I'm a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths. My thesis examines the discrepancy between policy and practice for low-impact dwelling in rural Wales. The study uses anthropological theories of dwelling to inform an analysis of rural development in Wales. This research was funded by a full “1+3” ESRC doctoral studentship.  The thesis is based on ethnographic fieldwork, consisting primarily of participant observation at an off-grid eco-village in west Wales for a period of fifteen months between 2010-2011.

My doctoral research has contributed to a body of Welsh ethnography by providing a rigorous examination of the notion of community in the context of local planning and development. The research breaks from theoretical and methodological constraints which have constructed communities as conceptual mediums for the interrogation of the interaction between modernity and social solidarity. Focusing on off-grid eco-villages, my research contributes a timely alternative to the logic of community with a focus on grids, networks, and assemblages to ask wider questions about how global processes are brought to bear at the domestic scale. I reject the notion of the Celtic Fringe and the centre-periphery dyad to show instead that rural Wales has been a forward-thinking locus of cultural change. Research has shown that planners and activists in west Wales do not share universal notions about the meaning or purpose of low-impact, despite models which would contain them both. Notions were so differentiated in fact that I have identified low-impact dwelling as categorically different from low-impact development, a distinction which enhances the existing body of literature about UK low-impact development by revealing how the inequalities implicit in the notion of development shape the possibilities for alternative models of rural land-use. Research on the interplay of these two models has highlighted areas of potential compromise and areas where compromise is unlikely, and as such has examined how and when policy has an effect on everyday practice. The notion of a global environment has been at the core of the Welsh Assembly's planning strategies and has shaped activists' approach to the goal of sustainable living. What is at stake in a wider sense is the morality of rural land use, which raises questions about who may decide what is proper and improper use of land and resources, in general, and at what scale(s) such conversations should take place.