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.

Research

A central strand of my research for many years has been utopian and science fictional visions of better ways of living with nature in the context of wider social debates about environmental futures. My current focus is on how green futures in fiction, policy, public debate and the sociological imagination are shifting 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 PI for Newcastle on the 3-centre AHRC-funded project Unsettling Scientific Stories: Expertise, Narrative, and Future Histories which explored how people in different historical periods thought about and envisioned their futures over the course of 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 closely with Dr Miranda Iossifidis analysing 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 increasingly interested in how sociology narrates and imagines possible and desirable futures; complicated presents; and how all this is shaped by ideas about the past.

I'm co-leader of 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.