Research
The School of Geography and the Environment is one of the leading international centres for geographical and environmental research.
The School aims to innovate within Geography, moving the discipline in new directions and to demonstrate the centrality of geographical perspectives and questions to interdisciplinary work.
This agenda and strategy builds upon a unique position within the University's Social Sciences Division that promotes new intellectual challenges and spaces for cross-cutting work between social and natural scientists. The distinctive feature of the School's research profile and agenda is the extension of traditional geographical concerns with spatial ordering and movement, and environmental process and change, through the prism of 'life'.
These concerns are refracted through four conceptual thematics - knowledges / technologies; resources / bodies; power / politics; spaces / ecologies - which in different ways run through the five research clusters.
Within this framework, our aim is to produce theoretically inventive, grounded research that is both intellectually agenda-setting within and beyond the discipline and makes policy interventions of national and international significance.
Research Clusters
The School has five major research clusters, with permeable boundaries and significant cross-cutting interests. These clusters are underpinned by external research funding; support staff; specialist computing and laboratory facilities; active postgraduate and postdoctoral communities; and non-academic collaborations.
The Arid Environmental Systems cluster that investigates past, contemporary and future dynamics of dryland environments, using the outputs of cutting edge process studies, sedimentary investigations, numerical dating and climatic analyses to develop robust interpretations of arid geo-system responses to global change drivers. find out more
The Biodiversity cluster that uses theoretical and empirical studies to develop understanding of the impacts of environmental change on biological systems with particular expertise in scale, diversity, long term ecology and the fossil record, dynamic terrestrial ecology, and the implications for evolution, island ecosystems, feedbacks to the earth system and conservation. find out more
The Climate Systems and Policy cluster that examines the physical and human dimensions and consequences of climate change and variability. It has particular strengths in the analysis of global climate data sets; climate modelling and forecasting; climate impacts on ecosystems; and the critical assessment of climate policy and governance. find out more
The Technological Natures: Materials, Cities, Politics cluster that examines the socio-material fabric of new forms of biological and informational resource and ecological governance, and develops theoretical and empirical understandings of their political and cultural consequences for the organisation of cities and bodies; land and water rights; food and financial markets. find out more
The Transformations: Economy, Society and Place cluster that works on the networks and movements of capital, money, resources, people and knowledge and their impact on the transformation of identity, governance and territory, and of the connections between them, at a range of scales from the global and regional to the corporation and the home. find out more
Other Research Initiatives
The School also contains two established research centres: the Environmental Change Institute (ECI) and the Transport Studies Unit (TSU).
The School maintains two inter-departmental research initiatives, the African Environments Programme and the Oxford Water Futures Programme, which, like the ECI and TSU, act as interdisciplinary/interdepartmental hubs for research grant bids, contract research staff and policy engagement.