Miss Lizzy Rainey
PhD Student

Summary

I am a PhD student in the UK Food Systems Centre for Doctoral Training, an interdisciplinary UKRI-funded programme focused on food system transformation.

My research will focus on how farmers in England interact with and understand nature, primarily trees, and how this is reflected or contested in traditional vs neoliberal farming practices, sustainable farming policy schemes, and broader food system transformation. I am supervised by Dr Annleen Kenis from the Human Geography Department at Brunel, as well as Dr Will Lock in the School of Global Studies and Dr Chris Sandom in Life Sciences from the University of Sussex (where I am co-registered). I will be pulling from the fields of political ecology, development studies, (critical) human geography and anthropology.

My academic background is in development studies (MA in Food and Development from Sussex/IDS, 2021-22), during which I contributed to a project led by the Institute for Development Studies for IPES-Food on competing framings of food system sustainability. I have professional experience in NGO management and development, implementing community-led agroforestry and urban forestry projects in Latin America, East Africa, and the United States.

 I am a trained Master Gardener in Arizona and Hawaii and a casual allotment/container urban grower in Brighton.