Background

I'm a senior lecturer at Newcastle where I research and teach on social theory, utopian studies, environmental/Anthropocene futures, science fiction and social imaginaries. I'm also interested in epistemic cultures and gender.

I'm currently Postgraduate Research Director for Sociology at Newcastle and also Postgraduate Research Director for the School of GPS as a whole.

Research

How can we live better with nature? What would a good environmental future look and feel like? My research explores social thinking about green futures in fiction, policy, public debate and the sociological imagination and how it is changing in response to climate change and the Anthropocene.  My recent book Green Utopias: Environmental Hope Before and After Nature (Polity 2017) explores some of these debates.

From 2016-18 I was a co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project Unsettling Scientific Stories: Expertise, Narrative, and Future Histories . We explored how people in different historical periods envisioned their futures over the long technological twentieth-century and how they used fiction to imagine and explore, speculate and critique what science might bring.

I continue to work with Dr Miranda Iossifidis on data from that project on social practices of science fiction reading. Our study, Prospecting Futures phase 2, builds on the first phase of research conducted by Dr Amy Chambers. 

My research draws on resources from science fiction studies, utopian theory and STS as well as sociology.  

I'm currently leading the Imagining Pasts and Futures Sociology research cluster.

Teaching

Publications

• Garforth L. Environmental Futures, Now and Then: Crisis, Systems Modeling, and Speculative Fiction. Osiris 2019, 34(1), 238-257.
• Garforth L, Gallinat A. Introduction: Constructing and practising student engagement in changing institutional cultures. Learning and Teaching 2018, 11(1), 1-18.
• Coulson S, Garforth L, Payne G, Wastell E. Admissions, adaptations and anxieties: social class inside and outside the elite university. In: Waller, R; Ingram, N; Ward, MRN, ed. Higher Education and Social Inequalities University Admissions, Experiences, and Outcomes. London, UK: Routledge, 2018.
• Garforth L. Green Utopias: Environmental Hope Before and After Nature. Oxford, UK: Polity, 2017.
• Kerr A, Garforth L. Affective Practices, Care and Bioscience: a Study of Two Laboratories. The Sociological Review 2016, 64(1), 3-20.
• Garforth L. Latour, Bruno (1947–). In: James D. Wright, ed. International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. Elsevier, 2015, pp.414-419.
• Garforth L. In/Visibilities of Research: Seeing and Knowing in STS. Science, Technology and Human Values 2012, 37(2), 264-285.
• Garforth L, Kerr A. Interdisciplinarity and the Social Science: Capital, Institutions and Autonomy. British Journal of Sociology 2011, 62(4), 657-676.
• Garforth L. Lost Edens and Other Green Worlds: Ecotopia, Politics, and Aesthetics. In: Heffernan, N., Wragg, D, ed. Culture, Environment and Ecopolitics. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011, pp.55-83.
• Garforth L, Kerr A. Let's Get Organised: Practicing and Valuing Scientific Work Inside and Outside the Laboratory. Sociological Research Online 2010, 15(2), 11.
• Garforth L. No Intentions? Utopian Theory After the Future. Journal for Cultural Research 2009, 13(1), 5-27.
• Garforth L, Cervinkova A. Times and Trajectories in Academic Knowledge Production. In: Felt, U, ed. Knowing and Living in Academic Research: Convergence and Heterogeneity in Research Cultures in the European Context. Prague: Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, 2009, pp.169-226.
• Garforth L, Kerr A. Women and Science: What's the Problem?. Social Politics 2009, 16(3), 379-403.
• Garforth L. Ideal Nature: Utopias of Landscape and Loss. Spaces of Utopia, An Electronic Journal 2006, (3), 5-26.
• Garforth L. Green utopias: beyond apocalypse, progress, and pastoral. Utopian Studies 2005, 16(1), 1-37.
• Garforth L. Ecotopian Fiction and the Sustainable Society. In: Parham, J, ed. The Environmental Tradition in English Literature. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, pp.100-116.