As a Human Geographer, I have been interested in rural places since my undergraduate days.  When I came to the UK in 1996 to do a PhD, I chose to study what I called Geographic Imaginaries of the UK countryside.  The thesis looked at the disjunctures between aspirational imaginaries of a clean healthy rural landscape and the actual dirty, messy business of living in the countryside in the Southwest of England.  Every good dissertation idea should have a phrase which can be used in the pub to describe what is being done and I chose “Yuppies moving into the countryside and then complaining that the pig farm next door smells”.  In the late nineties this was a very contemporary phenomenon with the Countryside Marches, growing awareness of the lack of rural housing and the loss of young people who could not afford to live where they grew up. 

Based on this, my first academic position was as a Research Fellow at the Arkleton Centre for Rural Development Research at the University of Aberdeen.  In the four years I was at the Centre I did research on Community Woodlands in Scotland; transitions from a rural economy dominated by production to one dominated by consumption; environmental and social justice in terms of land ownership in Scotland; and the spread of the consumption economy to the remotest peripheries.  Since then my research has developed to encompass a review of socio-economic research on rural development in Scotland, Asset-based Rural Community Development, further work on Community Woodlands and other Community Assets, Place-based Education as a rural development tool, gender in rural economies, and Sustainability across the three axes of Society, Economy and Environment.  

Through it all I have been keen to emphasize the importance of policy and rural change on the people who actually live, work and recreate in rural places.  Much of my career seems to have consisted of standing at the back of the room saying “Remember the little guys!” when dealing with issues of changing rural and environmental policy, rural development and rural economies.