Dr Caitlin DeSilvey

Senior Lecturer in Environmental Social Science (Cultural Geography)

Role

Dr Caitlin DeSilvey was appointed to the Environment and Sustainability Institute (ESI) in 2012. Her research as a cultural geographer focuses on two broad areas of enquiry: change and adaptation, and resilience and reskilling. In the area of change and adaptation, her research develops narrative and visual tools for engaging people in understanding and imagining environmental change. In the area of resilience and reskilling, she investigates the aesthetic and cultural aspects of everyday sustainable practices such as mending and allotment gardening.

Caitlin’s research approach is collaborative and interdisciplinary: she currently shares PhD supervision with environmental scientists (a project developing 3D models of projected sea level rise at a cultural heritage site) and artists (a project using locative media to narrate future histories in the landscape). Other research networks and projects involve collaborations with archaeologists, photographers, humanities scholars and heritage practioners. Current projects include Small is Beautiful? Visual and Material Cultures of Making and Mending; The Jurassic Coast and the Arts of Community Engagement: Heritage, Science, Policy and Practice on a Dynamic Coastline; and a knowledge exchange project with the National Trust exploring the concept of Anticipatory History. She is a member of the Geographies of Creativity and Knowledge research group, and co-director of the European Centre for Environmental Arts and Humanities. Caitlin is a member of the Geography department in the College of Life and Environmental Sciences. 

Profile

Caitlin graduated from Yale University in 1994 with a BA in Religious Studies and Environmental Studies. She then spent six years working as a community organiser and environmental educator in Missoula, Montana before moving to the UK to study for a MSc in Cultural Geography at the University of Edinburgh (2001) and a PhD at the Open University (2005). She joined the University of Exeter, based on the Cornwall Campus, in 2007, and has since developed a successful research programme with funding from UK and international research councils (AHRC, EPSRC, Norwegian Research Council, European Social Fund).

Academic and research interests

• Micro-sustainable practices
• Creative/collaborative research methods
• Post-industrial ecologies and aesthetics
• Deep mapping and digital humanities
• Locative media and landscape
• Waste, value and materiality 
• Narration and storytelling
• Heritage, memory and transience
• Cultural aspects of environmental change

Selected publications

DeSilvey, C., (2012) Copper places: affective circuitries in Jones O, Garde-Hansen J (eds.) Geography and Memory: Explorations in Identity, Place and Becoming, Palgrave Macmillan
DeSilvey, C., (2012) Making sense of transience: an anticipatory history. Cultural Geographies, 19 30-53
DeSilvey, C., Naylor, S., Sackett, C., (2011) Anticipatory history Axminster, Uniformbooks
DeSilvey, C., (2010) Memory in motion: soundings from Milltown, Montana. Social and Cultural Geography, 11 491-510
DeSilvey, C., (2007) Art and archive: memory-work on a Montana homestead. Journal of Historical Geography 33 878-900
DeSilvey, C., (2007) Salvage memory: constellating material histories on a hardscrabble homestead. Cultural Geographies 14 401-424
DeSilvey, C., (2006) Observed decay: telling stories with mutable things. Journal of Material Culture 11 318-338
DeSilvey, C., (2003) Cultivated histories in a Scottish allotment garden. Cultural Geographies 10 442-468.

Qualifications

BA Religious Studies and Environmental Studies, Yale University (1994)
MSc Cultural Geography, University of Edinburgh (2001)
PhD, Open University (2005)

Contact details