Max Woodworth – The Ohio State University
Principal Investigator. Focus area: China. Geography. Max D. Woodworth is a geographer with a research background in the urbanization of energy resource extraction regions. His work is concerned with the social impacts on places and communities caused by booms and busts in extraction and the challenges of energy resource adoption and abandonment. His experience in booming coal extraction regions of China provide a counterpoint to his work in the declining coal regions of Ohio.
Jeffrey Jacquet – The Ohio State University
Co-Principal Investigator. Focus area: Ohio River Valley/Appalachia, USA. Rural and natural resource sociologist with a focus on energy development, including social impacts from the development of renewables and fossil fuels. Other focus areas include rural community development, social impact assessment and the social-psychology of environmental change.
Vickie Zhang – National University of Singapore
Focus area: Australia; China; Singapore. Cultural geographer interested in the intensities and energetics of ordinary life in times of economic change. Dr. Zhang’s research explores the micropolitics of economic transitions through attention to how affected workers and communities are navigating durations of loss and adjustment, with a focus on corporeal forms of negativity. Dr. Zhang’s research combines theories of affect, embodiment and mobility, diverse forms of storytelling, and fieldwork undertaken in Australia and China.
Julia Haggerty – Montana State University
Focus area: Powder River Basin, USA. Rural geographer with a focus in Community and Social-Ecological Resilience, Rural Communities, Extractive Industries, and Rangelands. Julia Haggerty runs the Resources and Communities Research Group at Montana State University, a highly collaborative lab that researches the socioeconomic impacts of resource development on local communities. She currently mentors four Ph.D. students, all of whom are women working in male-dominated fields. Haggerty’s integrated research approach blends theory and practice to provide relevant, tractable results to rural communities.
Thomas Measham – Cooperative Research Centre for Transformations in Mining Economies
Focus area: Australia. Director of Cooperative Research Centre for Transformations in Mining Economies (CRC TiME). Professor Measham is an internationally recognised research leader with extensive experience in designing integrated research programs focused on communities, the resources sector and regional transition. Before joining CRC TiME, he was a Principal Research Scientist and Group Leader for CSIRO, leading a portfolio of interdisciplinary research projects focused on economic transition in resource rich regions. He has a background in human geography and 25 years’ experience spanning diverse industries and communities across regional Australia.
Sarah Knuth – Durham University
Focus area: United Kingdom/Europe. Geographer with research focuses on critical geographies of climate change and energy transition, finance and the green economy. Sarah Knuth is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Durham University. Her research focuses on critical geographies of climate change and energy transition, finance and the green economy.
Karen Rignall – University of Kentucky
Focus area: Appalachia, USA; Africa. Anthropologist with a focus in community development with an emphasis on Collaborative and engaged research. Dr. Rignall’s research focuses are land tenure and land use change, comparative research: North Africa and Appalachia, political ecology and environmental change, social dimensions of energy and economic transition in rural extraction zones, small-holder agriculture and agrarian change, rural community development, and gendered dimensions of social inequality.
Aleksandra Lis – Adam Mickiewicz University
Focus area: Poland; Germany; Europe. Ethnologist and cultural anthropologist. She holds a PhD degree in Sociology and Social Anthropology from the Central European University in Budapest (Hungary). For the last ten years, she has closely studied the intersection between the European and Poland’s climate and energy politics, which resulted and the publication of a book with Routledge, titled Climate and Energy Politics in Poland: Debating Carbon Dioxide and Shale Gas (2020). Her research specifically focuses on the science-policy nexus, participation of non-experts publics in technological controversies and challenges of the just transition to low carbon energy and transportation systems.
Sanya Carley – Indiana University
Focus area: Illinois basin, USA. Professor of public policy, Dr. Carley’s research focuses on energy justice as well as on policies aimed at advancing the innovation of low-carbon and efficient energy technologies in both the electricity and transportation sectors. In her most recent projects, she and collaborators study the incidence of energy insecurity among U.S. households and the equity and justice dimensions of the U.S. energy transition.