New colleagues in Sheffield
Mistra Urban Futures and the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield are delighted to welcome three new members to the team. Charlie Spring and Kristina Diprose are both research associates working at the Sheffield-Manchester Local Interaction Platform funded by Mistra Urban Futures. Charlie will support the Self Organising Action for Food Equity Project and Kristina will support work around the Sustainable Development Goals. Ione Hine is the Research Impact Officer for the ESRC funded Jam and Justice Project.
About Charlie
Charlie has alternated between academic and non-academic roles, including for the University of Salford’s Environmental Sustainability Team, campaign organisation ATD Fourth World and immigrant rights association AMSED in Strasbourg. Before moving to Manchester, her Masters studies in Sustainable Development Advocacy focussed on thinking critically about ‘corporate social responsibility’ (and cider sustainability!). Her BA in Social Anthropology at Cambridge introduced her to critical development theory, which she has applied to her academic and practical roles since. In her spare time she is co-chairing the ‘Measuring and Monitoring’ sub-group of the Greater Manchester Food Poverty Alliance and co-editing a Handbook of Food Waste. Charlie will be assisting various projects within Realising Just Cities, including SAFE.
Research Interests
Charlie’s PhD (University of Salford) was a critical ethnography of diverse organisations redistributing surplus food, asking whether and how this can prevent or contain problems of food wastage and food precarity. Research included a Churchill Fellowship to North America to investigate its food banking industry, learning from groups contesting corporate charity as a dominant response to poverty. Understanding relationships between food waste and hunger reflect her fundamental interest in socio-environmental problems, especially around food systems change. Her doctoral work drew upon urban political ecology, assemblage theory and framing theory. Charlie brings to her Sheffield role a curiosity about the power dynamics of diverse groups collaborating towards urban transitions in times of austerity politics, and she is keen to learn from Sheffield’s food and broader sustainability networks.
Please also read Charlie's blog post: Developing a Food Network for the North
About Kristina
Kristina is a Research Associate on the ‘Realising Just Cities’ project, focussing on what ‘just’ sustainability means for the Sheffield city region and local implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. She graduated from the University of Leeds with degrees in Childhood, Education and Culture (BA Hons), Social and Cultural Geography (MA) and a PhD in social geography. She then worked at the intersection of research and community organising on The Young Foundation’s ‘Socially Sustainable Leeds’ project, before joining the University of Sheffield in 2015 as a Postdoc in the Faculty of Social Science.
Research Interests
Kristina’s recent research and publications have focussed on: urban residents’ views on intergenerational justice, consumption and sustainability; media representations of sustainability; local narratives and moral geographies of climate change; and intergenerational community-based research. She has a particular interest in participatory social research and creative practice, having previously collaborated with arts practitioners on intergenerational theatre, creative writing and filmmaking workshops.
