Lesley HEAD

Position: Professor, Australian Laureate Fellow
Room: 41.G14
Phone No: +61 2 4221 3124
Email: lhead@uow.edu.au

AUSCCER

Research Interests

My long-term research fascination is human-environment relations, both conceptual and material. That is, I want to understand how humans have physically changed earth’s systems, how we think about our place in nature, and how these two things are connected. I have a particular focus on humans and plants. In recent years I have worked mostly in cultural geography, with projects on backyard gardens, wheat and invasive plants. This developed from my earlier interest in Aboriginal land use, ethnobotany and fire. I started my research career using palaeoecology and archaeology to study long term changes in the Australian landscape, and the interactions of prehistoric peoples with their environments.

Today I am building on this multidisciplinary background in the Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research (AUSCCER), where a team of scholars is applying cultural research methods to the pressing issues of sustainability and climate change.

Current projects:

• The Social Life of Invasive Plants

• The Wheat Project
  Ingrained: a human bio-geography of wheat, by Lesley Head, Jennifer Atchison and Alison Gates
  (coming in 2012, Ashgate)

• Making Less Space for Carbon:  Cultural research for climate change mitigation and adaptation

• The Backyard Project,Ordering information
   

 Representative Publications

 Searchable Publication List
 Research OnLine
 Selected Works

Current Students