Bio

When I look at the world, I see a world in which space matters. We don’t just live our lives outside of a geographical context; we live our lives in spaces and places. Spaces and places are not just the canvas of our lives, we are implicit in making the world around us via the daily routines we enact in place and through the exceptional moments we may be a part of. Similarly, I believe that the social, cultural, political, environmental, economic issues facing our world do not happen in a vacuum. They happen somewhere, and that ‘somewhere’ is important in making sense of any given phenomenon.

I am a human geographer interested in the socio-cultural, environmental and political workings of the world around us.

My interests in geography – and space – take place in the context of the sea. For the past 20 years I have become increasingly interested with how power operates in the marine environment and how governance works (and fails). I have explored this in the context of pirate radio ships, prison hulks, deep-sea mining to vessel traffic management. I am also interested in the ways in which the seas and oceans offer geographers, and other social and political scientists,  ways of thinking about time, space and movement – shifting from static modes of knowing and understanding the world. Here the sea becomes a theoretical tool, that in turn helps do practical work differently.

I have written widely in this area, as well as publishing textbooks on an area of teaching I am most passionate about: research training. I am author and editor of 10 books, including the volumes, Ocean Governance (Beyond) Borders (2025), Political Geography in Practice: Theories, Approaches, Methodologies (2024), The Routledge Handbook of Ocean Space (2022), Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the Ocean (Ashgate, 2014), The Mobilities of Ships (Routledge, 2015), Carceral Mobilities (Routledge, 2017); Territory Beyond Terra (Rowan and Littlefield, 2018) and Living with the Seas (Routledge, 2018); the discipline-wide textbooks, Political Geography in Practice: Theories, Approaches, Methodologies (2024) and Your Human Geography Dissertation (Sage, 2017); and the monograph, Rebel Radio: Sound, Space, Society (Palgrave, 2017).

My interest in human geography began as an undergraduate student where I studied for a BSc in Human Geography and Planning (2006) at Cardiff University, UK. I then went on to complete an MA in Cultural Geography (2007) and a PhD in Human Geography (2011) at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, sponsored by an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Grant.

During my PhD I was a Teaching Assistant at Royal Holloway (2007-2011), before I took up my first full-time academic post as a Teaching Associate in Human Geography in the Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, UK (2011-2012). Following this, I spent 4 years as a Lecturer at the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth University, UK (2012-2016). In 2016 I joined the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Liverpool, UK, as a Lecturer. I was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2017 and Reader in 2019.

I now lead a research group examinng Marine Governance at the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB), a research organisation in collaboration with the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg (UOL), in Germany. I also retain a commitment to Liverpool as an Honorary Research Associate. 

In Germany, I hold the post of Professor and am responsible, together with the excellent team there, for developing a  strand of critical social science that evaluates the governance of seas and oceans. Indeed,  our group seeks to explore how governance does not just happen anywhere, but somewhere, and is shaped by spatial processes. It also aims to take seriously power and politics, histories and current waves of policy in shaping the seas, and lives entangled with them. You can find out more about our team here.