Graduate Researchers Seminar: Informing and Influencing the Policy Agenda

Friday 12 February 2021

1.00-2.00 PM (AEDT)

Zoom Online

Following on from Daria Vasilevskaia's engaging seminar on trade and marine plastic pollution last November, James Bond (recently completed PhD Candidate) talked about the concept of expertise and how it can inform policy. The seminar also discussed how we might engage policy-makers, and avenues through which our research and findings might come to have real-world application.

The session was facilitated by Professor Lee Godden. Lee has had experience in working on several collaborative projects with government and in policy and legal reform.

Presenter:

James Bond submitted his PhD thesis to the Faculty of Science at University of Melbourne in September 2020. James' primary supervisor, Dr Brian Cook, is located in the school of geography. His co-supervisor, Prof Lee Godden, from the school of law. His research uses case studies in contentious water governance to unearth questions of expert power and knowledge: how is expert knowledge produced? Once produced, how is expert knowledge used to underpin claims to decision-making power? And in socio-environmental controversies, how is power contested by competing forms of expertise and what are the power dynamics at play?
James' research gathers research from academic literatures including knowledge controversies, Science and Technology Studies (STS), materiality, spatiality, geographies of science, and critical legal geographies literatures. The overarching aim of the research is to better understand the dynamics of competing claims to knowledge and power in socio-environmental controversies.