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’s research interests encompass cultural geography, the geographies of science, the politics of Nature and wildlife conservation. His work explores inherently geographical questions that conjoin the social and the environmental sciences. He employs qualitative, visual, ethnographic and historical methods. He has conducted extensive periods of fieldwork in the UK, Sri Lanka and most recently the Netherlands. Jamie’s research has been funded by a series of grants from the ESRC and has been published in many of the leading geography and interdisciplinary journals. He has been a visiting researcher at the Universities of British Columbia and Peradeniya (Sri Lanka).
Jamie is from London.
Undergraduate teaching
For the Final Honour School, Jamie lectures on the ‘Environmental Geography’ foundation course. Jamie convenes an FHS option, ‘Geographies of Nature’, based on his 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. As part of the core ‘Research Skills’ training for all MSc and DPhil students, Jamie teaches ‘Visual Methods’.
Jamie welcomes enquiries from individuals wishing to undertake doctoral or post-doctoral research in the following, or related, areas: the histories, geographies, cultures and politics of wildlife conservation; geographies of science; the politics of Nature; animal geographies and animal studies more generally; urban wildlife; volunteering and environmental imagery. Jamie is currently developing new research interests in the microbiome and would also welcome enquiries in this area.
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Research interests
Jamie’s current research focuses on the microbiome – the invisible life in, on and around us. In an ESRC-funded Transformative Research Project, entitled Good germs, Bad germs, Jamie is collaborating with colleagues in the School to develop a participatory model for mapping the domestic microbiome. This project aims to take the science of metagenomics out of the lab to allow members of the public to visualize and experiment upon the life in their kitchens. Working with the Food Standards Agency, the project explores how hygiene practices are shaped by an awareness of the inevitability of microbial life in domestic spaces. In other work on the microbiome, Jamie is exploring the emergence of pro-biotic approaches to managing human and environmental health – focusing in particular on the rise of helminthic and other forms of biotherapy for tackling autoimmune and allergic disease.
These research interests emerge from over a decade of work exploring the geographies of Nature. This research focuses on the implications of the Anthropocene for contemporary environmental thought and practice. The public recognition of humans as a planet changing force challenges forms of science and policy premised on the separation of Nature from Society. It also poses questions to the category Human as the sole locus of agency and value. Jamie’s work explores ‘more-than-human’ and ‘multinatural’ alternatives. Jamie has recently drawn this work together in a research monograph. A recent talk on this theme can be found here.
This general interest has been developed through three substantial research projects. The last of which, entitled Return of the wild was funded by an ESRC small grant. This project explores the history, politics and geographies of rewilding. This is a emerging as a new paradigm for wildlife conservation, with important implications for how we conceive and govern the environment. This project focused on the Oostvaardersplassen and Heck cattle in the Netherlands.
Prior research examined the rise of volunteering as way of delivering international conservation from the UK, focusing on the history, geographies, imagery and politics of Asian elephant conservation in Sri Lanka. Jamie was a co-investigator on this project with Professor Sarah Whatmore. The project was funded by an ESRC small grant and was entitled Scientific ecotourism and (post)colonial encounters with wildlife. Jamie’s PhD and post-doctoral research traced the arrival of biodiversity as an organising concept for UK wildlife conservation. His thesis examined the histories, geographies and politics of the mode of conservation to which it has given rise.
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Publications
Books
- Lorimer, J. (2015) Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature. Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis. pp. 264. ISBN: 978-0-8166-8108-2.
Journal articles
- 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
- 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.