The team comprises fourteen researchers from six UK universities and four different disciplines: economics, epidemiology, history and social science. We have been helped by staff of the King’s Digital Lab, who built the project website and led the visualisation of several of our research findings.
Importantly, the FIELD project has benefited since the outset from the support of a wide range of industry and professional stakeholders who have provided insights, advice and feedback. Their knowledge, skills and networks, and generosity in sharing them, have been crucial to the success of our work, helping to ensure its technical accuracy and real-world relevance.
Between 2020 and 2021, FIELD hosted three artists in residence who worked with us to explore farming practices, human-animal relationships and to interpret and communicate our research findings. The artists’ creative processes, and the work they produced, have made a vital contribution to FIELD’s public engagement and given us new ways to envisage animal disease, health and welfare.
Find out more about the research team, artists in residence and project partners below.
Prof Abigail Woods
University of Lincoln, History
Abigail Woods is Pro Vice Chancellor and Head of the College of Arts at the University of Lincoln. Reflecting her earlier career as a veterinary surgeon, her research focuses on the history of animal health in 19th and 20th century Britain, and its intersections with the histories of human health and livestock production. Her recent research has explored the history of veterinary expertise, policy and practice; the changing concepts of animal health, welfare and productivity; and how patterns and perceptions of livestock disease have changed over time. As principle investigator of the FIELD project, she is developing the first social histories of BVD and cattle lameness, and bringing them into dialogue with contemporary scientific and social scientific perspectives.
Nicole Gosling
University of Lincoln, History
Nicole Gosling is a PhD student at the University of Lincoln and will be writing her dissertation as a contribution to the FIELD project. She studied her BSc in Ecology at the University of Victoria, and recently completed an MA in Environmental History at Uppsala University. Broadly speaking, Nicole’s interests include how humans interact with nature, with a focus on human-animal relationships. She explored these relationships in her master’s thesis ‘Making Sense of Cattle: A story from farm to food’ where she looked at how different actors experience cattle bodies during the production of beef. Building on this line of thinking, Nicole’s role in the FIELD project will be focused on the history of lameness in sheep.
Prof Karen Sayer
Leeds Trinity University, History
Professor of Social and Cultural History at Leeds Trinity University, Leeds, UK, Karen Sayer specialises in the study of British agriculture, landscape and environment in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her first monograph, Women of the Fields: Representations of Femininity in Nineteenth Century Rural Society (MUP 1995) used a discursive and interdisciplinary approach to assess the representation of women’s work in agriculture in Parliamentary Reports alongside art, literature and the press, to explain legislative intervention and control of their employment. She built on this work with her second monograph Country Cottages: A Cultural History (MUP, 2000). Drawing on the work of the social sciences, architecture and geography to scrutinise the values attached historically to the idea and material culture of the cottage, and the experiences of those who inhabited it, the book encompassed a spatial reading of the political and material effects of the rural idyll that impact at the level of national identity and ‘race’, class and sex. She has continued to address the shape of, values attaching to and understandings of the British landscape and environment, and experiences of those living in the countryside. Today she works on energy landscapes – e.g. with P. Brassley & J. Burchardt Transforming the countryside? The Electrification of Rural England 1890-1970 (Routledge, 2016) – the managed spaces of the farm, history of livestock agriculture and animal history.
Within the FIELD project, she addresses the tensions that beset the ‘modernisation’ of UK livestock farming after 1947 and the different, competing messages attaching to animal welfare and consumption, as seen in the use of the British countryside as site of amenity and site of production. This work incorporates ideas of animals as active agents of history, and is framed by notions of interconnectivity of farm, the farm animal, disease organisms, farmers, labourers, marketeers, sales reps, government officials, journalists and the non-farming public over time.
Dr Andrew Black,
Leeds Trinity University, History
Dr James Bowen,
Leeds Trinity University, History
James P. Bowen is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in History based at Leeds Trinity University with research interests in agricultural and rural history. He was formerly a Research Associate (Victoria County History-Cumbria Project) in the Department of History, Lancaster University and was the Contributing Editor for The Herefordshire Victoria County History Trust Short on the parish of Colwall. He was formerly a Post-Doctoral Research Associate based at the Department of Geography and Planning, University of Liverpool employed on ‘Spaces of experience and horizons of expectation: the implications of extreme weather events, past, present and future’, a three-year project, funded as part of the Care for the Future programme of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He completed a PhD at Lancaster University supervised by Professor A.J.L. Winchester and held the Economic History Society’s Tawney Junior Research Fellowship in 2012-13 at the Institute of Historical Research, London.
Sue Bradley
Newcastle University, History
Sue Bradley is an oral historian in the Centre for Rural Economy, Newcastle University, where her research has ranged from flood risk to honey bee health and veterinary practice. She is interested in how oral history can help to address current concerns, and in using audio testimonies from older practitioners as a basis for discussions with their counterparts today. Her work for FIELD includes recording a collection of life-story interviews that will contribute insights from first-hand accounts of working with cattle and sheep in the north of England since the 1940's. This collection will be archived at the Museum for English Rural Life to serve beyond the project as a permanent public research resource. Sue also works part-time in Newcastle University’s Oral History Unit. Before coming to Newcastle she was responsible for creating the British Library’s Book Trade Lives collection of recordings with booksellers and publishers.
Dr Amy Proctor
Newcastle University, Social Science
Amy Proctor is based at the Centre for Rural Economy at Newcastle University. She is interested in agricultural extension and processes of expertise exchange within rural land management and has published widely on this. Her research has focused on the knowledge-practices of farmers and their advisors and the performance and practice of the advisory encounter. Amy is also interested in developing innovative and interactive ways of engaging with stakeholders and has co-led Landbridge, a national knowledge exchange network for rural professionals which provides a platform for inter-professional learning and debate among farm advisers and opportunities for exchange with research communities. In FIELD, Amy will develop and conduct the social science aspects of the project including in-depth interviews and ethnographic research with farmers and advisers and focus groups with farmers and consumers.
Dr Beth Clark
Newcastle University, Social Science
Beth’s research background in sports, exercise and nutrition and food marketing reflects her research interests in food and communication. She is particularly interested in exploring how people relate to animal products and different food production practices, such as motivations for food choice, innovation and technology in production, knowledge of food production practices, and food cultures. Through this she works with a range of stakeholders from across the food supply chain, which has fuelled an interest in communication, including how individuals and groups share information and trust different information sources.She has two roles on the FIELD project. The first is part of the social science research team, involving interviews, focus groups and observations with farmers, farming advisors and the public, to explore their different experiences and perceptions of endemic livestock disease. The second role focuses on public engagement, including the online communications and website for FIELD, as well as identifying and organising opportunities for greater interaction with the projects many stakeholders, including members of the farming community and the public.
Dr Lewis Holloway
University of Hull, Social Science
Lewis Holloway is a Reader in Human Geography at the University of Hull. He has research interests in food, farming and the countryside, and has a particular interest in farm animals and agricultural technologies. Recent research has focused on the ways in which genetic, information and robotic technologies have affected livestock farming, and has involved in-depth research with farmers and technology developers to understand how new technologies are engaged with, adopted and contested by farmers. Lewis is interested in the situated ethics associated with animal agriculture, and in how technologies can transform farming ethics and knowledge-practices. Lewis will be involved in developing and conducting the social scientific elements of the FIELD project. This will include on-farm interview and observational work with farmers, farm animals and expert advisors, and focus groups with farmers and public groups.
Dr Niamh Mahon
University of Hull, Social Science
Niamh is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Hull. In this role she is involved in the social science components of the FIELD project. This includes in-depth interviews and observational work with farmers and expert advisors, and focus groups with farmers and the public, conducted to explore their different experiences and perceptions of endemic livestock disease. Prior to this Niamh under took a PhD at Nottingham Trent University developing stakeholder-sensitive indicators of the Sustainable Intensification of UK agriculture and a Master’s degree from the University of East Anglia in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security. She has also worked as a research assistant in socio-economics and policy for the Organic Research Centre. Niamh is a member of the Food and Climate Research Network and the Sustainable Intensification Research Network.
Dr Ewan Coleman
University of Edinburgh, Epidemiology & Economics
Ewan Colman is a post-doctoral research associate at the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh. He has a background in mathematics, particularly in applied probability, data science, and network science. His research uses computational modelling to explore the relationship between behaviour and the spread of infectious disease. Ewan's past interests include the dynamics of conversations on social media, the social and spatial organisation of ant colonies, and the how the ever-increasing amount of public health data can be exploited to detect and mitigate epidemic diseases. As a member of the FIELD project, he will focus on the spread of BVD through cattle trade, and how changing attitudes towards biosecurity can reduce the prevalence of BVD on a national scale.
Prof Rowland Kao
University of Edinburgh, Epidemiology & Economics
Rowland Kao is Chair of Veterinary Epidemiology and Data Science at the Roslin Institute at Edinburgh University. He is interested in studying infectious disease dynamics through the development of theoretical models of disease transmission, to inform disease management and control. To do this he has integrated data on genetics, social neworks and demographic factors to explore a range of different livestock diseases including foot and mouth disease, avian influenza, bovine tuberculosis and monkey malaria. As part of the FIELD project, Rowland will be developing models of BVD transmission in cattle, including the prediction of individual famer responses to range of different on and off farm factors.
Maria Suella Rodrigues
University of Glasgow, Epidemiology & Economics
Maria Suella Rodrigues is a doctoral candidate at the University of Glasgow, supervised under Professor Nicholas Hanley (MVLS), Dr Keila Megennis at the University of Glasgow and Professor Rowland Kao from the University of Edinburgh. Maria holds a BSc degree in Economics from Lancaster University. Following that she moved to the University of Glasgow where she pursued the MRes in Economics, graduating in 2018. She is interested in investigating research questions in the areas of agricultural and environmental economics as well as applied micro-econometrics and choice-modelling theory. During her MRes dissertation she modelled consumer preferences for forest disease management with use of Choice modelling data. Additionally, she has received extensive training in choice-modelling from the Choice Modelling Centre, University of Leeds. As part of the FIELD project, Maria will design field experiments and model both farmer and consumer preferences in relation to farm animal welfare.
Prof Nick Hanley
University of Glasgow, Epidemiology & Economics
Nick Hanley is a Professor of Environmental and One Health Economics at the University of Glasgow. His PhD was in Agricultural Economics. His current main research interests include behavioural economics, the design of Payment for Ecosystem Service schemes, environmental valuation, one health economics, the economics of sustainable development, markets for biodiversity offsets, and the economics of invasive species. He is an honorary professor at the universities of St Andrews and Stirling. Nick is co-author of a textbook in environmental cost-benefit analysis with Edward Barbier; and two textbooks on environmental economics (with Jason Shogren and Ben White).
Kings Digital Lab
Kings College London, Research Software Engineering Development
King's Digital Lab (KDL) is providing Research Software Engineering Development for the FIELD project. The lead developers are Elliott Hall and Geoffroy Noel, both of whom have contributed to the methodologies of many digital humanities projects. Lead UI/UX designer Tiffany Ong oversees the functional and aesthetic development of the project website and will be producing accessible data visualisations as the project progresses. Neil Jakeman is an Analyst at KDL, coordinating development efforts and assisting in the design of data models and visualisations. (Clockwise from top left: Noel, Ong, Hall, Jakeman)
The FIELD project collaborates with three artists in residence who are exploring innovative ways of interpreting and communicating research findings and different farming practices. Find out more about each artist below.
Mark Jones
Documentary filmmaker
Mark Jones is a documentary filmmaker based in the south west of England. He has worked and had screenings internationally and frequently collaborates with academics on knowledge exchange and impact projects. Recent partners include: Oxford University, Birmingham University, Roehampton University, Oxford Brookes University, Queensland University (Australia), Fribourg University (Switzerland), Battersea Arts Centre, Natural History Museum and National Trust. He's worked on projects that have received funding from a number of arts and research organisations, including: Arts Humanities Research Council, Australian Research Council, Arts Council England, John Fell Fund and Social Issues Research Centre.
Michele Allen
Photographer and artist
I'm an artist working with photography, sound and video based in North East England. My work often deals with environment and sense of place with projects developing over long periods of time often in connection to specific locations or working with community groups. I'm fascinated by the way our understandings of place are formed through shared experience and how layered and subjective those understandings can also be. For the FIELD project I am working with farmers and members of the public to think about how representations of landscape and farming are shaping our understanding of where our food comes from as well as responding to the wider field project research.
If you would like to see more of my work please visit my website. www.michele-allen.co.uk
Shane Finan
Visual artist
Shane Finan is an artist, curator and project manager from Ireland. His work deals with ideas of place, technology and environment. He uses digital and electronic technologies alongside more traditional art practices including painting and installation. These media are used to create artworks that respond to contemporary research on environmental and scientific themes. His work has exhibited in Ireland, Iceland, China, the USA and the UK, and in the past two years he has won awards from the Arts Council of Ireland, Culture Ireland and Creative Ireland. He holds an MSc in Interactive Digital Media from Trinity College Dublin.
He is currently working on an ongoing project about networks, comparing fungal networks in forests and digital networks in modern communications, collaborating with Kielderhead Wildwood Project (Northumberland Wildlife Trust) and Visual Arts in Rural Communities (Highgreen). This will extend to an exploration of networks of disease transmission through humans and livestock in the FIELD project, where he is looking at models of disease spread and biosecurity on farms. He is always happier when he has fresh mud on his shoes.
This group of individuals provide the FIELD project with strategic insight, including reviewing the project's progress, providing critical insight, offering advice on future activities, and advising on the research topics being studied throughout the project.
Professor Henry Buller
Professor of Geography, Exeter University
An internationally renowned expert on animal welfare and the biopolitics of human-animal relations, and social science adviser to Defra. He will provide support for the social science work, and will bring expertise on livestock welfare, consumer perspectives and animals as shapers of human society.
Dr Ollie Douglas
Assistant Curator, Museum of English Rural Life
An experienced museum professional who will provide expert input to help the history cluster navigate the MERL archives. He will also oversee the digitisation of its films and images for the purposes of project research and public engagement, and support the knowledge exchange activities.
Professor Rob Fraser
Emeritus Professor of Agricultural Economics, University of Kent
An expert in agricultural economics and member of Defra's Economic Advisory Panel. He will provide support for the economists in the project through his expertise in the economics of livestock disease, its social and moral dimensions, and commercial and political contexts.
Professor Laura Green
Veterinary Epidemiologist, University of Warwick
A leading expert on endemic livestock disease, in particular lameness in sheep, who has worked with industry stakeholders to translate her research into practice, which has resulted in a significant reduction in lameness prevalence. She will advise on the epidemiological aspects of the project, inter-disciplinary working and animal welfare.
John McFarlane
Retired Vet
A retired farm vet who is active in veterinary politics and a key member of the Landbridge knowledge exchange network. As well as providing his veterinary expertise, he will assist the project in expanding its network to ensure its success, through facilitating connections with farmers, vets and other rural professionals.
These individuals possess knowledge, skills and networks crucial to the FIELD project activities, including being a source of expert advice.
Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board
The AHDB undertakes research and development across the food supply chain, as well as acting as a key knowledge broker at the farm level, providing advice and expertise on a wide range of farming related topics. Susannah will help the project engage with a wide variety of stakeholders in the co-production of knowledge and dissemination of research findings.
Tim Brigstoke
Policy Director, Royal Association of British Dairy Farmers
The RABDF focuses on the needs of milk producers, and influences and lobbies government and policymakers about the key issues of its members. Tim will bring the experiences and perspectives of the dairy industry to the project.
Defra
Defra will provide expertise through their Animal Welfare and Exotic Disease Control team, who have years of experience in understanding farmer decision making in relation to animal health. Charlotte will provide a means of disseminating the research findings to policy makers.
Bill Mellor
Chair BVDfree England
BVDfree England is a voluntary industry-led scheme working to eliminate BVD in all cattle in the UK by 2022. Bill will provide input on the project design and interpretation of the results, given his expertise from the BVDfree programme.
Jenny Purcell
BVD Policy Manager, Scottish Government
The Scottish government recently introduced a BVD eradication scheme. Understanding this further will be vital for the FIELD project, and Jenny will be a crucial facilitator in this process of knowledge exchange.
Paul Roger
Veterinary Consultant
An independent consultant in sheep health and welfare, and a RCVS Recognised Specialist in Sheep Health and Production. He will provide expert veterinary perspectives on lameness in sheep.
Jon Statham
Vet, Bishopton Veterinary Group
A practising farm vet and RCVS Recognised Specialist in Cattle Health and Production, who will provide expert veterinary input on BVD and lameness in cattle.
Phil Stocker and Nicola Smith
Livestock Researcher, National Sheep Association
The NSA represents the views and interests of sheep producers throughout the UK, and will be essential for providing sheep farmer perspectives throughout the project. They will bring a sheep industry perspective to the project, and will assist in bringing sheep farmers into the research as co-producers.
These organisations will support the project's knowledge exchange activities for all of our interested audiences.
Flavour Sense Nation
Flavour Sense Nation are a company that creates interactive events to explore the perceptions of food. They will provide their expertise in relation to FIELD's Food Busk, which will provide an opportunity to explore public perceptions of animal health and welfare.
Landbridge
Landbridge is a national knowledge exchange network for rural professionals, which provides a platform for inter-professional learning and debate with the aim of improving the advice given to farmers and other businesses. As well as providing advice on the project, Landbridge will help facilitate a knowledge-exchange workshop with rural professionals during the project.
Museum of English Rural Life
The MERL aims to challenge perceptions about rural England by revealing the historical and contemporary relevance of country life. The MERL has expertise in public engagement activities, as well as having a number of collections key to assisting the FIELD research. It will help the project to develop its public-facing work through the use of its venues, networks and expertise in this area.