Background

After completing her PhD in 2012, Jo accepted a Postdoctoral Research Associate position at the University of Manchester. She worked on the ESCR funded project, ‘Households, Retailers and Food Waste Transitions’ (ref: ES/L00514X/1) as well as pursuing internal funding for her work on the sustainable management of waste in neoliberal society.

In 2016, Jo returned to Newcastle as a Research Excellence Academy (REA) fellow in the department of politics. She is currently researching the justifiable limitations of individual responsibility for climate change mitigation as part of the project, ‘Individual Responsibility for Realising Human Rights: Climate Change, Poverty and Other Problems of Aggregate Effects’.

Alongside her publication record (2012-2020), Jo has produced two children (21 months of maternity leave in total).

Research

Jo's research mainly focuses on the facilitation and management of individual behaviour change, in the context of climate change and the environment more generally. She is particularly interested in the role of neoliberal environmentalism in the proliferation of the current climate crisis and the (necessary) transition to a more sustainable society.

Her current project focuses on the justifiable limitations of individual responsibility for climate change and she has three collaborative papers in preparation:

- 'Upping our game’? An assessment of individual responsibility in the context of a climate
emergency
- Knowledge is (lack of) power: The 'information-overload model' and individual
responsibility for climate change.
- How long does it take to save the world? A moral assessment of time, food and individual
behaviour change.

Going forwards, Jo would like to focus on local authorities and the responsible management of behaviour change in the context of the current climate emergency.

Teaching

Publications

• Bell D, Swaffield J, Peeters W. Climate ethics with an ethnographic sensibility. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 2019, epub ahead of print.
• Peeters W, Bell D, Swaffield J. How New are New Harms Really? Climate Change, Historical Reasoning and Social Change. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 2019, epub ahead of print.
• Swaffield J, Evans D, Welch D. Profit, reputation and ‘doing the right thing’: convention theory and the problem of food waste in the UK retail sector. Geoforum 2018, 89, 43–51.
• Evans D, Welch D, Swaffield J. Supermarkets, the ‘consumer’ and responsibilities for sustainable food. In: T. Marsden, ed. The SAGE Handbook of Nature. London, UK: Sage Publications Ltd, 2018.
• Welch D, Swaffield J, Evans D. Who's Responsible for Food Waste? Consumers, Retailers and the Food Waste Discourse Coalition in the UK. Journal of Consumer Culture 2018, (ePub ahead of Print).
• Evans D, Welch D, Swaffield J. Constructing and mobilizing ‘the consumer’: Responsibility, consumption and the politics of sustainability. Environment and Planning A 2017, 49(6), 1396-1412.
• Swaffield J. After a decade of critique: neoliberal environmentalism, discourse analysis and the promotion of climate-protecting behaviour in the workplace. Geoforum 2016, 70, 119-129.
• Swaffield J. Freebies, freedom and fundamental change: resistance to neoliberal environmentalism in large ‘green’ corporations. Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability 2016, 22(5), 553-567.
• Bell D, Gray T, Haggett C, Swaffield J. Re-visiting the ‘social gap’: public opinion and relations of power in the local politics of wind energy. Environmental Politics 2013, 22, 115-135.
• Swaffield J, Bell D. Can 'climate champions' save the planet? A critical reflection on neoliberal social change. Environmental Politics 2012, 21(2), 248-267.