Public conference as part of the search for a professor in Human Geography

Summary: This presentation examines how judgments about what nature should look like shape European nature recovery. Drawing on research at Oxford’s Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, I introduce students to political ecology and critical visual methodologies by interrogating landscapes framed as wilderness or wastelands and explore how aesthetic framings of 'messy', 'wild', or 'degraded' nature encode power relations, and legitimise certain interventions over others. The research component presents my work across the UK, Switzerland, and post-communist contexts in Eastern Europe, encompassing cultural landscape values, wildlife coexistence and biodiversity offsetting. I demonstrate how my research combines hybrid approaches with policy engagement to examine competing values and social justice dimensions of nature recovery, bridging human geography with applied conservation social science.