Staff
Elizabeth Hobson
Lecturer
Amory
Amory Building, University of Exeter, Rennes Drive, Exeter, EX4 4RJ , UK
Office hours: GEO3101 Gender & Geography students can arrange office hours by appointment.
Overview
Lizzie is a cultural geographer, but her work bridges Human Geography and the Environmental Arts and Humanities. Drawing on themes of landscape, place, identity, and social relations in space, her work speaks to interdisciplinary debates surrounding environmental change, postcapitalist landscapes, embodiment and risk, wellbeing, and affective labour.
Lizzie’s thesis explores how communities and environments repair and transform after disasters. Critical of current recovery narratives, her thesis offers ‘scarred landscapes’ as a language that problematises the apocalyptic anxieties and descriptions of doomed and damaged communities that dominate contemporary environmental politics. Lizzie builds on disaster geographies by considering how disasters are rarely singular, short-term ruptures but are often interconnected across places and scales
Research Interests: Environmental humanities; planetary health; posthuman feminist phenomenology; embodiment; planetary flows of bodies; feminist epistemologies and knowledge production, art/science/theory collaborations; alter-Anthropocene; volume imaginaries, justice.
Qualifications
2022 University of Exeter funded PhD in Human Geography
Scarred Landscapes: Making Space for Texture & Volume in alter-Anthropocene Discourses
2017 Masters of Research in Critical Human Geographies (University of Exeter) Distinction
2016 BA Hons Geography (University of Exeter) First Class with Deans Commendation
Research group links
Research
Research interests
My research analyses the intersections of the body, technology, materiality and ethics.
Research projects
Project title: The dialectics of recovery: brining neurodiversity into therapeutic geographies
Supervisors: Professor John Wylie and Professor Ian Cook
Funding Body: University of Exeter, Vice Chancellor Scholarship for Academic Excellence
Project description:
Spectrality has grown in popularity over the last decade, however, the concept has been neglected from geographical literature concerning health and wellbeing. This is suprising since the recently published 'Implementing Recovery through Organisational Change' (2013), joint initative from the Centre for Mental Health and Mental Health Network NHS Confederation, identified the importance of moving beyond conceptual frameworks for personal recovery in mental health which rely on temporal linearity. My project aims to bring spectral geographies into closer conversation with the therapeutic landscapes literature, and, in doing so, expand the concept of recovery. Practically, I will carry out ethnographic fieldwork with individuals and organisations that use art practices as a device to explore mental health and recover; as well as co-produce an autoethnographic short film exploring the concept of temporality through themes of vulnerability, recovery, health and healing in the context of my personal experiences of Borderline Personality Disorder and neurodiversity.