Dr Jo Swaffield

Research Excellence Academy Fellow

Email: joanne.swaffield1@ncl.ac.uk
Telephone: 0191 208 3690
Address: Henry Daysh Building
Claremont Road
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 7RU

Background

After completing her PhD at Newcastle University 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 focuses broadly on the facilitation and management of individual and organisational behaviour change in the context of global environmental problems.

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

- Climate change and a neoliberal conception of individual responsibility

- The ‘Information-overload’ model and individual responsibility for climate change

- A moral assessment of time, food and individual behaviour change

Going forwards, Jo intends to investigate potential responses to the impacts of climate change on everyday life (stress, anxiety, solidarity, resilience) and the ways in which these might be monitored and managed at a societal level. She is currently seeking funding to explore individual and community responses to the Covid-19 pandemic as a way to better understand the potential impacts of the impending climate crisis. This specific comparison of global emergenices and adaptive capacities will focus on food (in)security but may lay the foundations for future research into other potential impacts of climate change on everyday life (e.g., travel, working from home).

Teaching

Jo does not currently have any teaching responsibilities.

Publications

Bell D, Swaffield J, Peeters W. Climate ethics with an ethnographic sensibility. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 2019, 32, 611-632.
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, 32, 505-526.
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.