Naomi is a political geographer who explores the knowledge politics surrounding the making and management of global ‘environments’ in the context of changing global agendas for sustainability and changing terrains of conflict. Major themes in her work include citizenship rights, legal aspects of tenure and displacement, environmental expertise, and the construction of sustainable futures – especially in relation to the movement of new paradigms for biodiversity conservation around the world.

Geographically, Naomi’s work focuses on transforming rural environments in Latin America, especially Colombia, Guatemala and El Salvador.  Her research follows how new globalising agendas for sustainability and the rise of new technologies for environmental monitoring (such as drones) transform and affect the contexts within which they are introduced – against historical backdrops of coloniality, long-term conflict, disputes over land rights and citizenship, and unevenness in terms of access to resources. Naomi’s work explores how conservation has become a vehicle for the militarisation of conflicted areas – but also how rural communities are using conservation technologies to defend tenure rights and articulate other visions of environmental futures.

 Methodologically Naomi mobilises ethnographic and participatory approaches in combination with oral histories and archival work to explore and elicit dimensions of situated cultural struggle. Through this approach she aims to help co-create social histories and resistance practices that challenge colonial and exclusionary power relations. 

Naomi's research interests for teaching and supervision include:

• Post-colonial, de-colonial and political ecology approaches to environmental politics, with a focus on the politics of knowledge
• The cultural politics of race, nature and social exclusion
• Food justice, agrarian social movements and food sovereignty, especially in the context of Central America
• Concepts of 'commons' and 'commoning'
• Migration, border politics and transnational forms of belonging
• Theories of politics and aesthetics, especially Walter Benjamin, Jacques Rancière and decolonial theories
• Community education, radical education and pedagogies for social change, including feminist approaches 
• Environmental monitoring and digital monitoring practices.