Dr Ben Coles
Small Group Project 2023-24
Beyond Net-Zero: Assessing and Extending Social and Environmental Understandings of Wind Power
With Dan Smith & Matt Wilde
Adopting a multi-disciplinary and multi-sited approach, this project examines the material, socio-economic and ethical practices that constitute wind energy, and interrogates them for their spatially disparate impacts on the places and populations that are integral to its production. Specifically, this project traces the metals – copper, steel, rare earths – and materials (i.e. concrete) that comprise the materiality of wind turbines, as well as the financial actors and institutions that invest in and profit from Net-Zero, in order to make the largely obscured spaces and relations of wind energy legible.
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Biography
Ben Coles is an economic geographer who researches commodities markets and cultures of consumption and their connections to resource extraction and production landscapes on the other. Prior to his appointment to the University of Leicester, he worked at the University of Sheffield.
Funded by the ESRC, his research focuses particularly on the geographies of commodities especially the nexus of food water and energy as they intersect with ‘the’ marketplace to shape/reshape political-economic space.
More broadly he has conceptual and methodological interests in place space and scale as well as in 'nexus' and ‘critical nexus thinking’ as a means to interrogate social-spatial interconnectivity address the moral assumptions associated with notions of 'ethical' and redress the implicit contradictions of resource economies.
He utilises these perspectives in variety of political and economic contexts in the UK EU Latin America (Brazil) to examine a diverse array of geographical questions about the ‘geographies’ of commodities (esp. food) their production/consumption/in-between (markets farms and factories) and their underlying nexus of interrelated and interconnected resources (e.g. water/energy).
Ben is currently focused on the policy implications of these relationships as they pertain to ‘one company’ towns in Brazil (https://companytowns.web.ox.ac.uk/people).
Funded by the ESRC, his research focuses particularly on the geographies of commodities especially the nexus of food water and energy as they intersect with ‘the’ marketplace to shape/reshape political-economic space.
More broadly he has conceptual and methodological interests in place space and scale as well as in 'nexus' and ‘critical nexus thinking’ as a means to interrogate social-spatial interconnectivity address the moral assumptions associated with notions of 'ethical' and redress the implicit contradictions of resource economies.
He utilises these perspectives in variety of political and economic contexts in the UK EU Latin America (Brazil) to examine a diverse array of geographical questions about the ‘geographies’ of commodities (esp. food) their production/consumption/in-between (markets farms and factories) and their underlying nexus of interrelated and interconnected resources (e.g. water/energy).
Ben is currently focused on the policy implications of these relationships as they pertain to ‘one company’ towns in Brazil (https://companytowns.web.ox.ac.uk/people).
Biographical details correct as of 06.10.25