Karen Bickerstaff
Biographic Data
| ID | 759613 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Karen Bickerstaff |
| GIVEN NAMES | Karen |
| FAMILY NAME | Bickerstaff |
| SIGNATURE | BICKERSTAFF K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Exeter |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7618-1384 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 367 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
The Perils of Climate Catastrophism: A Call to Situate Crisis and Change
Catastrophic imaginaries are inextricably bound to how we think about climate change and also how we respond—individually and collectively—to the urgent challenges of achieving rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. This advanced review reflects on, and problematises, the power and persistence of ideas about climate catastrophe. It is argued that this politically and culturally dominant framing of imminent planetary devastation impedes and…
The future of geography field course pedagogy in UK higher education
Field courses are widely regarded as integral to geography degree programmes, providing students with opportunities for experiential learning, often in unfamiliar international environments. Yet, this key area of pedagogy appears increasingly unsustainable and complex for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) within the context of the urgent need for decarbonisation, increasing financial costs, and the institutional challenges of comprehensively e…
Geography and environment: New conversations, new communities
In this Editorial, the Geo: Geography and Environment Editors reflect on the journal over the past year, highlighting some of the key papers published and ‘ Geo Themes’ being developed: ‘Decolonising Climate Geography’; ‘Climate Change, AI and Sustainability’; ‘Geographies of Energy Futures’. The Editors renew the call for submissions on these topics and put out a new call for Special Section proposals on subjects around the environment, climate …
Can co-creation support local heat decarbonisation strategies? Insights from pilot projects in Bruges and Mechelen
Co-creation is often presented as a solution to challenges of achieving energy transitions. However, there is currently little known about how coordinating stakeholders, such as city administrations, interpret co-creation and the extent to which this influences co-creation processes. We draw on a recent project, which embedded co-creation in public decision-making about local-level, sustainable heating transitions. We specifically address the que…
Geography and environment: A time of change
Around the world, the environmental crisis is deepening. The atmosphere, oceans, cryosphere and terrestrial ecosystems: all are under stress and many living species are being pushed towards extinction. Climate change, a key facet of this crisis, is unfolding rapidly, with glaciers melting in line with worst-case scenarios. Rising global temperatures are fuelling socio-ecological damage with distinctly uneven geographical consequences. We are, for…
Living on with Sellafield: Nuclear infrastructure, slow violence, and the politics of quiescence
Communities living with nuclear infrastructures have widely been positioned as quiescent and accepting of the risks posed. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in 2008 in the village of Seascale, which neighbours the UK’s Sellafield nuclear site, and on recent thinking on nuclear and toxic geographies, this paper troubles the idea of nuclear quiescence. In doing so, it critically engages with a long tradition of geographical research on nuclear…
Justice in energy system transitions
Human-induced climate change, by its nature, involves the production of injustice. The impacts of climate change impose spatially uneven harms on present and future generations and the production of greenhouse gas emissions is socially and spatially uneven. This chapter highlights key concepts being articulated in energy justice research through a focus on low carbon energy system transitions generally and the deployment of nuclear power specific…
Decarbonisation at home: The contingent politics of experimental domestic energy technologies
Policy efforts to reduce the carbon intensity of domestic energy consumption have, over the last three decades, been dominated by an almost dichotomous reading of the relationship between technology and social change. On the one hand, there is a conception of personal responsibility that constructs domestic energy users as key actors in the adoption and (appropriate) use of low carbon energy technologies; from this perspective, environmental chan…
Because We've Got History Here: Nuclear Waste, Cooperative Siting, and the Relational Geography of a Complex Issue
This paper takes as its focus recent developments in UK radioactive waste management policy and, through a relational reading of siting conflicts, stresses the need to locate, historically, controversy that takes place in the present. In particular, I argue that temporally distant actors and events, which remain culturally very salient, are critical in shaping the pathway of contentious planning processes. Here I trace the space-time relations th…
Locating Scientific Citizenship: The Institutional Contexts and Cultures of Public Engagement
In this article, we explore the institutional negotiation of public engagement in matters of science and technology. We take the example of the Science in Society dialogue program initiated by the UK's Royal Society, but set this case within the wider experience of the public engagement activities of a range of charities, corporations, governmental departments, and scientific institutions. The novelty of the analysis lies in the linking of an acc…
Assembling Justice Spaces: The Scalar Politics of Environmental Justice in North‐east England
In contrast to the US environmental justice movement, which has been successful in building a networked environmentalism that recognises—and has impacted upon—national patterns of distributional (in)equalities, campaigns in the UK have rarely developed beyond the local or articulated a coherent programme of action that links to wider socio‐spatial justice issues or effects real changes in the regulatory or political environment. Our purpose in th…
Absencing/presencing risk: Rethinking proximity and the experience of living with major technological hazards
Justice, Nature and the City
In his 1996 work, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (JNGD), David Harvey brought together a series of debates -including those concerning environmental values, the politics of social and environmental justice, and the future of cities -which are rarely articulated within the same analytical framework.Harvey"s work established foundational concepts for understanding how space, time, place and nature are constituted and represented th…
Reframing nuclear power in the UK energy debate: Nuclear power, climate change mitigation and radioactive waste
In the past decade, human influence on the climate through increased use of fossil fuels has become widely acknowledged as one of the most pressing issues for the global community. For the United Kingdom, we suggest that these concerns have increasingly become manifest in a new strand of political debate around energy policy, which reframes nuclear power as part of the solution to the need for low-carbon energy options. A mixed-methods analysis o…
Constructing Responsibilities for Risk: Negotiating Citizen - State Relationships
The paper examines the ways in which citizens negotiate responsibility in relation to various environmental and technological risks. It focuses on the role of agency and the way that this figures in constructions of relations of responsibility between individuals and institutions. A central argument is that, across the different issue contexts, patterns of perceived agency are crucial to understanding the apparent contradiction in citizens' attri…
Situating local experience of risk: Peripherality, marginality and place identity in the UK foot and mouth disease crisis
Shared Visions, Unholy Alliances: Power, Governance and Deliberative Processes in Local Transport Planning
The aim of this paper is to bring some critical reflection to bear on the upsurge of participatory rhetoric in local governance. The research discussed investigates two case studies of deliberative exercises used by local authorities to develop their local transport plans. The analysis avoids the rather simplistic 'check list' evaluative models based upon the Habermasian ideals of communicative rationality and instead develops an approach which a…
Risk perception research: Socio-cultural perspectives on the public experience of air pollution
The British 2001 Foot and Mouth crisis: A comparative study of public risk perceptions, trust and beliefs about government policy in two communities
This mixed methodology study examines public attitudes to risk and its management during the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) epidemic in Britain. A quantitative survey and qualitative focus groups were conducted to examine how two communities (Norwich and Bude) responded to the crisis. People were more concerned about a broad range of indirect consequences than about the direct (health) impacts of the disease, especially about the effects on th…
The Right Tool for the Job? Modeling, Spatial Relationships, and Styles of Scientific Practice in the UK Foot and Mouth Crisis
In this paper we explore the expert controversy over the management of a major rural risk issue, the foot and mouth disease (FMD) outbreak that affected the United Kingdom in 2001, and in particular the role of predictive epidemiological modeling in the decisionmaking process. We pose the questions of why this technique was identified as the right tool for the job by government and why, at the same time, its use was so fiercely contested by other…
The place(s) of matter: Matter out of place – public understandings of air pollution
This article reflects on the key findings and insights offered by recent work on public understandings of air pollution, which has begun to adopt some of the concepts and methodologies associated with social constructionism. We begin with a brief discussion of debates in the social sciences generally, and human geography specifically, regarding the precepts of ‘social constructionism', before setting out the ‘heterogeneous’ mode that we adopt in …
Transport planning and participation: The rhetoric and realities of public involvement
Risk, Responsibility, and Blame: An Analysis of Vocabularies of Motive in Air-Pollution(ing) Discourses
In this paper we analyse the reasonings that people deploy in explaining and rationalising their behaviour in relation to the collective environmental and health-risk problem of urban air quality. We draw on an empirical study of public perceptions of air pollution to identify a range of 'vocabularies of motive' or discourses that serve to move responsibility to act away from the individual and onto other groups. We consider how far each of these…
Public understandings of air pollution: The ‘localisation’ of environmental risk
Participatory Local Governance and Transport Planning
In this paper we evaluate the experience of public participation in local transport planning in the United Kingdom. In the context of a new emphasis on participation in central government policy rhetoric and planning guidance, we examine the rationales, methods, and outcomes of recent public participation initiatives. Through drawing on a questionnaire survey distributed to all English highway authorities and a content analysis of provisional loc…
Public understandings of air pollution: The ‘localisation’ of environmental risk
Absencing/presencing risk: Rethinking proximity and the experience of living with major technological hazards
The place(s) of matter: Matter out of place – public understandings of air pollution
This article reflects on the key findings and insights offered by recent work on public understandings of air pollution, which has begun to adopt some of the concepts and methodologies associated with social constructionism. We begin with a brief discussion of debates in the social sciences generally, and human geography specifically, regarding the precepts of ‘social constructionism', before setting out the ‘heterogeneous’ mode that we adopt in …
The Right Tool for the Job? Modeling, Spatial Relationships, and Styles of Scientific Practice in the UK Foot and Mouth Crisis
In this paper we explore the expert controversy over the management of a major rural risk issue, the foot and mouth disease (FMD) outbreak that affected the United Kingdom in 2001, and in particular the role of predictive epidemiological modeling in the decisionmaking process. We pose the questions of why this technique was identified as the right tool for the job by government and why, at the same time, its use was so fiercely contested by other…
Risk, Responsibility, and Blame: An Analysis of Vocabularies of Motive in Air-Pollution(ing) Discourses
In this paper we analyse the reasonings that people deploy in explaining and rationalising their behaviour in relation to the collective environmental and health-risk problem of urban air quality. We draw on an empirical study of public perceptions of air pollution to identify a range of 'vocabularies of motive' or discourses that serve to move responsibility to act away from the individual and onto other groups. We consider how far each of these…
Transport planning and participation: The rhetoric and realities of public involvement
Participatory Local Governance and Transport Planning
In this paper we evaluate the experience of public participation in local transport planning in the United Kingdom. In the context of a new emphasis on participation in central government policy rhetoric and planning guidance, we examine the rationales, methods, and outcomes of recent public participation initiatives. Through drawing on a questionnaire survey distributed to all English highway authorities and a content analysis of provisional loc…
Shared Visions, Unholy Alliances: Power, Governance and Deliberative Processes in Local Transport Planning
The aim of this paper is to bring some critical reflection to bear on the upsurge of participatory rhetoric in local governance. The research discussed investigates two case studies of deliberative exercises used by local authorities to develop their local transport plans. The analysis avoids the rather simplistic 'check list' evaluative models based upon the Habermasian ideals of communicative rationality and instead develops an approach which a…
Living on with Sellafield: Nuclear infrastructure, slow violence, and the politics of quiescence
Communities living with nuclear infrastructures have widely been positioned as quiescent and accepting of the risks posed. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in 2008 in the village of Seascale, which neighbours the UK’s Sellafield nuclear site, and on recent thinking on nuclear and toxic geographies, this paper troubles the idea of nuclear quiescence. In doing so, it critically engages with a long tradition of geographical research on nuclear…
Assembling Justice Spaces: The Scalar Politics of Environmental Justice in North‐east England
In contrast to the US environmental justice movement, which has been successful in building a networked environmentalism that recognises—and has impacted upon—national patterns of distributional (in)equalities, campaigns in the UK have rarely developed beyond the local or articulated a coherent programme of action that links to wider socio‐spatial justice issues or effects real changes in the regulatory or political environment. Our purpose in th…
The British 2001 Foot and Mouth crisis: A comparative study of public risk perceptions, trust and beliefs about government policy in two communities
This mixed methodology study examines public attitudes to risk and its management during the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) epidemic in Britain. A quantitative survey and qualitative focus groups were conducted to examine how two communities (Norwich and Bude) responded to the crisis. People were more concerned about a broad range of indirect consequences than about the direct (health) impacts of the disease, especially about the effects on th…
Justice, Nature and the City
In his 1996 work, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (JNGD), David Harvey brought together a series of debates -including those concerning environmental values, the politics of social and environmental justice, and the future of cities -which are rarely articulated within the same analytical framework.Harvey"s work established foundational concepts for understanding how space, time, place and nature are constituted and represented th…
Situating local experience of risk: Peripherality, marginality and place identity in the UK foot and mouth disease crisis
Locating Scientific Citizenship: The Institutional Contexts and Cultures of Public Engagement
In this article, we explore the institutional negotiation of public engagement in matters of science and technology. We take the example of the Science in Society dialogue program initiated by the UK's Royal Society, but set this case within the wider experience of the public engagement activities of a range of charities, corporations, governmental departments, and scientific institutions. The novelty of the analysis lies in the linking of an acc…
Constructing Responsibilities for Risk: Negotiating Citizen - State Relationships
The paper examines the ways in which citizens negotiate responsibility in relation to various environmental and technological risks. It focuses on the role of agency and the way that this figures in constructions of relations of responsibility between individuals and institutions. A central argument is that, across the different issue contexts, patterns of perceived agency are crucial to understanding the apparent contradiction in citizens' attri…
Because We've Got History Here: Nuclear Waste, Cooperative Siting, and the Relational Geography of a Complex Issue
This paper takes as its focus recent developments in UK radioactive waste management policy and, through a relational reading of siting conflicts, stresses the need to locate, historically, controversy that takes place in the present. In particular, I argue that temporally distant actors and events, which remain culturally very salient, are critical in shaping the pathway of contentious planning processes. Here I trace the space-time relations th…
The future of geography field course pedagogy in UK higher education
Field courses are widely regarded as integral to geography degree programmes, providing students with opportunities for experiential learning, often in unfamiliar international environments. Yet, this key area of pedagogy appears increasingly unsustainable and complex for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) within the context of the urgent need for decarbonisation, increasing financial costs, and the institutional challenges of comprehensively e…
Can co-creation support local heat decarbonisation strategies? Insights from pilot projects in Bruges and Mechelen
Co-creation is often presented as a solution to challenges of achieving energy transitions. However, there is currently little known about how coordinating stakeholders, such as city administrations, interpret co-creation and the extent to which this influences co-creation processes. We draw on a recent project, which embedded co-creation in public decision-making about local-level, sustainable heating transitions. We specifically address the que…
Decarbonisation at home: The contingent politics of experimental domestic energy technologies
Policy efforts to reduce the carbon intensity of domestic energy consumption have, over the last three decades, been dominated by an almost dichotomous reading of the relationship between technology and social change. On the one hand, there is a conception of personal responsibility that constructs domestic energy users as key actors in the adoption and (appropriate) use of low carbon energy technologies; from this perspective, environmental chan…
Public understandings of air pollution: The ‘localisation’ of environmental risk
Participatory Local Governance and Transport Planning
In this paper we evaluate the experience of public participation in local transport planning in the United Kingdom. In the context of a new emphasis on participation in central government policy rhetoric and planning guidance, we examine the rationales, methods, and outcomes of recent public participation initiatives. Through drawing on a questionnaire survey distributed to all English highway authorities and a content analysis of provisional loc…
Transport planning and participation: The rhetoric and realities of public involvement
Risk, Responsibility, and Blame: An Analysis of Vocabularies of Motive in Air-Pollution(ing) Discourses
In this paper we analyse the reasonings that people deploy in explaining and rationalising their behaviour in relation to the collective environmental and health-risk problem of urban air quality. We draw on an empirical study of public perceptions of air pollution to identify a range of 'vocabularies of motive' or discourses that serve to move responsibility to act away from the individual and onto other groups. We consider how far each of these…
The place(s) of matter: Matter out of place – public understandings of air pollution
This article reflects on the key findings and insights offered by recent work on public understandings of air pollution, which has begun to adopt some of the concepts and methodologies associated with social constructionism. We begin with a brief discussion of debates in the social sciences generally, and human geography specifically, regarding the precepts of ‘social constructionism', before setting out the ‘heterogeneous’ mode that we adopt in …
Risk perception research: Socio-cultural perspectives on the public experience of air pollution
The British 2001 Foot and Mouth crisis: A comparative study of public risk perceptions, trust and beliefs about government policy in two communities
This mixed methodology study examines public attitudes to risk and its management during the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) epidemic in Britain. A quantitative survey and qualitative focus groups were conducted to examine how two communities (Norwich and Bude) responded to the crisis. People were more concerned about a broad range of indirect consequences than about the direct (health) impacts of the disease, especially about the effects on th…
The Right Tool for the Job? Modeling, Spatial Relationships, and Styles of Scientific Practice in the UK Foot and Mouth Crisis
In this paper we explore the expert controversy over the management of a major rural risk issue, the foot and mouth disease (FMD) outbreak that affected the United Kingdom in 2001, and in particular the role of predictive epidemiological modeling in the decisionmaking process. We pose the questions of why this technique was identified as the right tool for the job by government and why, at the same time, its use was so fiercely contested by other…
Shared Visions, Unholy Alliances: Power, Governance and Deliberative Processes in Local Transport Planning
The aim of this paper is to bring some critical reflection to bear on the upsurge of participatory rhetoric in local governance. The research discussed investigates two case studies of deliberative exercises used by local authorities to develop their local transport plans. The analysis avoids the rather simplistic 'check list' evaluative models based upon the Habermasian ideals of communicative rationality and instead develops an approach which a…
Situating local experience of risk: Peripherality, marginality and place identity in the UK foot and mouth disease crisis
Reframing nuclear power in the UK energy debate: Nuclear power, climate change mitigation and radioactive waste
In the past decade, human influence on the climate through increased use of fossil fuels has become widely acknowledged as one of the most pressing issues for the global community. For the United Kingdom, we suggest that these concerns have increasingly become manifest in a new strand of political debate around energy policy, which reframes nuclear power as part of the solution to the need for low-carbon energy options. A mixed-methods analysis o…
Constructing Responsibilities for Risk: Negotiating Citizen - State Relationships
The paper examines the ways in which citizens negotiate responsibility in relation to various environmental and technological risks. It focuses on the role of agency and the way that this figures in constructions of relations of responsibility between individuals and institutions. A central argument is that, across the different issue contexts, patterns of perceived agency are crucial to understanding the apparent contradiction in citizens' attri…
Assembling Justice Spaces: The Scalar Politics of Environmental Justice in North‐east England
In contrast to the US environmental justice movement, which has been successful in building a networked environmentalism that recognises—and has impacted upon—national patterns of distributional (in)equalities, campaigns in the UK have rarely developed beyond the local or articulated a coherent programme of action that links to wider socio‐spatial justice issues or effects real changes in the regulatory or political environment. Our purpose in th…
Absencing/presencing risk: Rethinking proximity and the experience of living with major technological hazards
Justice, Nature and the City
In his 1996 work, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (JNGD), David Harvey brought together a series of debates -including those concerning environmental values, the politics of social and environmental justice, and the future of cities -which are rarely articulated within the same analytical framework.Harvey"s work established foundational concepts for understanding how space, time, place and nature are constituted and represented th…
Locating Scientific Citizenship: The Institutional Contexts and Cultures of Public Engagement
In this article, we explore the institutional negotiation of public engagement in matters of science and technology. We take the example of the Science in Society dialogue program initiated by the UK's Royal Society, but set this case within the wider experience of the public engagement activities of a range of charities, corporations, governmental departments, and scientific institutions. The novelty of the analysis lies in the linking of an acc…
Because We've Got History Here: Nuclear Waste, Cooperative Siting, and the Relational Geography of a Complex Issue
This paper takes as its focus recent developments in UK radioactive waste management policy and, through a relational reading of siting conflicts, stresses the need to locate, historically, controversy that takes place in the present. In particular, I argue that temporally distant actors and events, which remain culturally very salient, are critical in shaping the pathway of contentious planning processes. Here I trace the space-time relations th…
Decarbonisation at home: The contingent politics of experimental domestic energy technologies
Policy efforts to reduce the carbon intensity of domestic energy consumption have, over the last three decades, been dominated by an almost dichotomous reading of the relationship between technology and social change. On the one hand, there is a conception of personal responsibility that constructs domestic energy users as key actors in the adoption and (appropriate) use of low carbon energy technologies; from this perspective, environmental chan…
Justice in energy system transitions
Human-induced climate change, by its nature, involves the production of injustice. The impacts of climate change impose spatially uneven harms on present and future generations and the production of greenhouse gas emissions is socially and spatially uneven. This chapter highlights key concepts being articulated in energy justice research through a focus on low carbon energy system transitions generally and the deployment of nuclear power specific…
Living on with Sellafield: Nuclear infrastructure, slow violence, and the politics of quiescence
Communities living with nuclear infrastructures have widely been positioned as quiescent and accepting of the risks posed. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in 2008 in the village of Seascale, which neighbours the UK’s Sellafield nuclear site, and on recent thinking on nuclear and toxic geographies, this paper troubles the idea of nuclear quiescence. In doing so, it critically engages with a long tradition of geographical research on nuclear…
Can co-creation support local heat decarbonisation strategies? Insights from pilot projects in Bruges and Mechelen
Co-creation is often presented as a solution to challenges of achieving energy transitions. However, there is currently little known about how coordinating stakeholders, such as city administrations, interpret co-creation and the extent to which this influences co-creation processes. We draw on a recent project, which embedded co-creation in public decision-making about local-level, sustainable heating transitions. We specifically address the que…
Geography and environment: A time of change
Around the world, the environmental crisis is deepening. The atmosphere, oceans, cryosphere and terrestrial ecosystems: all are under stress and many living species are being pushed towards extinction. Climate change, a key facet of this crisis, is unfolding rapidly, with glaciers melting in line with worst-case scenarios. Rising global temperatures are fuelling socio-ecological damage with distinctly uneven geographical consequences. We are, for…
The future of geography field course pedagogy in UK higher education
Field courses are widely regarded as integral to geography degree programmes, providing students with opportunities for experiential learning, often in unfamiliar international environments. Yet, this key area of pedagogy appears increasingly unsustainable and complex for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) within the context of the urgent need for decarbonisation, increasing financial costs, and the institutional challenges of comprehensively e…
Geography and environment: New conversations, new communities
In this Editorial, the Geo: Geography and Environment Editors reflect on the journal over the past year, highlighting some of the key papers published and ‘ Geo Themes’ being developed: ‘Decolonising Climate Geography’; ‘Climate Change, AI and Sustainability’; ‘Geographies of Energy Futures’. The Editors renew the call for submissions on these topics and put out a new call for Special Section proposals on subjects around the environment, climate …
The Perils of Climate Catastrophism: A Call to Situate Crisis and Change
Catastrophic imaginaries are inextricably bound to how we think about climate change and also how we respond—individually and collectively—to the urgent challenges of achieving rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. This advanced review reflects on, and problematises, the power and persistence of ideas about climate catastrophe. It is argued that this politically and culturally dominant framing of imminent planetary devastation impedes and…
Political science (18 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Law (11 works) · Politics (10 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Public relations (9 works) · Risk Perception and Management (9 works) · Geography (8 works) · Social science (8 works) · Economics (7 works)