Wallerand Bazin

Post-pastoral aesthetics: trees, bracken, broom and bells

Wallerand is a cultural and environmental geographer from Paris, France. His doctoral research focuses on the political ecologies of climate and conservation policies in heritage landscapes. 

Wallerand coordinates the Environmental Humanities research hub at TORCH and is a member of the Technological Life research cluster, the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and the Oxford University Collective for Pastoralist and Nomadic People. 

Political ecology 

Leaning on Jacques Rancière, his DPhil project sketches a post-pastoral aesthetics by analysing the disagreement between sheep farmers and ecologists around tree planting in the Lake District (Lowther valley) and the management of landscape closure in the Cévennes (Val d’Aigoual). Both National Parks are enshrined as UNESCO cultural landscapes in part due to their agro-pastoral heritage, transhumance and hefting, which is unsettled by calls for rewilding and free evolution. Wallerand looks specifically at the politics of vibrant vegetation management, namely bracken cutting and broom burning, and the shift from heritage to conservation grazing. He uses archival research and comparative ethnography with transhumant sheep farmers in the Cévennes and upland hill farmers in the Lake District to make sense of current proposals to reintroduce transhumant forms of grazing in the English uplands in the context of agri-environmental reforms, namely ELMS landscape recovery projects.

This research builds on his MPhil (Geography, Oxford) in 2020-2022, which focused on the socio-legal implications of tree planting on land tenure in the UK, particularly in the Lake District. Wallerand holds a BA in Philosophy of Science from Erasmus University Rotterdam. 

Environmental Humanities

His wider research is situated in the environmental humanities, drawing on different disciplines, including political theory, art history, literature, performance studies, and is resolutely collaborative.

With Dr Ben Platt (Geography, Cambridge), he draws on Jacques Rancière’s writings on landscapes and aesthetics to understand contemporary interventions in landscape design across the rural-urban spectrum. 

With Elisabeth Darrobers (Comparative Literature, Sorbonne), he works on eco/bio-criticism and how nature is represented on the theatre stage. They have recently analysed the microbiopolitics of “screening” the poliovirus in the 2023 theatre adaptation of Philip Roth’s Nemesis (2010) (forthcoming book chapter). Their collaborative works have been published in Analyse-Opinion-Critique, Oxonian Review, Fabula and the Oxford Review of Books, on themes ranging from climate opera, climate change museum, eco-theatre, scenographies of urban space to work-time-reduction, eco-theorism and decolonial architectures. 

Post-colonial studies

Wallerand also furthers post-colonial research in geography (see Bazin and Gunaratnam-Bailey, 2024), conservation (see Bazin and Gomez (ORB, 9(1), 2024) on trophy hunting) and heritage studies, particularly relating to ideas of nature in the UNESCO cultural landscape designation.

As part of efforts to decolonise year-abroad placements for third year undergraduates reading French in the UK, Wallerand coordinates the Oxbridge-Vallet year-abroad placement in Cotonou. For the Fondation Vallet-Bénin-Excellence, he co-created in 2023 with Beninese, French and Ivorian colleagues the EEEJ summer school in Cotonou (Benin) for fifteen francophone graduate students in the humanities and social sciences. Wallerand presently sits on its scientific council and on the editorial board of its yearly cultural magazine, La Palabre. 

• Darrobers, E. and Bazin, W., “Screening for control: microbipolitics in Tiphaine Raffier’s Nemesis”, in Bouttier, S., Campos, L., Lapointe, F.J., and Montin, S., Microscopic Life in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature and Performance (Open Editions, forthcoming)
• Bazin, W. and Gunaratnam-Bailey, Z., “Incomparable geographies in a multipolar world’, St Antony’s International Review, 19(1), May 2024, pp. 10-31(22)
• Bazin, W., “Accessing contested landscapes: a political ecology of tree planting in the Lake District”, Mondes du Tourisme, 25, 2024.

Awards, Scholarships and Grants

• Rotary Global Grant Award – Environment (2024-2026): $31,000
• Fondation de France Bourse d’Excellence (2023-2026) : €36,000
• St Antony’s Student Travel and Research Grant (STAR): £554 (2024)
• Environmental Change Institute Small Grant: £700 (2021), £300 (2024), £530 (2025)
• John Boardman Scholarship (2020-2022): £5,000