Sally Beckenham

Sally is interested in environmental justice and the way that calls for environmental justice intersect with other rights and identities. Her Ph.D. research explored discourses of identity and the politics of claiming rights in the context of post-tsunami dispossession in Southern Indian fishing communities. For this research on post-tsunami seascapes she was awarded a Leverhulme scholarship and was based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Her post-doctoral research includes work on environmental justice and the haze crisis in Northern Thailand and an exploration of the relationship between ecological knowledge production and global indigenous discourse in Southeast Myanmar. The latter was conducted with colleagues in Thailand as part of the E.U. Commission Horizon 2020 project Competing Regional Integrations in Southeast Asia (CRISEA).

Her latest publication is a guest editorial in the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography entitled Ecological knowledge co‐production and the contested imaginaries of development in Southeast Asia (2023). She is an interdisciplinary academic with degrees in Modern History (University of East Anglia); International Politics (University of Edinburgh) and International Relations (Department of War Studies, King's College London).

She came to York after working for five years in Thailand as Lecturer in International Politics and Development at the Institute of Southeast Asian Affairs (ISEAA), Chiang Mai University (CMU) and an Affiliated Researcher at CMU’s Regional Centre for Social Science and Sustainable Development (RCSD). She was also Lecturer in Environmental Politics at CMU’s Faculty of Political Science and Public Administration. Sally is currently exploring an interest in critical and engaged pedagogy and its value to students of political geography.