Dr Vanessa Burns

Vanessa joined The University of Sheffield in September 2021. She has a DPhil in Geography from the University of Oxford, a MA (research) from the University of New South Wales, and a BA (1st Class Hons and University Medal) from the University of Technology Sydney. Before joining Sheffield, Vanessa held a position as Social Scientist in Governance at The James Hutton Institute, where she collaborated on a number of Scottish government and European Commission funded environmental research projects. Prior to this, Vanessa worked as a Lecturer in human geography at Stanford University. Her independent research has been funded by the Australian Research Council and The Leverhulme Trust. Vanessa's work is broadly interested in how ontologies of nature inform the production of environmental knowledge, especially knowledge of environmental change. She is interested in the project of reforming environmental law and governance frameworks, by asking how the ontological foundations of environmental law and governance frameworks obstruct good governance. She is especially interested in how European ontologies of nature produce international environmental frameworks that are maladapted to alternative (indigenous) land and sea management in postcolonial regions, and the problem of how to decolonise these frameworks.