ProfNoel Castree

During my 30 years as a researcher I have had five main research interests: recently, the societal role of expertise about global environmental change; the political economy of environmental change; the broader relationships between people and their environments and how best to conceptualise them; the governance of universities and other knowledge producing institutions; and the geographies of workplace struggle for better pay and conditions. Cross-cutting all five interests is a long-term preoccupation with how epistemological and political representation bleed into one another: 'speaking of' and 'speaking for' are intimately related. I have long been interested in how certain ways of depicting the world become normalised, while others are cast into darkness or otherwise fail to be socially influential. Claims to authoritative knowledge comprise one of the four great sources of modern power (the others being money, governmental rules and laws, and the threat/use of violence or force). The status of 'knowledge' is now very vexed in our 'post-truth' times where a cacophony of voices compete for attention in order to comment on the realities of 21st century life. 

In my career so far I have made some modest contributions to theorising the connections between capitalism and the biophysical world, with a particular focus on neoliberalism. Marxist political economy has a key resource, inspired by the likes of David Harvey (whose lectures I attended at Oxford in the late 1980s). More generally I have tried to offer a conceptual vocabulary able to avoid the antinomies of naturalism and social constructionism in analyses of the world’s natural resources and environments. In recent years I have focused on global change science and how so-called 'human dimensions' are being incorporated into expert claims about Earth present and future. For a few years before and just after the new millennium I involved myself in the field of 'labour geography', lead-authoring a book called Spaces of Work (Sage publications) and publishing several articles and chapters.

One of the particular pleasures of being a geographer is exposure to environmental science, social science and humanities approaches to understanding people and planet. I seek to make a virtue of Geography’s unique ‘ecology of knowledge’ in my research and teaching, while being very open to forging connections to other disciplines. I continue to regard Marxist political economy as a necessary, if not sufficient, cognitive and normative tool kit to explain and evaluate the world in which we find ourselves. I completed a co-authored book about David Harvey's life's work, published by Routledge in December 2022. It's called David Harvey: A Critical Introduction to His Thought and comprises 10 chapters plus some useful appendices.

In 2026, I turned my attention to AI and the AI state-industrial complex. This builds on long standing interests  in the social role of science and expertise and what capitalism does to our shared world.