Visiting researchers
We are proud to host short- and long-term visiting researchers who contribute to the intellectual life of the Sustainable Consumption Institute (SCI) and engage with our research themes.
SCI offers an active, interdisciplinary and friendly research environment, with strong links to colleagues across departments and institutes at The University of Manchester.
We welcome expressions of interest from researchers interested in visiting SCI. Funding opportunities may be available through the Simon and Hallsworth Visiting Professorships and the British Academy Visiting Fellowships.
For more information about visiting opportunities, please contact the Institute Director, Professor Mike Hodson. Please also refer to our visiting guidelines for further details.
Past visitors
From 2025 to 2026, the Sustainable Consumption Institute welcomed a number of visiting researchers from the UK and internationally, providing opportunities for colleagues and students to connect, exchange ideas and develop collaborative research around sustainability and consumption.
From April to June 2025, we hosted Jacob Moody, a PhD researcher at the Maastricht Sustainability Institute, Netherlands, hosted by Professor Matthew Paterson. Jacob’s interdisciplinary research focuses on the energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its impacts on renewable energy transitions in the Netherlands and the UK, drawing on theories of practice to explore changes in household energy consumption and energy production.
During his three-month visit, Jacob engaged with SCI researchers and presented an internal seminar, ‘Crises in transitions or transitions in crisis?’, exploring the relationship between sustainability transitions and periods of crisis. He also participated in workshops and research discussions across the Institute, and reflected on his experience in an SCI blog, Not Quite a Guide: Reflecting on my Research Visit to SCI.
During Spring 2025, we also welcomed Anne Marx Lorenzen, a PhD researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), hosted by Professor Matthew Paterson and Dr Pritish Behuria. Anne’s research focuses on geopolitics, international political economy and sustainability, with particular interests in global energy transitions and climate mitigation in developing countries.
Her PhD research forms part of a wider DIIS project examining how Chinese and Japanese development aid can influence and diffuse norms in Ethiopia’s energy sector, alongside research into the sustainability of renewable energy projects in Cambodia, Indonesia and Ethiopia. Anne also teaches International Politics and Global Development Studies at Roskilde University and brings extensive policy experience, having previously worked at the Danish Ministry of Climate, Energy and Utilities and as part of the leadership team developing the UNDP Sustainable Energy Hub. Her visit provided valuable opportunities for discussion and exchange around energy transitions, international development and sustainability.
In April 2025, we hosted Elisabeth Süßbauer, an environmental sociologist and visiting researcher from the Technische Universität Berlin, Germany, hosted by Torik Holmes. During her month-long visit, Elisabeth engaged with SCI researchers and presented an internal seminar, ‘From single-use to reuse? The mundane governance of reusable food containers’, exploring the social and material factors shaping the transition towards reusable food packaging.
Her research focuses on sustainable consumption and production practices, with particular interests in food packaging, waste and organisational and urban transformations. Elisabeth’s visit provided an opportunity to share insights and strengthen connections between the SCI and researchers working on sustainable consumption in Germany.
From June 2025, we hosted Ben Eyre, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of East Anglia, hosted by Jeremy Brice and Aarti Krishnan. Ben’s research focuses on sustainable finance, evidence-based policymaking and impact management, with a particular interest in the use of ethnographic and participatory methods to support rigorous and equitable interdisciplinary research.
During his two-month visit, Ben engaged with SCI researchers and contributed to discussions around sustainable investment and interdisciplinary research. He also co-organised the workshop ‘Sustainable Investment and the Politics of Materiality’ and contributed to an SCI blog reflecting on the workshop and emerging research directions. Ben later co-authored an SCI blog reflecting on the workshop and its discussions, The Politics of Sustainable Investment: Challenges and Possible Research Directions. As a former PhD researcher at the University of Manchester, his visit also provided an opportunity to reconnect with the Institute and wider research community.
During Autumn 2025, we also hosted Professor Annica Kronsell, Professor of Environmental Social Science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and Visiting Professor at the University of Copenhagen. Hosted by Sherilyn MacGregor and Matthew Paterson, Annica engaged with SCI researchers and presented a seminar titled ‘Ecological Feminist Perspectives on Climate Change Governance’, drawing on her current book project exploring how eco-feminist perspectives can reshape climate governance.
Her research spans feminist theory, environmental politics and governance, with a particular focus on gendered institutions and sustainability transitions. Annica’s visit provided valuable opportunities for interdisciplinary discussion around climate governance, gender, justice and sustainability, while strengthening the SCI’s international research connections.
From December 2023 to December 2024, we hosted Dr Xingju Zhong, an Associate Professor at Chongqing University, China, and Deputy Director of the Department of Public Human Resources and Social Security. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Renmin University of China and specialises in environmental organizations, public opinion on environmental issues, social policy, and qualitative research methods.
Hosted by Professor Alison Browne (Geography Department), Dr Zhong worked on a project exploring green lifestyle transformations in rural and urban areas, with a focus on community-based practices. She engaged with SCI researchers throughout her visit and contributed to interdisciplinary discussions on sustainability.
On November 6th 2024, we hosted Ahmad Hariza Bin Hashim at the SCI. Ahmad is based at Universiti Putra Malaysia in Penang, where he convenes a group of researchers working on sustainability and consumption. He was visiting with Professor Matthew Paterson (Politics Department), and the purpose of his visit was to connect with SCI as a similarly focused research community and to explore how his currently informal group might develop into a more established institute.
While at SCI, Ahmad engaged in discussions with staff and expressed particular interest in meeting with our PhD students. He met with researchers to hear about their work and exchange ideas on shared themes in sustainability research. Ahmad's visit contributed to strengthening international networks and exploring opportunities for collaboration around sustainability and consumption.
From May-September 2024, we hosted Aysha Batool in the SCI. Aysha is a PhD scholar in Business Administration, with a major in Marketing, at Government College University Faisalabad, Pakistan. Aysha is also employed as a research analyst in the Office of Fair Trade at the Competition Commission of Pakistan. Aysha was visiting with SCI associate Paul Tobin (Politics Department).
Throughout her visit, Aysha undertook research interviews and attended many SCI events including our summer party and regular seminars and forums. Aysha also completed a summer course with Methods@Manchester.
In January-March 2023, we hosted, along with the Politics Department, Professor Jacqueline Best, as a Hallsworth Visiting Professor.
Professor Best is a specialist on finance and global political economy, and in that context, we organised a half-day workshop on ‘Climate finance and central banking in the new inflationary context’.
This brought together specialists on central banking in combination with those on climate finance to think about the implications and dynamics of the increasing regulatory activity by central banks regarding climate change, and how that has been affected by the crises of COVID, inflation, and the Ukraine war.
Participants included Eric Helleiner, Sarah Bracking, Paul Langley, John Morris, as well as several colleagues from Manchester. A blog post summarising our discussions is here, and it has led to ongoing conversations and research activity around this theme among the participants.
In May 2021 we hosted David Schlosberg as a virtual visiting professor at SCI. In the course of this two-week ‘visit’ we held four events.
- David gave the first SCI annual lecture, entitled ‘Material participation and sustainable practice’, which explored the idea of - and demand for - political participation that is just, prefigurative, sustainable, and based on material actions. What kind of politics is guerrilla gardening or installing community batteries? While there is a long history of material participation in social movements, recent movements incorporate a shift in relations between human and nonhuman as a political act.
- We also held a seminar entitled ‘That’s how the light gets in: In conversation with Sherilyn MacGregor and David Schlosberg’. This was a discussion based on an article by Sherilyn called ‘making matter great again’, which argued that much of the work on ‘sustainable materialism’, including David’s book with Luke Craven of that title, neglected the ecofeminist roots of this interest in everyday material practices and politics. View the conversation.
- David also held a ‘master class’ on ‘from environmental to multispecies justice’ with PhD students and early career researchers at Manchester.
- We also held a meeting to discuss potential future collaborations between scholars at the SCI and the Sydney Environment Institute, where David is the director, and it was clear there are various possible areas of converging interests we will keep exploring.
- Xiaofang Zhan
- Andrew Bollinger
- Igor Nikolic
- Jaco Quist
- Itay Greenspan
- Femida Handy
- Rachel Trajber
- Sacha Manik
- Dr Liu Fei
- Riie Heikkila
- Dr Jordi López-Sintas
- Terhi-Anna Wilska
- Nicklas Neuman
- Lidewij Tummers
- Mia Tammelin
- Nicklas Neuman
- Tullia Jack
- Gregor Kungl
- Jo Lindsay
- Mette Jacobsen
- Senja Laakso