Dr Alex Arnall

I am a Human Geographer working across the environmental social sciences and humanities. My research examines how communities make sense of and respond to environmental shocks and stresses, and how these processes reshape livelihoods and social futures. I work across rural, urban and coastal settings, particularly where flooding and sea-level rise are reshaping lives and contributing to displacement.

My work is driven by questions of justice and politics: whose knowledge counts and whose interests shape environmental governance and policy. I enjoy building long-term connections with people and places and developing research that brings marginalised experiences into wider debates. I have extensive fieldwork experience in Mozambique, the Maldives and the UK, and more recently have developed research collaborations in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.

Rather than treating environmental change simply as a problem of risk management, I explore how it is lived and understood. Memory, place attachment and local knowledge shape how people respond to change and imagine the future, including decisions about whether to adapt, resist, stay or move. I mainly use ethnographic and participatory methods, often working collaboratively with communities, to understand how environmental interventions unfold in practice and the tensions and unintended consequences they can produce.