Research

I am an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) researching urban food systems and cultures. I am specifically interested in exploring the obstacles (cultural, infrastructural, socio-technical, policy-related, or otherwise) currently preventing the mainstreaming of urban community agroecology. I am also a practitioner of urban gardening: I help to manage three community gardens across Coventry and run the community food project, 'Food Union' for the Pod (a Coventry City Council mental health and community arts service).

I completed my PhD in 2015 which examined the cultural representation of environmental activism, with a specific emphasis on agricultural sites of resistance.

Outputs

 

• ‘Critical Foodscapes: What does the Future Hold for Urban Gardening?’, Special Issue (Editor) Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems (forthcoming 2017).
• ‘Critical Foodscapes: What does the Future Hold for Urban Gardening?’, a one day conference (Organiser) at the Institute of Advanced Study, Warwick. 7th July 2016.

• ‘Current Extent and Future Capacity of Urban Gardening’, American Anthropological Association: Culture and Agriculture, February (2016).
• ‘Climate Change as Historical Process’ in Dillon, S. (Ed) Gylphi 21st Century Writers Series: Maggie Gee. London: Gylphi (2015).
• ‘Review – Bill McKibben, Oil and Honey’, Environmental Values 23.3 (2014).
• ‘The Fossil Free Resistance Movement’, The Globalist 3.1 (2014): 28-29.
• ‘Lessons from the Global South: Representations of Agroecological Resistance Movements’ at New Forms of Agriculture: Ordinary Practices, Public Debate And Social Critique, November 20-21 2013, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA), Département Sciences pour l’Action et le Développement, Dijon, France.
• ‘Producing Radical New Forms or Reproducing “Neoliberal Governmentalities”?: Literary Representations of Agroecological Resistance Movements’ at Food (In)security Conference: International and Trans-Disciplinary Perspectives, 16 October 2013, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.
• ‘Sustainable Activism?: Agroecological Resistance Movements in the Global North’ at ASLE Literature and Sustainability Symposium, 15th March 2013, University of Wales Trinity Saint David.
• ‘Representations of Environmental Activism in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital Trilogy and Michael Crichton’s State of Fear’, Trans-Scripts 3 (2013): 27-60.
• ‘Review – Timothy Clark, Literature and the Environment’ The Oxonian 17.3 (2011).
• 'Structural Violence and the Constraints of Ecological Crisis' - The Oxford Postgraduate Conference: 'Return to the Political' (2012).
  
• 'Towards an Ecological Unconscious - Representing the Violence of Capitalist Economies', Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) conference (2012).

Teaching

 

2015/16 - Introduction to Alternative Lifeworlds

2015/16 - Modes of Reading 

2014/15 - Modern World Literatures 

2014/15 - Reimaging the University

2013-16 - Human Animal Studies

2012/13 - Modes of Reading

Christopher Maughan

C dot J dot Maughan at warwick dot ac dot uk