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Dr Janet Banfield

College Lecturer in Geography

janet.banfield@hertford.ox.ac.uk

At heart, I am a cultural geographer with one foot in psychology. I gained my BA (Hons) in geography at Oxford University in 1997, at which point I would have described myself as a physical geographer. I then completed an MSC in Environmental Science, Policy and Planning at the University of Bath, and embarked on what I thought would be a dream career in environmental consultancy, but I was quickly disillusioned by it so switched track and pursued a longer and more fulfilling career in local government, working in sustainable development, corporate planning and strategic policy, up to senior management level. Subsequently, I obtained a Master of Research degree in psychology at Oxford Brookes. This led to increasing interest in ideas of embodied cognition and pre-reflective experience, which brought me back to Oxford for my DPhil in geography, which I completed in 2014. My doctoral research drew on non-representational thinking in both geography and psychology to explore the emergence of spatiality and subjectivity through artist practice, firmly positioning me now on the human side of the discipline. Since then, my research interests have broadened into geography-psychology interconnections more generally to inform our understanding of interdisciplinarity, and my research and teaching interests have also grown, increasingly oriented around auto-ethnographic and practice-based experimental approaches. I took on my first college lectureship at Hertford College in January 2015 and have worked almost entirely at colleges since then, delivering class and tutorial teaching, pastoral and academic skills support, and dissertation supervision, at up to four colleges simultaneously.

Teaching

At the college level, I teach across the human side of the discipline, covering aspects of Human Geography, Geographical Controversies, and Qualitative Techniques at Prelims, and similarly covering aspects of Space, Place and Society and the more human aspects of Geographical Thought for the Final Honours School. At the departmental level, I have lectured on the Nature, Society and Environmental Governance postgraduate course, and have co-convened/co-delivered the undergraduate option Geography and Policy, both of which have enabled me to incorporate my former local government and sustainable development experiences into my academic work. I am currently based solely at colleges.

  • Research interests

  • Publications