Current Project

The current project is Adaptation and Indigenous Labour: Colonial Extraction on the Climate Frontier

Using historical, ethnographic and collaborative qualitative methods, Vanessa Burns establishes new bases in geographical research for the decolonisation of environmental governance.

Education and Early Career

Dr Burns holds a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) in Geography from the University of Oxford. She is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Institute for Global Sustainable Development (University of Sheffield)

Before joining the University of Sheffield, Dr Burns held a position as a Social Scientist in Governance at The James Hutton Institute. There, she collaborated on various environmental research projects funded by the European Commission and the Scottish Government. Previous to this, she worked as a Lecturer in Human Geography at Stanford University. Vanessa also holds an MA from the University of New South Wales and a BA (1st Class Hons and University Medal) from the University of Technology Sydney

Research

Vanessa's work is broadly interested in how ontologies of nature inform the production of environmental knowledge, especially knowledge of environmental change. She is interested in the project of reforming environmental law and governance frameworks, by asking how the ontological foundations of environmental law and governance frameworks obstruct good governance.

She is especially interested in how European ontologies of nature produce international environmental frameworks that are maladapted to alternative (indigenous) land and sea management in postcolonial regions, and the problem of how to decolonise these frameworks.

Research Interests:

• Politics of environmental change

• Adaptation justice

• Pacific geographies

• Decolonial thought

• Ocean governance

• Human-environment relations in the Anthropocene epoch