Dr Debbie Hopkins

 

Associate Professor in Human Geography

Biography

Debbie is an Associate Professor in Human Geography jointly appointed between the School of Geography and the Environment, and the Sustainable Urban Development programme in the Department for Continuing Education. She is also an Official Fellow of Kellogg College, and an International Research Affiliate of the Centre for Sustainability at the Te Whare Wānanga o Ōtākou/ University of Otago. 

Debbie completed her master's degree (Geography, with distinction) at King's College London, PhD at Te Whare Wānanga o Ōtākou/ University of Otago (Aotearoa New Zealand), and Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (with distinction) at the University of Oxford.

Following postdoctoral training at the Centre for Sustainability (Otago; 2014-2016), and the Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford (2016-2017), Debbie was appointed as a Departmental Research Lecturer between the Transport Studies Unit and the School of Geography and the Environment (Oxford, 2017-2019).

Debbie is an editorial board member of the Journal of Transport Geography, Applied Mobilities, Tourism Geographies, Journal of Sustainable Tourism and Global Networks. From 2021-2024, Debbie was the Editor-in-Chief of the American Association of Geographers Review of Books journal. Between 2017 and2019, she undertook a part-time academic secondment with the New Zealand Ministry of Transport where she led a project on incorporating different forms of information and 'evidence' into policymaking processes.

Debbie currently leads a UKRI ESRC project (2022-2026), 'Trucking Lives: Making Space for People in Truck Driving Work', funded through the Transforming Working Lives programme. Working with colleagues from the universities of Sheffield, Newcastle and Durham, Trucking Lives unites insights from mobilities studies, labour geography and critical logistics to understand and make visible truck driver's everyday lives, identify changes needed to recruit and retain a diverse workforce, and find ways to improve workers' lives for the better. This builds upon previous research funded by the Oxford Fell Fund and the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport Seed Corn Fund.

Teaching

Debbie teaches across the Sustainable Urban Development master’s programme, and on the Prelims, Final Honour School (FHS) and MSc programmes in Geography. Debbie coordinates an Option subject on ‘Sustainable Urbanisms’ for 2nd and 3rd year geography undergraduate students, and teaches ‘Sustainability’ to 1st year undergraduates.

Debbie supervises masters and DPhil students, and is happy to speak to anyone interested in projects on themes including: mobile labour, critical logistics, everyday mobilities, emissions and energy demand reductions in freight and logistics.

Research interests

Debbie is a human geographer and environmental social scientist. Her research is concerned just and climate compatible transformations, with a particular focus on mobility configurations in logistics and aviation. She engages with ideas from labour geography, mobilities studies, critical logistics and critical sustainabilities to further this agenda. Debbie is currently working on a number of projects that span these interests (primary projects listed below), many of which include international and interdisciplinary collaborators. Her research has been funded by national research agencies in the UK, Aotearoa New Zealand, Norway and elsewhere. Her research spans three main themes; 1. Logistical mobilities, 2. Aviation and the climate crisis, and 3. Academic mobilities

Logistical mobilities

This research combines critical logistics studies with mobilities studies to recognise and interrogate the diverse mobility practices that take place within supply chains. More importantly, it reflects upon the power these hold, the injustices embedded within them, and their intransigence.

Logistical configurations incorporate a diverse array of mobility practices. The focus is often on enabling ‘smooth’ functioning supply chains, through the coordination of movements of goods, negotiating ‘frictions’ along the way.

Debbie’s research has shown how:

• ideologies of ‘just-in-time’ logistics are lived by workers - often clashing with bodily and family needs.
• the ‘unsafe trucker’ is used to justify investment in automation technologies; and
• shifting logistical configurations re/produce distinct discourses of technology change and its implications in road freight.

Aviation and the climate crisis

Debbie works closely with an international research team concerned with the rapid and sustained rise in air travel, and its disastrous effects on the climate. Their work has shown the ways the sector claims ‘climate compatible growth’ which science has repeatedly shown to be impossible without radical technological advancements. Motivated by the injustices associated with aviation, and this scholarship raises questions about what a climate compatible aviation would or could look like.

Her collaborative research has shown:

• that half of leisure flights lack explicit importance;
• how discourses and enactments of ‘sustainable aviation’ are locked into gendered environmentalism;
• how carbon-intensive transport modes - like aviation - are socially normalised through social media posts and ‘influencer’ culture; and
• how the nation state performs a variety of roles that benefit from and support aviation, creating conflicts with the state’s climate targets.

Academic mobilities

Since 2013, Debbie has been working on an agenda of academic mobilities in the climate crisis, showing how the globalised academic system locks aeromobilities into academic practice, but also recognising the injustices embedded within some actions to reduce academic mobilities and the privileges attached to im/mobilities. Debbie works with colleagues around the world to better understand the mechanisms that incentivise travel in academia and the transformative potential of technologies, polices and behaviour change.

 

Publications

Books

Jenkins, K. and Hopkins, D. (eds.) (2018) Transitions in Energy Demand: The emergence, diffusion and impact of low-carbon innovation. Routledge, Abingdon UK.

Hopkins, D. and Higham, J.E.S. (eds.) (2016) Low Carbon Mobility Transitions. GoodFellow Publishers, Oxford, UK. ISBN: 978-1-910158-64-7.

Selected journal articles

Huwe, V., Hopkins, D. & Mattioli, G. (2024). Aviation exceptionalism, fossil fuels and the state, Review of International Political Economy, 31:1, 76-100.

de Vos, J., Hopkins, D., Schwanen, T. & Hickman, R. (2024). Tackling the academic air travel dependency. An analysis of the (in)consistency between academics’ travel behaviour and their attitudes, Global Environmental Change, 88, 102908.

Hopkins, D. (2024) Towards Just Geographies of Academic Mobilities, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographers, 23:4. Special Issue: Climate Action Task Force 2023 Plenary Lecture and Forum.  https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v23i4.2466

Hopkins, D. Landa-Mata, I., Jacobsen, J.K.S., Farstad, E. & Higham, J.E.S. (2024). Imagining post-fossil mobilities with Norwegian tourists, Social & Cultural Geography, 25:9, 1395-1416.

Hopkins, D., Gossling, S., Cohen, S., Hana, P. & Higham, J.E.S. (2023). Aeromasculinities and the Fallacy of Sustainable Aviation, Energy Research & Social Science, 106, 103319.

Hopkins, D. & Schwanen, T. (2023). Sociotechnical expectations of vehicle automation in the UK trucking sector, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 196, 122863.

Hopkins, D. & Schwanen, T. (2023). The Expected Speed and Impacts of Vehicle Automation in Passenger and Freight Transport: A Dissensus Delphi Study among UK Professionals, Research in Transportation Business and Management. 100973.

Hopkins, D. & Davidson A.C. (2023). Stories of the gendered mobile work of English lorry driving, Gender Place and Culture, 30:10, 1372-1392. DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2022.2122946

Martiskainen, M., Hopkins, D., Torres Contreras G.A., Jenkins, K., Mattioli, G., Simcock, N., Lacey-Barnacle, M. (2023). Eating, heating or taking the bus? Lived experiences at the intersection of energy and transport poverty, Global Environmental Change, 82, 102728.

Akyelken, N. & Hopkins, D. (2022). Researching mobility in times of immobility, Transport Reviews, 43:1, 1-4.

Higham, J.E.S., Loehr, J., Hopkins, D., Becken, S. & Stovall, W. (2022). Climate science and tourism policy in Australasia: Deficiencies in science-policy translation. Journal of Sustainable Tourism.

Scheer, A. Schwarz, M. Hopkins, D. & Caldecott, B. (2022). Whose jobs face transition risk in Alberta? Understanding sectoral employment precarity in an oil-rich Canadian province, Climate Policy, 22:8, 1016-1032.

Hopkins, D. & Schwanen, T. (2022). Recruiting research participants for transport research: Reflections from studies on autonomous vehicles in the UK, Journal of Transport Geography, 102, 103377. DOI: 10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2022.103377

Hopkins, D. (2022). Buffering as everyday logistical labour, Roadsides, 007:  Logistics, 51-58. DOI: 10.26034/roadsides-202200708. Available at: https://roadsides.net/hopkins-007/

Higham, J.E.S., Hanna, P. Peeters, P., Hopkins, D., Cohen, S., Gossling, S. & Cocolas, N.  (2022). Reconfiguring aviation for a climate-safe future: Are airlines sending the wrong message? Journal of Travel Research, 61:6, 1458–1473.

Hopkins, D. & Schwanen, T. (2021). Talking about automated vehicles: What do levels of automation do? Technology in Society, 64, 101488.

Hopkins, D., García Bengoechea, E., & Mandic, S. (2021) Adolescents and their aspirations for car-based transport, Transportation, 48:1, 67-93.

Hopkins, D. (2021). Crises and sustainable tourism, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 29:9, 1423-1435.

Martiskainen, M., Jenkins, K.E.H., Bouzarovski, S., Hopkins, D., Mattioli, G., Lacey-Barnacle, M. (2021). A spatial whole systems justice approach to sustainability transitions, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 41, 110-112

Simcock, N., Jenkins, K., Lacey-Barnacle, M., Martiskainen, M., Mattioli, G. & Hopkins, D. (2021). Identifying double energy vulnerability: A systematic and narrative review of groups at-risk of energy and transport poverty in the global north, Energy Research and Social Science, 102351.

Martiskainen, M., Sovacool, B.K., Lacey-Barnacle, M., Hopkins, D., Jenkins, K.E.H., Simcock, N., Mattioli, G. & Bouzarovski, S. (2021). New dimensions of vulnerability to energy and transport poverty, Joule, 5:1, 3-7. DOI: 10.1016/j.joule.2020.11.016

Hopkins, D. (2020). Sustainable mobility at the interface of transport and tourism, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 28:2, 129-143.

Hopkins, D., Kester, J. Meelen, T. & Schwanen, T. (2020). Not more but different: A comment on the transitions research agenda, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 34, 4-6.  

Klöwer, M., Hopkins, D., Higham, J.E.S. & Allen, M. (2020). An analysis of ways to decarbonize conference travel after COVID-19, Nature, 583, 356-360.

Sovacool, B., Shoval, N., Hopkins, D., Jenkins, K., Hielscher, S., Goldthau, A.  & Brossmann, B. (2020). Imagining sustainable energy and mobility transitions: Valence, temporality, and radicalism in 38 visions of a low-carbon future, Social Studies of Science. 50:4, 642-679.