Professor Jamie Lorimer
Tutorial Fellow in Geography
Professor of Environmental Geography
Jamie Lorimer joined the School of Geography and the Environment in October 2012. Jamie has a BSc (Hons, first class) and PhD from the University of Bristol. His PhD and subsequent post-doctoral fellowships at Oxford (2005-7) were funded by the ESRC. Prior to returning to Oxford, Jamie lectured for four years at Kings College London.
Jamie is an environmental geographer whose research examines the production of environmental knowledge, and how this knowledge comes to shape the world around us. He focuses on powerful understandings of Nature and their consequences for human and nonhuman life across different spatial scales. Past projects have examined human relations with a range of organisms – from elephants to hookworms – and policy domains – including conservation, health, and agriculture. He combines concepts and approaches from more-than-human geography with those from science studies, using ethnographic, participatory, and historical methods. His research has been funded by the ESRC, The British Academy and the Wellcome and Leverhulme Trusts, amongst other sources.
Undergraduate teaching
Jamie lectures on the Prelims ‘Human Geography’ course, the Final Honour School ‘Environmental Geography’ foundation course. Jamie convenes an FHS option with Beth Greenhough, ‘Geographies for the Anthropocene, based on their research.
At Hertford College, Jamie and his colleagues are responsible for teaching students across the entire breadth of geographical topics for the Preliminary Examination and Final Honour School of Geography.
Graduate teaching
Jamie is the Academic Director for the MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance course. He convenes and teaches on the ‘Nature and Society’ core course for this MSc. Jamie also co-teaches a module on ‘Conservation and Society’ on the MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management.
Jamie welcomes enquiries from individuals wishing to undertake doctoral or post-doctoral research in the four research areas outlined above, or related topics including: the histories, geographies, cultures and politics of wildlife conservation, including rewilding; animal geographies; the social dimensions of the microbiome, sustainable transitions in food and agriculture. Jamie and Beth Greenhough run the More-Than-Human Geographies reading group and seminar series.
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Research interests
Jamie’s current research spans four broad and connected areas:
The histories, cultures and politics of wildlife conservation
Jamie’s early work examined the role of ‘nonhuman charisma’ in shaping the scope, ethics, and political economy of nature conservation. He traced how some species and spaces are favoured in conservation science and management and explored the ecological and political implications of these partialities in the UK and in South Asia.
Subsequent work examined the rise of rewilding and then nature recovery as new modes of nature conservation, noting the shift from a focus on rare species to ecological processes and landscape connections. He drew these interests together in his first monograph, entitled Wildlife in the Anthropocene, which examines conservation after the end of the modern understanding of Nature: as cut off from Society and revealed by objective Natural Science. It provides a new framework that grounds conservation in unruly and hybrid ecologies, which locates scientific and economic decision making in their cultural and political contexts, and which advocates for multispecies conviviality. Jamie continues to explore the social dimensions of conservation through his involvement in The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery.
The governance of the microbiome and health
In his work on rewilding Jamie tracked how ecological metaphors from conservation biology moved into the sciences of microbial ecology and immunology as scientists developed tools for mapping the microbiome. Following the emergence of this field, Jamie examined how scientists and citizen are turning to microbiology to understand the pathological consequences of the loss of microbial diversity, the rise of microbial ‘dysbiosis’, and the emergence of new pathogens. They are introducing microbes to manage ecologies and to secure health. He mapped a relational and deeply unequal geography of microbial health, in which disease emerges from both microbial excess and microbial absence.
To enable this research, Jamie developed (with colleagues) an interdisciplinary and participatory methodology for engaging publics with the microbiome. In the Good Germs project, he collaborated with a group of households in Oxford to take the technologies of next generation sequencing out of the laboratory to help people visualize their domestic microbiome and to conduct their own domestic hygiene experiments. Jamie is a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research programme on Humans and the Microbiome.
Jamie has drawn this work together in his second monograph, entitled The Probiotic Planet: Using life to manage life. It combines his interests in rewilding, the microbiome and biome restoration argue that a probiotic turn is underway in the management of life across a range of scales and policy domains. Scientists and policy makers are using life to manage life: reintroducing species and ecological processes to address the problems caused by the excessive application of antibiotic approaches.
Livestock, regenerative agriculture, and the rise of plant-based eating
Since 2018 Jamie has been leading a work package in the Livestock, Environment and People programme. In collaboration with Tara Garnett and several postdoctoral researchers, he is examining food system responses to the growing awareness of the links between livestock agriculture and climate change. This includes research with Alex Sexton on the rise of alternative proteins and the growth in plant-based eating in Europe and North America: tracing the emergence of a new model of ‘Big Veganism’. It also includes work with George Cusworth on the promise and pitfalls of regenerative agriculture, a probiotic model of ‘nature-based’ farming that is growing in popularity. This research critically examines these alternative food futures, tracing the political economic implications of the growing shift towards meat and dairy alternatives.
Animals’ Geographies
In the last fifteen years Jamie has published a series of papers with colleagues and PhD students developing the sub-disciplinary field of animals’ geographies. This work takes animals seriously as geographical actors, exploring how they make and inhabit places. They have outlined and deployed methodologies for attending to the lived experiences of animals, and for witnessing and evoking animals’ worlds. They have explored how key concepts from human geography (like atmospheres, mobilities, territories and the urban) enable novel analyses of animals’ worlds, and how attending to animals themselves offers new insights for human geography.
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Related websites
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Publications
Books
- Lorimer, J. (2020) The Probiotic Planet: Using Life to Manage Life. Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis. ISBN: 978-1-5179-0921-5
- Lorimer, J and Fairfax- Cholmeley, R. (2020) The Wild Ways of the Oak. Richard Lawrence, Oxford,
- Lorimer, J. (2015) Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature. Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis. pp. 264. ISBN: 978-0-8166-8108-2.
Journal articles
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Greenhough, B., Jokela-Pansini, M., Kirksey, S. and Lorimer, J. (2024) Medicine Anthropology Theory, 11(1), pp. 1–17.
Mapping microbial selves: field notes from a dirty parenting project
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Atchison, J., Pickerill, J., Arnold, C., Gibbs, L., Gill, N., Hubbard, E., Lorimer, J. and Watson, M. (2024) People and Nature, 6(2), pp. 458–473.
Peopled landscapes: questions of coexistence in invasive plany managment and re-wilding
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Cusworth, G. and Lorimer, J. (2024) Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 114(3), pp. 462–480.
On disease configurations, black-grass blowback, and Probiotic Pest Management
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Campbell, L., Lorimer, J., Mansfield, B., Porinchu, D. and Wright, S. (2023) Progress in Human Geography, 47(6), pp. 753–754.
Progress in environmental geography and progress in human geography: new siblings
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Sanford, M. and Lorimer, J. (2022) Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 9(1).
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Cusworth, G., Brice, J., Lorimer, J. and Garnett, T. (2022) Social studies of science, pp. 3063127221134275 – 3.
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Clay, N., Sexton, A., Garnett, T. and Lorimer, J. (2022) in Social Innovation and Sustainability Transition, pp. 11–28.
- Turnbull, J., Searle, A. and Lorimer, J. (2022) Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 48(2), pp. 232–248. Anthropause environmentalisms: noticing natures with the Self-Isolating Bird Club
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Brice, J., Cusworth, G., Lorimer, J. and Garnett, T. (2022) Environment & planning A, 54(8), pp. 1551–1568.
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Cusworth, G., Lorimer, J., Brice, J. and Garnett, T. (2022) Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 47(4), pp. 1009–1027.
Green rebranding: regenerative agriculture, future-pasts, and the naturalisation of livestock
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Sexton, A., Garnett, T. and Lorimer, J. (2022) Progress in Human Geography, 46(2), pp. 605–628. Vegan food geographies and the rise of Big Veganisam
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Lorimer, J. (2022) DIALOGUES IN HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, 12(1), pp. 74–78. Is this the humanism we have been looking for?
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Clay, N., Sexton, A., Garnett, T. and Lorimer, J. (2022) in Social Innovation and Sustainability Transition. Springer Nature, pp. 11–28. Palatable Disruption: The Politics of Plant Milk
- Garnett, T., Cusworth, G. and Lorimer, J. (2021) Journal of Rural Studies, 88, pp. 126–137. Agroecological break out: legumes, crop diversification and the regenerative futures of UK agriculture
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Evans, J. and Lorimer, J. (2021) Current Anthropology, 62(S24), pp. S361 – S375. Taste-shaping-natures: Making Novel Miso with Charismatic Microbes and New Nordic Fermenters in Copenhagen
- Sanford, M., Painter, J., Yasseri, T. and Lorimer, J.(2021) Controversy around climate change reports: a case study of Twitter responses to the 2019 IPCC report on land. Climatic Change 167, 59.
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Cusworth, G., Garnett, T. and Lorimer, J. (2021) Global Environmental Change, 69.
Legume dreams: the contested futures of sustainable plant based food systems in Europe
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Cousins, T., Pentecost, M., Alvergne, A., Chandler, C., Chigudu, S., Herrick, C., Kelly, A., Leonelli, S., Lezaun, J., Lorimer, J., Reubi, D. and Sekalala, S. (2021) BMJ Global Health, 6(3).
- Searle, A., Turnbull, J. and LORIMER, J. (2021). Geography Directions.
- Searle, A., Turnbull, J. and Lorimer, J. (2021) Geographical Journal, 187(1), pp. 69–77. After the anthropause: Lockdown lessons for more-that Human Geographers
- Greenhough, B., Read, C.J., Lorimer, J. et al. (2020) Setting the agenda for social science research on the human microbiome. Palgrave Commun 6, 18 .
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Clay, N., Sexton, A., Garnett, T. and Lorimer, J. (2020) Agriculture and Human Values, 37, pp. 945–962.
- Lorimer, J. (2020) The Probiotic Planet Using Life to Manage Life. University of Minnesota Press.
- Lorimer, J., & Schreve, D. (2020). The bones beneath the streets: drifting through London’s Quaternary. Cultural Geographies, 27(3), 453-475.
- Anderson, R.M., Buitenwerf, R., Driessen, C. et al. (2019) Introducing rewilding to restoration to expand the conservation effort: a response to Hayward et al.. Biodivers Conserv 28, 3691–3693.
- Clay, N., Garnett, T. & Lorimer, J. (2020) Dairy intensification: Drivers, impacts and alternatives. Ambio 49, 35–48 .
- Lorimer, J., Hodgetts, T., Grenyer, R., Greenhough, B., McLeod, C. and Dwyer, A. (2019) Making the microbiome public: Participatory experiments with DNA sequencing in domestic kitchens. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 44(3): 524-541.
- Godfray, C., Aveyard, P., Garnett, T., Hall, J.W., Key, T.J., Lorimer, J., Pierrehumbert, R.T., Scarborough, P., Springmann, M. and Jebb, S.A. (2018) Meat consumption, health, and the environment. Science, 361(6399).
- Greenhough, B., Dwyer, A., Grenyer, R., Hodgetts, T., McLeod, C. and Lorimer, J., (2018) Unsettling antibiosis: how might interdisciplinary researchers generate a feeling for the microbiome and to what effect? Palgrave Communications, 4.
- Hodgetts, T., Grenyer, R., Greenhough, B., McLeod, C., Dwyer, A. and Lorimer, J. (2018) The microbiome and its publics: A participatory approach for engaging publics with the microbiome and its implications for health and hygiene. EMBO reports, 19.
- Lorimer, J. (2018) Hookworms Make Us Human: The Microbiome, Eco‐immunology, and a Probiotic Turn in Western Health Care. Medical Anthropology Quarterly: International Journal for the Analysis of Health.
- Overend, D. and Lorimer, J. (2018) Wild Performatives: Experiments in Rewilding at the Knepp Wildland Project. GeoHumanities.
- Lorimer, J. (2017) Parasites, ghosts and mutualists: a relational geography of microbes for global health. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.
- Lorimer, J. (2017) Probiotic Environmentalities: Rewilding with Wolves and Worms. Theory, Culture and Society: 1-22.
- Lorimer, J. (2017) The Anthropo-scene: A guide for the perplexed Social Studies of Science. Social Studies of Science, 47(1): 117-142.
- Lorimer, J., Hodgetts, T. and Barua, M. (2017) Animals’ atmospheres. Progress in Human Geography.
- Pooley, S., Barua, M., Beinart, W., Dickman, A., Holmes, G., Lorimer, J., Loveridge, A.J., Macdonald, D.W., Marvin, G., Redpath, S., Sillero-Zubiri, C., Zimmermann, A. and Milner-Gulland, E.J. (2017) An interdisciplinary review of current and future approaches to improving human-predator relations. Conservation Biology, 31(3): 513-523.
- Lorimer, J. (2016) Gut Buddies: Multispecies Studies and the Microbiome. Environmental Humanities, 8(1): 57-76.
- Lorimer, J. (2016) Rot. Environmental Humanities, 8(2): 235-239.
- Lorimer, J. (2016) Wildlife after the Anthropocene. Dialogues in Human Geography, 6(1): 112-115.
- Lorimer, J. and Driessen, C. (2016) From “Nazi Cows” to cosmopolitan “Ecological Engineers”: Specifying rewilding through a history of Heck cattle. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 106(3): 631-652.
- Hodgetts, T. and Lorimer, J. (2015) Methodologies for animals’ geographies: cultures, communication and genomics. Cultural Geographies, 22(2): 285-295.
- Lorimer, J. and Driessen, C. (2015) Experiments with the wild at the Oostvaardersplasssen. ECOS, 35(3/4): 44-52.
- Lorimer, J., Sandom, C., Jepson, P., Doughty, C., Barua, M. and Kirby, K. (2015) Rewilding: Science, practice and politics. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 40.
- Lorimer, J. (2014) On auks and awkwardness. Environmental Humanities, 4: 195-205.
- Lorimer, J. and Driessen, C. (2014) Wild experiments at the Oostvardersplassen: rethinking environmentalism for the Anthropocene. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 39(2): 169-181.
- Francis, R., Lorimer, J. and Raco, M. (2013) What is special about urban ecologies? Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38(4): 682-684.
- Lorimer, J. (2013) The 400th Part Per Million. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.
- Lorimer, J. and Driessen, C. (2013) Bovine biopolitics and the promise of monsters in the rewilding of Heck cattle. Geoforum, 48: 249-259.
- Lorimer, J. (2012) Aesthetics for post-human worlds: difference, expertise and ethics. Dialogues in Human Geography, 2(3): 284-287.
- Lorimer, J. (2012) Multinatural geographies for the Anthropocene. Progress in Human Geography, 36(5): 593-612.
- Francis, R. and Lorimer, J. (2011) Urban reconciliation ecology: the potential of living roofs and walls. Journal of Environmental Management, 92(6): 1429-1437.
- Francis, R., Lorimer, J. and Raco, M. (2011) Urban ecosystems as ‘natural’ homes for biogeographical boundary crossings. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37(2): 183-190.
- Greenhough, B., Lorimer, J. and Davies, G. (2011) Corporal compassion: animal ethics and the philosophy of the body. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29(1): 188-190.
- Lorimer, J. (2010) Elephants as companion species: the lively biogeographies of Asian elephant conservation in Sri Lanka. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35(4): 491-506.
- Lorimer, J. (2010) International conservation volunteering and the geographies of global environmental citizenship. Political Geography, 29(6): 311-322.
- Lorimer, J. (2010) Ladies and Gentlemen, behold the enemy! Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28(1): 40-42.
- Lorimer, J. (2010) Moving image methodologies for more-than-human geographies. Cultural Geographies, 17(2): 237-258. And an erratum..
- Lorimer, J. and Davies, G. (2010) Interdisciplinary conversations on interspecies encounters. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28(1): 32-33. (An introduction to a review symposium on Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet, including an author’s response.).
- Lorimer, J. (2009) International conservation volunteering: What difference does it make? Oryx, 43(3): 352-360.
- Lorimer, J. and Whatmore, S. (2009) After the ‘king of beasts’: Samuel Baker and the embodied historical geographies of elephant hunting in mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon. Journal of Historical Geography, 35(4): 668-689.
- Lorimer, J. (2008) Counting corncrakes: the affective science of the UK corncrake census. Social Studies of Science, 38(3): 377-405.
- Lorimer, J. (2008) Living roofs and brownfield wildlife: towards a fluid biogeography of UK nature conservation. Environment and Planning A, 40(9): 2042-2060.
- Lorimer, J. (2007) Nonhuman charisma. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 25(5): 911-932.
- Lorimer, J. (2006) Nonhuman charisma: which species trigger our emotions and why? ECOS, 27: 20-27.
- Lorimer, J. (2006) What about the nematodes? Taxonomic partialities in the scope of UK biodiversity conservation. Social and Cultural Geography, 7(4): 539-558.
Book chapters
- Hodgetts, T. and Lorimer, J. (2021) in Routledge Handbook of Biosecurity and Invasive Species, pp. 326–341.
- Lorimer, J. (2018) Environmental conservation and restoration. In, Castree, N., Hulme, M. and Proctor, J. (eds.) Companion to Environmental Studies. Routledge, London. 848 pp. ISBN: 9781138192201.
- Lorimer, J. (2018) Microbiogeographies: the lively cartographies of Homo microbis. Chapter 9 in, Bull, J., Holmberg, T. and Åsberg, C. (eds.) Animal Places: Lively Cartographies of Human-Animal Relations. Routledge. 276 pp.
- Lorimer, J. (2017) Living well with parasitic worms: a more-than-human geography of global health. Chapter 6 in, Herrick, C. and Reubi, D. (eds.) Global Health and Geographical Imaginaries. Routledge, London. pp. 94-113.
- Lorimer, J. and Hodgetts, T. (2017) Biogeography. In, Richardson, D., Castree, N., Goodchild, M.F., Kobayashi, A., Liu, W. and Marston, R.A. (eds.) International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment and Technology. Wiley. 8464 pp. ISBN: 978-0-470-65963-2.
- Driessen, C. and Lorimer, J. (2016) Back Breeding the Aurochs: The Heck Brothers, National Socialism and Imagined Geographies for Non-Human Lebensraum. Chapter 6 in, Giaccaria, P. and Minca, C. (eds.) Hitler’s Geographies: The Spatialities of the Third Reich. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 376 pp. ISBN: 9780226274423.
- Lorimer, J. (2016) Probiotic Legalities: De-Domestication and Rewilding Before the Law. In, Braverman, I. (ed.) Animals, Biopolitics, Law: Lively Legalities. Routledge, London. pp. 39-58.
- Lorimer, J. (2015) Charisma. In, Kirksey, E. (ed.) The ABCs of Multispecies Studies. Duke University Press Books. 328 pp. ISBN: 9780822356257.
- Lorimer, J. (2013) Les animaux mouvants dans les images en mouvement: le cas des elephants. In, Roux, J., Charvolin, F. and Dumain, A. (eds.) Passions cognitives: L’objectivité a l’épreuve du sensible. Editions des archives contemporaines, Paris.
- Lorimer, J. (2013) Witnessing and evoking moving animals: Deleuzian methodologies for more-than-human visual analysis. In, Coleman, R. and Ringrose, J. (eds.) Deleuze and Research Methodologies. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN: 9780748644100..
- Lorimer, J. and Srinivasan, K. (2013) Animal geographies. Chapter 29 in, Johnson, N., Schein, R. and J. Winders (eds.) The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography. Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 332-342. ISBN: 9780470655597.
- Lorimer, J. (2012) Touching environmentalisms: the place of touch in the fraught biogeographies of elephant captivity. In, Patterson, M. and Dodge, M. (eds.) Touching Space, Placing Touch. Ashgate. 288 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4094-0214-5.
- Lorimer, J. (2011) Nature – Part II: The rise of multinaturalism. Chapter 12 in, Agnew, J. and Duncan, J. (eds.) The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Human Geography. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford. pp. 197-208. ISBN: 978-1-4051-8989-7.
- Lorimer, J. (2009) Natures, Charismatic. In, Kitchin, R. and Thrift, N. (eds.) International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography, Volume 7. Elsevier, Oxford. pp. 324-330. ISBN: 978-0-08-044910-4.
- Lorimer, J. (2009) Posthumanism / Posthumanistic Geographies. In, Kitchin, R. and Thrift, N. (eds.) International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography, Volume 8. Elsevier, Oxford. pp. 344-354. ISBN: 978-0-08-044910-4.
Other publications
Lorimer, J. (2018) Leave It to Beavers: Animal Work in Austerity Environmentalism. Cultural Anthropology website.
Other
- Lorimer, J. (2017) Decoupling without Disconnection: Conservation and democracy in an urbanized world. The Breakthrough Institute.
- Lorimer, J. (2017) Why liberals love the microbiome. Critical Care, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 12 June
- Lorimer, J. and Hodgetts, T. (2017) Good germs, bad germs: citizen science and microbiology. The Biochemist: Magazine of the Biochemical Society, 39(3): 35-37.
- Lorimer, J. (2016) Probiotic. Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website, July 12, 2016 Cultural Anthropology
- Lorimer, J. (2015) Charisma. In, Kirksey, E. (ed.) The ABCs of Multispecies Studies.
- Lorimer, J. (2010) Evoking Orang-utans, part of the Studying Green Project.