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Dr Janet Banfield

College Lecturer in Geography

janet.banfield@hertford.ox.ac.uk

At heart, Janet is a cultural geographer with one foot in psychology. She gained her BA (Hons) in geography at Oxford University in 1997, at which point she would have described herself as a physical geographer. She then completed an MSC in Environmental Science, Policy and Planning at the University of Bath, and embarked on what she thought would be a dream career in environmental consultancy, but 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, Janet 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 her back to Oxford for her DPhil in geography, which she completed in 2014. Her 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 her now on the human side of the discipline. Since then, her research interests have broadened into geography-psychology interconnections more generally to inform our understanding of interdisciplinarity, and her research and teaching interests have also grown, increasingly oriented around auto-ethnographic and practice-based experimental approaches, including applying visual approaches to essay feedback and academic skills tuition. She took on her first college lectureship at Hertford College in January 2015 and has 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, Janet teaches 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, she has lectured on the Nature, Society and Environmental Governance postgraduate course, and has co-convened/co-delivered the undergraduate option Geography and Policy, both of which have enabled her to incorporate her former local government and sustainable development experiences into her academic work. She is currently based solely at colleges.

  • Research interests

  • Publications