Background:

Andrea Nightingale directed the new Environmental Social Science PhD program until April 2015 when she moved to Uppsala. She teaches on subjects related to environmental politics, social justice and development. She was previously the Director of the MSc in Environment and Development and a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Geography at the University of Edinburgh (2002-2012). 

Her PhD from the University of Minnesota (2001) in Geography was based on work done in Nepal since 1987 on questions of development, natural resource management, community forestry, gender, social inequalities and governance.

Focus areas:

Andrea is the Chair of Rural Development in the Global South at SLU in Uppsala, Sweden. Her academic interests include socio-natures, feminist theory, critical development studies, and methodological work on mixing methods across the social and natural sciences. She has worked extensively on understanding how intersectional social relations, including gender, race, caste, class and other axes of social difference (known collectively as intersectional subjectivities) are foundational to which management priorities are considered in and who is expected to do what kinds of work to achieve environmental governance and sustainability goals, as well as the possibilities for the reconfiguration of gender and other social inequalities through everyday governance practices.

Her current research explores state transition and climate change in Nepal. This project, Landscapes of Democracy, has been running for the last 10 years. She is presently expanding her interests into Scandinavian countries, Africa and other countries in South Asia. She also has a research project on coastal landscapes and marine environments in Sweden.

Current work: 

Presently her theoretical interests incorporate feminist work on emotion and subjectivity with theories of development, authority, collective action and cooperation in common property situations. Her most recent theoretical work seeks examine the confluence of climate change and violent conflict, and the nexus of social, cultural and political values in producing particular kinds of environments.

Her on-going collaborations include working closely with Siri Eriksen at Noragric, NMBU in Norway on the politics of climate change adaptation. She and Hemant Ojha have a long-term collaboration on questions of environmental governance, social and political transformation and policy research. They presently are finalizing their British Academy funded project, “Climate Change and Political Violence? Resource governance and post-conflict reconstruction in Nepal". Her marine research is a collaboration Ruth Brennan (Scottish Association for Marine Science) and Stephen Hurrel (independent artist).