Dr Austin Read

Austin is a Departmental Lecturer operating at the crossroads of environmental, historical, and political geography. His research investigates the historical geographies of colonialism and capitalism that underpin today's ecological crises, with the primary aim of encouraging more socially and politically conscious responses to environmental change. Austin joined the School of Geography and the Environment in 2024. Previously, he earned his BSc, MSc, and PhD in Geography from the University of Bristol, where he also worked as a postgraduate teaching assistant. He has also studied political science and French at Sciences Po Lyon and spent a year training as an archivist at the University of Glasgow.

Austin is currently working on a new project that explores the historical geographies of land enclosure in Britain and their legacy in modern nature recovery efforts. He is also continuing to publish findings from his recently completed PhD research, which was a critical examination of biodiversity conservation in the River Severn and the River Wye. These projects cluster around four key themes:

1. Political Ecologies of Biodiversity Conservation & Nature Recovery

Austin’s work aims to critically analyse strategies for biodiversity conservation and nature recovery that have emerged amidst the current global environmental crisis, often referred to as the “Anthropocene.” While conservation is sometimes viewed as inherently good, it can also serve as a managerial tool that supports and facilitates capitalist practices of extraction and dispossession. Consequently, Austin aligns with a well-established geographical tradition of scholars using critical spatial theories and methods to uncover the complexities in modern biodiversity conservation and to support interdisciplinary efforts that promote social and environmental justice. Developing more inclusive and democratic environmental governance has taken on renewed urgency in an era where rising climate-sceptic powers seek to exploit disillusionment with technocratic conservation efforts.

2. Historical Geographies of Colonialism and Racial Capitalism in British Environments

Austin is particularly interested in researching the ways that ecological crisis and biodiversity conservation are both shaped by historical geographies of colonialism and racial capitalism, especially in the UK. Entrenched spatial binaries can make it challenging to see how colonialism and racial capitalism have shaped and often harmed British environments. In fact, such an approach may seem ethically questionable, as it risks fostering a problematic comparison between environmental decline in the UK and racial violence in (post)colonial contexts. A key aspect of Austin’s research has therefore been to develop geographical theories and methods that support this kind of investigation without falling into problematic or hasty comparisons. This work is evident in his published articles, which, for example, describe how biodiversity decline in rivers is an inheritance of British imperialism that demands an anti-colonial response, and explain how ecological infrastructures, such as canals and weirs, serve as material archives that can be used to narrate these histories in a spatially and temporally specific manner. This type of research, which is a significant focus of Austin’s emerging postdoctoral project, appears particularly vital as increasingly fractious debates about the legacies of British imperialism ripple across society.

3. Rivers and Watery Environments

Much of Austin’s work has centred on watery environments, especially rivers. His PhD research focused on the River Wye and the River Severn, which both run through the borderlands of England and Wales. He is also developing a smaller project that examines minor urban rivers in London. This empirical focus is the result of a lifelong fascination with water, combined with the emergence of waterways as a significant topic in contemporary British political discourse. Drawing on wider geographical interest in the materiality of water, Austin seeks to examine the forces that underpin this contemporary river moment and contribute to societal struggles for river justice.

4. Historical-Geographical Materialism

Finally, an ongoing effort in Austin’s work has been to foster a theoretical dialogue between Marxist historical materialisms, posthumanist “new” materialisms, and decolonial theories of political ontology. There has often been fierce (though productive) debate within geography between these traditions, but I am more interested in exploring how they might be integrated. This involves examining the disciplinary history of geography and the various ways it has engaged with the concepts of materialism and ontology. Recently, Austin has been considering this through the development of what some scholars call a historical-geographical materialism, which aims to place spatial and temporal theorising on an equal footing and ensure that scholarly theory is oriented towards bringing present political conjunctures into consciousness. This final research theme is thus a more introspective examination of what geographical theory has been so far, as well as an exploration of what it could become in the future.

Austin’s research activities have been funded by several sources, including: 

• John Fell Fund Research Grant: A Forgotten River: Fluvial Geographies of the Dagenham Brook. £5,430.00. 2025-2026
• School of Geography and Environment Travel and Research Grant, University of Oxford: £1000 to support participation in the American Association of Geographers conference in Detroit, MI. 2025
• Political Ecologies Research Group, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol: Research workshop funding. £500. 2024.
• Bristol Doctoral College’s PGR Development Fund: Research workshop funding. £500. 2024.
• University of Bristol Alumni Travel Grant: awarded £550 for travel to an international conference. 2024.
• University of Bristol, Postgraduate Teaching Fellowship. £90,000. 2020-2024.
• School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol: Prize for highest overall performance of a Human Geography master’s student, awarded a bursary of £250. 2019.
• School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol: Prizes for best Human Geography dissertation and for highest overall performance of a Human Geography undergraduate student, awarded two bursaries of £250. 2017.

Publications (peer reviewed journal articles, book chapters and media/creative outputs)

• Read, A. (Forthcoming) Assemblage, archive, ancestor: theorising historical ontologies and methods with Salmon. Geographical Research (special issue on ‘Nature in/and/of the Archive’).
• Read, A. (2025) Infrastructure as archive: Examining the colonial geographies of rivers. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.
• Read, A. and Kramsky, Y.A. (2025, accepted – in press) End of a cis-hetero discipline? Strategies for a queer political ecology. In, Hope, J., Apostolopoulou, E. and Collins, A. The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology (2nd Edition).
• Read, A. (2024) Eutrophicated: Tracking colonial histories of phosphate matter and the Plantationocene inheritances of the River Wye. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 7(6): 2413-2436.
• Read, A. (2023) Sensory Ethnography. In, Sensory Research in the Humanities: An Introduction to Five Methods [Online]. Available at: https://medenvnetwork.wordpress.com/2023/03/28/sensory-research-in-the-humanities/
• Read, A. (2021) Seaspiracy: Is the fishing industry killing our oceans? Sustainable Food Trust [Online]. Available at: https://sustainablefoodtrust.org/news-views/seaspiracy-is-the-fishing-industry-killing-our-oceans/