What Our Students Say

Matthew Offord

I undertook my MA in Environment, Culture and Society between 1998 and 2000, whilst I was working at Cumbria County Council. The diverse landscape and economy of the county ensured that much of the knowledge I gained was immediately useful in public policy-making. I later moved to London where, in addition to employment at the Local Government Association and later at the BBC, I became Deputy Leader of Barnet Council with responsibility for environmental issues. During that time I introduced a compulsory recycling scheme amongst the 300,000 residents (the first in the country), undertook a Carbon Trust scheme to identify and reduce carbon emissions across the borough and oversaw a massive road safety programme that reduced the number of Killed and Seriously Injured people by over 45%.
What am I doing now? In May 2010 I was elected as a Conservative Member of Parliament for the constituency of Hendon in North London. In addition to my constituents’ concerns, I maintain an active interest in environmental issues, particularly hydropolitics, water quality, energy security, rural policy, agriculture, food security, economic development and pharmacology.
In January 2012 I was awarded my PhD at King’s College London entitled Rural Governance and Economic Development: The Changing Landscape of Rural Local Government.

Ingmar Lippert

From 2005 to 2007 I was a part-time student taking the MA in ECS. Modules and interactions with fellow students and lecturers provided me with a critical and sharp take on society-environment relations.

Specifically, the STS inspired perspective on scrutinising how actors enact "natures" caught my academic interest. Combined with the emancipatory potential of tensions between post- and new-structuralist thinkers and activists, the MA led me onto a research path studying corporate ecological modernisation practices from the inside. Throughout 2009 I was in the field - within the environmental management office of one of the world largest players of the financial market.

What am I doing now?

Currently, I am based at Augsburg University, doing a Phd supervised by Christoph Lau. Right now I am working through my field notes and on ways to visualise the structure of codes themes, etc; sometimes I post ideas and developments here: http://www.ems-research.org/ this website is a humble start of a couple of STS phd students (all dealing with "environmental issues"), aiming to understand and comment upon hegemonic environmental practices (thus the concept of "management").

Uli Beisel

I can wholeheartedly recommend the MA Environment, Culture, Society (ECS) at Lancaster. Having come to Lancaster in 2005 after graduating in Germany, the MA introduced me to thoroughly interdisciplinary and problem-oriented thinking, for which I became to value UK academia. ECS combines exciting research from a broad range of social science disciplines - sociology, science and technology studies, philosophy of nature - in order to explore today's pressing societal questions, like humans' relationship with the environment or politics of nature and technology. This means that one does not only get introduced to stimulating and provocative academic approaches, but also is always encouraged to connect theories with possibilities for activism - be it through contributing to policy processes or bottom-up public engagement.

What am I doing now?

After completing ECS in 2006 I began a PhD in Human Geography at The Open University. I'm currently finishing my thesis on human-environment relationships in malaria control, and will in summer 2010 move on to conduct postdoctoral research in the Anthropologies of African Biosciences group at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.