Dr Amy Penfield and Dr Jessica Moody are among 68 UK researchers to have been awarded UKRI Future Leaders Fellowships. Future Leaders Fellowships are the UKRI’s flagship awards which allow universities to develop their most talented early career researchers and innovators.
Dr Amy Penfield, Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, has been awarded £2 million to study small-scale drivers of deforestation in the Amazon forest.
Drawing on empirical data collected in the rainforests of Peru, Bolivia and Brazil, Dr Penfield’s project offers a comparative study of ‘incursion economies’ — land grabbing, illegal logging, and prospector mining — which take place below the radar in remote regions of the forest and that invariably result in environmental degradation.
The interdisciplinary project team will deploy and integrate a mix of methods, including ethnography, remote sensing, institutional placements, policy research, social networks, and supply chain analysis to dig into the various scales of the phenomenon, making this research the first of its kind to combine ground level ethnographic data with a large-scale transboundary view of the phenomenon using GIS datasets.
Dr Penfield said: “I’m extremely honoured to have been awarded this fellowship that aims to examine the localised causes of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. Relatively little comprehensive research exists on how incursion activities such as these play out on the ground, who participates, how the activities function, how they intersect, and how they link to broader global economies.
“This project will forge a novel approach to ‘incursion infrastructures’ by exploring the hidden networks and arrangements that facilitate the endurance of incursion economies. Alongside this framing, a central aim of the research is to better understand the motivations and moral tensions that define participation in environment destruction, steering the narrative away from one-dimensional stereotypes of Homo devastan, which describes the role humans play in environmental degradation, habitat destruction, and towards a more nuanced depiction of forest inhabitants who forge complex livelihood in these vulnerable terrains.”
Dr Jessica Moody, Senior Lecturer in Public History in the Department of History has been awarded £2 million to study the ways that plants, gardens, and green outdoor spaces can be productive places of public history, able to communicate, memorialise and tell histories in innovative ways. Creative methodologies and approaches to this new field of ‘plant public history’ will be developed and tested through the fellowship.
Working in partnership with the National Trust and the International National Trusts Organisation, the fellowship will analyse current heritage practice and explore green heritage spaces as ‘sites of memory’ in relation to histories of transatlantic enslavement around the Atlantic world. The research will uncover new histories and connections between plants and people to share more widely.
Dr Moody said: "I'm delighted to have received this fellowship. I would like to thank my project partners and the team at Bristol for supporting this application as well as the UKRI. I look forward to exploring this exciting new area over the next four years.”
Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser, UKRI Chief Executive, said: “UKRI’s Future Leaders Fellowships provide researchers and innovators with long-term support and training to develop ambitious, transformative ideas.
“The programme supports the research and innovation leaders of the future to transcend disciplinary and sector boundaries, bridging the gap between academia and business.
“The fellows demonstrate how these awards continue to drive excellence, and to shorten the distance from discovery to prosperity and public good.”