Current Research Grants
Principal’s Teaching Award Scheme: Investigating the benefits of using on campus recorded teaching material for online learners (Principal Investigator)
This ongoing project will lead to innovative ways to connect with online students.
Global Challenges Internal Fund: Caricrop: Exploring the potential of new technologies to support local and inter‐regional agricultural trade in the Caribbean (Co-Investigator with colleagues in Design Informatics and Geography)
This project is using blockchains to support fairer and more sustainable small-scale food production in the Caribbean.
Ongoing Research
The Political Ecology of Conservation and Extraction in Mozambique
This research examines how we can understand the ongoing process of neoliberalisation through studying conservation and extraction. For my PhD research in this area, I spent nearly six months in the Ponta do Ouro Partial Marine Reserve (PPMR), part of the Lubombo Transfrontier Conservation Area, and in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique interviewing conservation managers, government ministers and officials, communities living in conservation reserves, activists and academics. Drawing on Marxist political ecology, assemblage theory and political geographies of international development, my research showed how conservation in Mozambique is increasingly governed and understood by donors and elites as something best done through commodification, and that this has led to a closer relationship between the extractives and conservation sectors. I also highlighted the sometimes unfair and ambiguous interventions this produces in the lives of people and animals, how these interventions are contested, and investigated how ideas of ‘green development’ are advanced to solve a number of complex and contradictory problems.
Publications from this research include:
Symons, K., 2018. The tangled politics of conservation and resource extraction in Mozambique’s green economy. Journal of Political Ecology, 25(1), pp.488-507. Available here.
Symons, K. Land rights and justice in neoliberal Mozambique: The case of Afungi community relocations. (2018). In The Right to Nature: Social Movements, Environmental Justice and Neoliberal Natures, 1st Edition. Edited by Elia Apostolopoulou, Jose A. Cortes-Vazquez. Routledge. Available for pre-order here.
Symons, K., 2016. Transnational spaces, hybrid governance and civil society contestation in Mozambique’s gas boom. The Extractive Industries and Society, 3(1), pp.149-159. Available here.
You can also read my PhD research here.
OxChain: International Development and New Digital Technologies
I was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh on the OxChain project. This cross-disciplinary project involved researching what blockchain technologies mean for international development. The research involved working closely with people, data and ‘things’ to see how they gain value in Oxfam’s network, drawing on theoretical approaches including global production networks, digital geographies and data commodification, and research methods including organisational ethnography.
The overall research question centred on how might the kinds of new value transactions afforded by blockchain change the way that Oxfam conceives of development problems and implements development solutions?
You can read more about the project’s publications and ongoing research here.
Edinburgh Futures Institute: Can blockchain restore trust in international development? (Principal Investigator)
This was a really exciting project which brought scholars, the public and development practitioners to explore blockchain as ‘humanitarian tech’. We wrote a paper to help NGOs seeking to use blockchains, which you can see here: Blockchain Roadmap.
Small-scale Bioenergy in Kenya
As part of my MSc in Africa and International Development (2011-2012) I spent two months in western Kenya (Kisumu). I was part of Policy Innovation Systems for Clean Energy Security (PISCES) project researching climate change adaptation and small-scale bioenergy. My research was published as a PISCES policy paper and a journal article.
Kate Symons 