Our Researchers

His research interests include autoethnography, ecological arts practice, conservation and conversations around re/wilding, regenerative agriculture and the politics of being and selfhood in the Anthropocene. He is currently developing a number of projects on the Lizard in Cornwall at the intersection of contemporary arts research and re/wilding, conservation and the politics of land in collaboration with Professor Caitlin DeSilvey at the University of Exeter. He has undertaken post-doctoral research as a National Productivity Investment Fellow at Falmouth University in collaboration with the National Trust. Published papers include writing for the New Statesman, Digital Creativity Journal and the Living Maps Review.

As an artist he has developed a practice of Romantic Conceptualism that does not restrict itself to traditional boundaries, mediums or modes of practice, but rather develops a responsive way of being and making that is composed of and by its present context. He has exhibited internationally in exhibitions from New York to St. Petersburg.

Exhibitions include: This is The Future, Chiltern Sculpture Trail; British Art Show 6, Newcastle; Deptford X Festival, London; Conflux Festival of Psychogeography, New York; Artisterium, Tbilisi, Georgia; Performance Writing 12, Arnolfini, Bristol; Sideways: a festival of walking, Belgium; Remote Performances, Outlandia/Resonance FM, Scotland; Venice Biennale; HIDE, Secret Garden Party, Cambridge; Hermitage, Newlyn Gallery and Unbounded, Eden Project.

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He has taught widely in higher education and was formerly Head of the School of Art, Design and Media at the University of Brighton.

Previous roles include: Associate Curator and the Head of Research at Arnolfini; Head of Arts and Ecology at Dartington College of Arts; Director of an International Arts Summer School in Luxembourg; Lecturer in Fine Art in Context at the University of the West of England. Alan has taught at and advised higher education institutions throughout the world including work at Trondheim School of Arts, University of New Mexico, Banff Centre for the Arts, LaSalle College of Art and Design, NTU Singapore, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Taylor’s University Malaysia, San Francisco College of Art and Design, University of The Fjords, Icelandic Academy of the Arts. He is on the board of MIT Press Leonardo Journal. He has worked with many Arts and Design organisations on strategy including the RSA, TATE, and the Tobacco Factory.

Jo has been awarded International Fellowships and residencies to undertake research and fieldwork, including at the Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California; Headlands Center for the Arts, USA; Space Plasma Physics Group, Dept. Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester; Skaftfell Center for Visual Arts, Iceland; Vatnasafn/Library of Water, Iceland; Living Art Museum, Iceland; Northeast Greenland National Park; and Reserva Ecológica De Guapiaçu, Brasil. Her collaborative projects, films, artworks and architectures have received awards, honours and special mentions from Ars Electronica, VIDA International Art and Artificial Life, The Arts Foundation, AJ Architecture Awards and London Short Film Festival.

Jo has a Master’s (Distinction) in curating art, design and new media and completed her AHRC-funded doctorate in 2020, receiving her PhD for Library of Light: a framework to explore light, material culture and social experience from the University of Sunderland, UK.
Jo has co-edited a number of publications including Null Object: Gustav Metzger thinks about nothing, published by Black Dog (2012); Remote Performances in Nature and Architecture, a project centred on London Fieldworks’ Outlandia project in the Scottish Highlands, published by Routledge (2015). Her recently authored, Library of Light: encounters with artists and designers, was published by Lund Humphries (2019) and examines the role light plays in the new frontiers of art, design and technology and its impact on our cultural history. Most recently Jo has collaborated with writer and thinker Timothy Morton on a future documentary Confronting our Erasure Through Art for BBC4. She also recently contributed the essay Violence Power, Surveillance: From the Blind Lantern to the Searchlight for “White Torture” to a bilingual publication (German/English) published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König to accompany Power! Light! a forthcoming exhibition at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2021-22).

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Having taught and served as Dean for nearly 15 years at Vermont’s Sterling College, Pavel brings a depth of experience to Schumacher College’s unique approach to experiential learning. While pursuing research in ecologically-minded curriculum design and teaching courses in environmental philosophy, Pavel is also a passionate endurance and adventure runner. Over the past five years through a project called Climate Run, Pavel has covered hundreds of miles in the Arctic and subarctic on foot in order to bring attention to the connections between our bodies and the more-than-human world in the face of a rapidly changing climate.

Pavel holds a Ph.D. in English and is the author of many articles, chapters, and two books: Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest: Region, Heritage, and Environment in the Rural Northeast. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010; and This Vast Book of Nature: Writing the Landscape of New Hampshire's White Mountains, 1784-1911. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006. He is currently working on a book titled Resilience in the North: Adventure, Endurance, and the Limits of the Human, which threads together personal narrative and observation with environmental philosophy and reflections on what it means to be human.

Sarah draws on subversive arts thinking, alternative practices of imagination, forms of unknowing and non-dominant cultural cosmologies, with a particular emphasis on everyday creative resistance. She endeavours to work within a care-led, slow scholarship framework that gratefully acknowledges indebtedness to the activism of academics of colour, indigenous, minority, feminist and queer knowledge. She has also trained extensively in somatic and movement practices and is passionate about embodiment politics. She spent several years working as a hand paper maker, developing a haptic, text-based arts practice in the process that has been exhibited internationally.

Mona has a background in craft and design. After doing an undergraduate degree in Craft and Material Culture at the University of Art, Tehran, Iran, she completed MDes and PhD in Design at the University of Dundee, Scotland. Her doctorate thesis is an exploration of the role of unmediated relationship with the environment in the evolution of human consciousness. Her aspiration is to reintroduce the embodied and relational qualities of craft practice into regenerative design processes, particularly in participatory approaches to Transition. 

After a few years, he switched to philosophy with a focus on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language which lead into a second doctorate on which he is currently working. His thesis develops a Wittgensteinian approach to the history and philosophy of science that is based on seeing connections. He has published articles on Newton, Goethe, Wittgenstein, Barfield and Bortoft, as well as edited and translated a number of books on Goethean science.

Troy has edited the Holistic Science Journal with Philip Franses. He has also edited the book Experience Colour, a large format exhibition catalogue that presents an exploration, understanding and application of colour, and What is Colour?, the collected works of Michael Wilson's groundbreaking holistic colour research.