Professor Clare Saunders

A brief introduction:

Since August 2022, I have been Head of Department for Humanities and Social Science Cornwall. This is an exciting transdisciplinary department that puts the attainment of social justice at the heart of its work. From January 2021, I was the Lead of Politics, Penryn.

My teaching and research are focused on the ways in which people can work together to achieve social and environmental sustainability. By social sustainability, I mean fair, inclusive and participatory democracy. By environmental sustainability I mean genuine attempts to achieve justice for people, other species, eco-systems and earth processes. In seeing social and environmental sustainability as intertwined, I do this work mostly through the lenses of the broad and interrelated academic fields of political participation, environmental politics and environmental justice. 

My teaching and research are also interrelated. For example, when I'm running POC3072: The Politics of Protest, students learn about the role of protest in democracies. I take them on a field trip to London to attend and survey a large-scale protest. This teaches our students how to apply the professional state-of-the-art Caught in the Act of Protest methodology, while also contributing crucial data to an international database. Students on the MSc module HAPM102: Environmental Justice in Policy and Society,  use creative methods to critical thinking as ways to bring environmental justice to the fore in debates about environmental policy. This relates closely to work I have been doing with Creative Fellow Daksha Patel on using creative methods to re-think environmental justice.

Biography:

Before working at the University of Exeter I was RCUK Academic Fellow at the University of Southampton (2008-12), promoted to Senior Lecturer in October 2011. Prior to that, I was a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Social and Political Movements, University of Kent (2000-1, 2004-2008 with an ESRC funded PhD 2001-2004).

Research supervision:

I would welcome applications from PhD students in any of the following areas:

• Social movements / protest
• Pro-environmental behaviour change
• Environmental discourses
• Environmental justice

Completed PhD students include:

• Joyce Liang: A comparison of the lifestyles of the Umbrella and Anti-Extradition Movement protest cycles.
• Amina Ghezal: The story of moving islanders: Exploring Tuvaluna migrants' place attachment and sense of belonging between the homeland and the host-land.
• Phillip Passmore: Communicating climate science on-line.
• Sidan Wang: Newspaper discourse of climate change in China
• Molly Bond: How indigenous people shape (or should shape) the developing regime for the regulation of synthetic biology.
• Milka Ivanovka: Consequences of state benefits on political activities and membership involvement.
• Gina Angelescu: Environmental citizenship in Europe: A longitudinal analysis.
• Emily Rainsford: The nature of youth activism: Exploring young people who are political active in different institutional settings.