About the project
This project aims to develop the lens of resilient industrial socio-metabolic relations – a conceptual framework that moves beyond functional understandings of inputs and outputs, to integrate lived experiences of benefits and harms – through an empirical focus on the nutri- and pharma- ceutical components of the UK chicken meat industry.
Food-systems thinking presents decision-makers, policymakers and food-leaders with barriers to understanding ethical relations at play in managing and preparing for crises. The food system is a complex space to safeguard – who or what should be looked after; who or what will consequentially be harmed? And yet, without interventions to strengthen resilience, the scale of harms could reach critical levels. How do industries, the State and communities work together to protect the vulnerable in the food system?
The project will address these questions in relation to the UK laying hen/egg food system. What are the risks for harms to human and more-than-human communities in the face of potential disruption in egg industry inputs (e.g. feed, chicks, medicines)? What are the outputs (waste, shell and liquid egg, chicken lives) and how and where is their management contributing to community, environmental resilience?
The PhD studentship will study this complexity to understand their form, the trade-offs that emerge and their impacts on human health, more-than-human communities and ecologies. It will study biotechnological and community-based interventions made in the name of ‘resilience’ to contemporary omni-crises. How can responses/interventions address those human and more-than-human communities, who are already made vulnerable, to build a more sustainable, inclusive, accessible food system?
The project straddles Animal Geographies, Animal Welfare Science, Food Geographies and Science and Technology Studies. The research will contribute to the empirical and theoretical development of the lens of socio-metabolic relations – a conceptual framework that moves beyond functional understandings of inputs and outputs, to integrate human and animal lived experiences of benefits and harms in food systems.
The fully-funded 3.5 year PhD is attached to the successful BBSRC/DEFRA/UKRI TRI SoMe Chicken awarded to Professor Emma Roe, and collaborators. It is a major project which aims to strengthen the resilience of the chicken meat industry, which currently meets 50% of all UK meat demand. The chicken industry is vulnerable to disruptions from international trading conditions and extreme weather. Given the central place of chicken in the nation’s diet, alongside vulnerabilities and public concern around chicken-welfare and chicken-waste polluting UK rivers, it is timely to consider these issues.
The PhD is a discrete but related project focused on the same species – chicken – but focused on the laying hen and egg industry, to offer a contrasting and comparative lens to findings in the main project.
TRI SoMe Chicken is an interdisciplinary UKRI/BBSRC/DEFRA-funded project, with co-investigators drawn from the academic institutions of Gloucestershire, City, Bristol as well as Southampton, along with industry collaborators The Applied Group and FAI. The larger project will forge a novel policy instrument of ethical principles for socio-economic transitions to UK food system resilience; the PhD will feed into this output.
As well as supervision from Prof Emma Roe, lead supervisor, (Professor in More-Than-Human Geographies, University of Southampton) you will also be supervised by:
- Prof Damian Maye (Professor of Agri-Food Studies, University of Gloucestershire)
- Dr Sarah Lambton (Senior Lecturer in Livestock Welfare and Innovation, University of Bristol)
