complex contributions of local elites to CDD in different locations and (2) the roles that non-elites play in monitoring and controlling leader activities - to argue that donors should be cau…
Challenging climate change and migration discourse: Different understandings of timescale and temporality in the Maldives
A climate of control: Flooding, displacement and planned resettlement in the Lower Zambezi River valley, Mozambique
In recent years, the potential role of planned, internal resettlement as a climate change adaptation measure has been highlighted by national governments and the international policy community. However, in many developing countries, resettlement is a deeply political process that often results in an unequal distribution of costs and benefits among relocated persons. This paper examines these tensions in Mozambique, drawing on a case study of floo…
Shifting sands: The rhythms and temporalities of island sandscapes
This article explores the different timescales and temporalities of the movement of sand. In recent years, growing scholarly attention has focused on the qualities of sand and the increasing demands for its use worldwide. However, the dynamics of this complex substance and the ways in which it flows through entangled human and non-human environments remains largely under-explored. In drawing on recently collected empirical data, this article expl…
Flooding, resettlement, and change in livelihoods: Evidence from rural Mozambique
Post-disaster development policies, such as resettlement, can have major impacts on communities. This paper examines how and why people's livelihoods change as a result of resettlement, and relocated people's views of such changes, in the context of natural disasters. It presents two historically-grounded, comparative case studies of post-flood resettlement in rural Mozambique. The studies demonstrate a movement away from rain-fed subsistence agr…
Everyday life and environmental change
This paper explores how daily changes in the physical environment intersect and connect with people's everyday lives, routines and practices in the Maldives. Day-to-day life is often regarded as mundane and ordinary, and therefore not particularly worthy of study. As this paper argues, however, the everyday is central to understanding how environmental change occurs and how people respond to it. Much recent work has challenged the ontological sep…
Introduction to politics of climate change: Discourses of Policy and Practice in Developing Countries
This Themed Section aims to increase understanding of how the idea of climate change, and the policies and actions that spring from it, travel beyond their origins in natural sciences to meet different political arenas in the developing world. It takes a discursive approach whereby climate change is not just a set of physical processes but also a series of messages, narratives and policy prescriptions. The articles are mostly case study-based and…
Resilience as transformative capacity: Exploring the quadripartite cycle of structuration in a Mozambican resettlement programme
Moving the nanoscience and technology (NST) debate forwards: Short-term impacts, long-term uncertainty and the social constitution
Spatial and temporal ways of knowing sea level rise: Bringing together multiple perspectives
Sea level rise presents risks to ecosystems, populations, and infrastructure in low‐lying areas. This article considers diverse ways of knowing, understanding, and experiencing these risks. It explores differences and connections between knowledge produced through the technological methods of scientific research and that which emerges through the experiences and insights of local people. For example, while scientific assessments measure and forec…
Becoming an island: Making connections and places through waste mobilities
Islands, long portrayed in the Western imaginary as remote, static, and bounded entities, have increasingly come to be viewed as places constantly in the making: as connected sites formed by complex and shifting relations and assemblages of people and things. This paper considers the role that waste plays in this process through exploration of how discarded and unwanted matter decays, moves, and comes to rest in relation to a small island in the …
How Does Small-Scale Mining Stabilize Rural Livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa? The Case of Mozambique
This paper examines the linkages between subsistence farming and artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) – lowtech, labor-intensive mineral extraction and processing – in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on the case of Mozambique. While the body of literature on this subject is burgeoning, it is comprised mostly of conceptual pieces and country case studies that rely heavily on qualitative data. Focusing on Manica Province, long an epicentre of small-…
Where land meets sea: Islands, erosion and the thing-power of hard coastal protection structures
In the last few decades, hard coastal protection structures, such as seawalls and groynes, have become increasingly commonplace around the world. Conventionally, the effects of such structures have been considered within a modernist framework that evaluates the degree of human control over the land-sea interface. However, this dominant viewpoint overlooks the central role that sea defences play in the ongoing production of coastal communities, pa…
NGOs, elite capture and community-driven development: Perspectives in rural Mozambique
This article examines the problems of elite capture in community-driven development (CDD). Drawing on two case studies of non-governmental organisation (NGO) intervention in rural Mozambique, the authors consider two important variables - (1) the diverse and complex contributions of local elites to CDD in different locations and (2) the roles that non-elites play in monitoring and controlling leader activities - to argue that donors should be cau…
Employment until the end of the world”: Exploring the role of manipulation in a Mozambican land deal
Here and now: Perceptions of Indian Ocean islanders on the climate change and migration nexus
Empirical studies exploring the links between climate change and migration are increasing. Often, perceptions are not fully explored from the people most affected by the climate change and migration nexus. This article contributes to filling this gap by eliciting and analysing perceptions regarding climate change and migration from an understudied population labelled as being amongst those most immediately and directly affected by climate change:…
Contestation over an island imaginary landscape: The management and maintenance of touristic nature
This article demonstrates how maintaining high-end tourism in luxury resorts requires recreating a tourist imaginary of pristine, isolated and unpeopled island landscapes, thus necessitating the ceaseless manipulation and management of space. This runs contrary to the belief that tourism industries are exerting an increasingly benign influence on local environments following the emergence of 'sustainable tourism' in recent decades. Rather than pr…
Encountering the Anthropocene: Reconfiguring human-nature relations on the North Norfolk Coast, UK
The Anthropocene, proposed as a new era in human-nonhuman relations, is potentially both profound and far-reaching. However, it has also been critiqued as a universalising concept detached from the realities of people’s day-to-day lives. The aim of this paper is to address this shortcoming by examining the situations of coastal communities on the ‘frontline’ of global environmental change in North Norfolk in the UK. In this region, sea defences t…
Disaster mobilities, temporalities, and recovery: Experiences of the tsunami in the Maldives
Large‐scale disasters are frequently portrayed as temporally bounded, linear events after which survivors are encouraged to ‘move on’ as quickly as possible. In this paper, we explore how understandings of disaster mobilities and temporalities challenge such perspectives. Drawing on empirical research undertaken on Dhuvaafaru in the Maldives, a small island uninhabited until 2009 when it was populated by people displaced by the Indian Ocean tsuna…
Climate change imaginaries: Representing and contesting sea level rise in Fairbourne, North Wales
Geographical imaginaries – as discourses that are both representationally and performatively constituted – are vitally implicated in the making of the world and therefore profoundly political. In this paper we introduce the notion of the ‘sea level rise imaginary’ (SLRI) to explore the implications of these insights for how rising seas caused by climate change are being understood and acted upon in the UK. Drawing on empirical research undertaken…
Walking with farmers: Floods, agriculture and the social practice of everyday mobility
What is carbon? Conceptualising carbon and capabilities in the context of community sequestration projects in the global South
Carbon has been described as a ‘surreal commodity.’ While carbon trading, storage, sequestration, and emissions have become a part of the contemporary climate lexicon, how carbon is understood, valued, and interpreted by actors responsible for implementing carbon sequestration projects is still unclear. In this review paper, we are concerned with how carbon has come to take on a range of meanings. In particular, we appraise what is known about th…
Presenting rurality: The Land Settlement Association in interwar England
Moving the nanoscience and technology (NST) debate forwards: Short-term impacts, long-term uncertainty and the social constitution
NGOs, elite capture and community-driven development: Perspectives in rural Mozambique
This article examines the problems of elite capture in community-driven development (CDD). Drawing on two case studies of non-governmental organisation (NGO) intervention in rural Mozambique, the authors consider two important variables - (1) the diverse and complex contributions of local elites to CDD in different locations and (2) the roles that non-elites play in monitoring and controlling leader activities - to argue that donors should be cau…
Flooding, resettlement, and change in livelihoods: Evidence from rural Mozambique
Post-disaster development policies, such as resettlement, can have major impacts on communities. This paper examines how and why people's livelihoods change as a result of resettlement, and relocated people's views of such changes, in the context of natural disasters. It presents two historically-grounded, comparative case studies of post-flood resettlement in rural Mozambique. The studies demonstrate a movement away from rain-fed subsistence agr…
Introduction to politics of climate change: Discourses of Policy and Practice in Developing Countries
This Themed Section aims to increase understanding of how the idea of climate change, and the policies and actions that spring from it, travel beyond their origins in natural sciences to meet different political arenas in the developing world. It takes a discursive approach whereby climate change is not just a set of physical processes but also a series of messages, narratives and policy prescriptions. The articles are mostly case study-based and…
A climate of control: Flooding, displacement and planned resettlement in the Lower Zambezi River valley, Mozambique
In recent years, the potential role of planned, internal resettlement as a climate change adaptation measure has been highlighted by national governments and the international policy community. However, in many developing countries, resettlement is a deeply political process that often results in an unequal distribution of costs and benefits among relocated persons. This paper examines these tensions in Mozambique, drawing on a case study of floo…
What is carbon? Conceptualising carbon and capabilities in the context of community sequestration projects in the global South
Carbon has been described as a ‘surreal commodity.’ While carbon trading, storage, sequestration, and emissions have become a part of the contemporary climate lexicon, how carbon is understood, valued, and interpreted by actors responsible for implementing carbon sequestration projects is still unclear. In this review paper, we are concerned with how carbon has come to take on a range of meanings. In particular, we appraise what is known about th…
Challenging climate change and migration discourse: Different understandings of timescale and temporality in the Maldives
Resilience as transformative capacity: Exploring the quadripartite cycle of structuration in a Mozambican resettlement programme
Here and now: Perceptions of Indian Ocean islanders on the climate change and migration nexus
Empirical studies exploring the links between climate change and migration are increasing. Often, perceptions are not fully explored from the people most affected by the climate change and migration nexus. This article contributes to filling this gap by eliciting and analysing perceptions regarding climate change and migration from an understudied population labelled as being amongst those most immediately and directly affected by climate change:…
Contestation over an island imaginary landscape: The management and maintenance of touristic nature
This article demonstrates how maintaining high-end tourism in luxury resorts requires recreating a tourist imaginary of pristine, isolated and unpeopled island landscapes, thus necessitating the ceaseless manipulation and management of space. This runs contrary to the belief that tourism industries are exerting an increasingly benign influence on local environments following the emergence of 'sustainable tourism' in recent decades. Rather than pr…
Resettlement as climate change adaptation: What can be learned from state-led relocation in rural Africa and Asia?
There is growing interest in helping people in developing countries cope with climate change by reframing population relocation as an adaptation strategy. However, there is also ongoing uncertainty surrounding what the advantages and disadvantages of resettling poor and vulnerable communities might be. This article helps address this knowledge gap by considering what might be learned from recent and ongoing state-led relocation programmes in rura…
Climate and Culture: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on a Warming World
Climate and Culture: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on a Warming World
How does culture interact with the way societies understand, live with, and act in relation to climate change? While the importance of the exchanges between culture, society and climate in the context of global environmental change is increasingly recognised, the empirical evidence is fragmented and too often constrained by disciplinary boundaries. Written by an international team of experts, this book provides cutting-edge and critical perspecti…
Employment until the end of the world”: Exploring the role of manipulation in a Mozambican land deal
Shifting sands: The rhythms and temporalities of island sandscapes
This article explores the different timescales and temporalities of the movement of sand. In recent years, growing scholarly attention has focused on the qualities of sand and the increasing demands for its use worldwide. However, the dynamics of this complex substance and the ways in which it flows through entangled human and non-human environments remains largely under-explored. In drawing on recently collected empirical data, this article expl…
Everyday life and environmental change
This paper explores how daily changes in the physical environment intersect and connect with people's everyday lives, routines and practices in the Maldives. Day-to-day life is often regarded as mundane and ordinary, and therefore not particularly worthy of study. As this paper argues, however, the everyday is central to understanding how environmental change occurs and how people respond to it. Much recent work has challenged the ontological sep…
Presenting rurality: The Land Settlement Association in interwar England
Becoming an island: Making connections and places through waste mobilities
Islands, long portrayed in the Western imaginary as remote, static, and bounded entities, have increasingly come to be viewed as places constantly in the making: as connected sites formed by complex and shifting relations and assemblages of people and things. This paper considers the role that waste plays in this process through exploration of how discarded and unwanted matter decays, moves, and comes to rest in relation to a small island in the …
Spatial and temporal ways of knowing sea level rise: Bringing together multiple perspectives
Sea level rise presents risks to ecosystems, populations, and infrastructure in low‐lying areas. This article considers diverse ways of knowing, understanding, and experiencing these risks. It explores differences and connections between knowledge produced through the technological methods of scientific research and that which emerges through the experiences and insights of local people. For example, while scientific assessments measure and forec…
Walking with farmers: Floods, agriculture and the social practice of everyday mobility
Encountering the Anthropocene: Reconfiguring human-nature relations on the North Norfolk Coast, UK
The Anthropocene, proposed as a new era in human-nonhuman relations, is potentially both profound and far-reaching. However, it has also been critiqued as a universalising concept detached from the realities of people’s day-to-day lives. The aim of this paper is to address this shortcoming by examining the situations of coastal communities on the ‘frontline’ of global environmental change in North Norfolk in the UK. In this region, sea defences t…
Disaster mobilities, temporalities, and recovery: Experiences of the tsunami in the Maldives
Large‐scale disasters are frequently portrayed as temporally bounded, linear events after which survivors are encouraged to ‘move on’ as quickly as possible. In this paper, we explore how understandings of disaster mobilities and temporalities challenge such perspectives. Drawing on empirical research undertaken on Dhuvaafaru in the Maldives, a small island uninhabited until 2009 when it was populated by people displaced by the Indian Ocean tsuna…
Climate change imaginaries: Representing and contesting sea level rise in Fairbourne, North Wales
Geographical imaginaries – as discourses that are both representationally and performatively constituted – are vitally implicated in the making of the world and therefore profoundly political. In this paper we introduce the notion of the ‘sea level rise imaginary’ (SLRI) to explore the implications of these insights for how rising seas caused by climate change are being understood and acted upon in the UK. Drawing on empirical research undertaken…
Where land meets sea: Islands, erosion and the thing-power of hard coastal protection structures
In the last few decades, hard coastal protection structures, such as seawalls and groynes, have become increasingly commonplace around the world. Conventionally, the effects of such structures have been considered within a modernist framework that evaluates the degree of human control over the land-sea interface. However, this dominant viewpoint overlooks the central role that sea defences play in the ongoing production of coastal communities, pa…
How Does Small-Scale Mining Stabilize Rural Livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa? The Case of Mozambique
This paper examines the linkages between subsistence farming and artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) – lowtech, labor-intensive mineral extraction and processing – in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on the case of Mozambique. While the body of literature on this subject is burgeoning, it is comprised mostly of conceptual pieces and country case studies that rely heavily on qualitative data. Focusing on Manica Province, long an epicentre of small-…
Geography (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration (16 works) · Political science (14 works) · Law (9 works) · Archaeology (8 works) · Climate change (8 works) · Economics (8 works) · Ecology (7 works) · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs (7 works)