Please feel free to reach out to any of us if you have any questions or would like to get involved.
Ahmad Ashqar is a Research Master student in the Anthropology Department at Durham University. Trained in Mechanical Engineering and holding an MSc in Sustainability, Energy and Development, he works at the intersection of technical systems and social life, focusing on energy transitions and energy justice. From Palestine, he brings a justice-centred perspective that foregrounds questions of power, accountability, and care within the transition.
His ethnographic fieldwork is based in East Durham, undertaken in close collaboration with East Durham Trust on Energising East Durham—a community-energy initiative that aims to serve the region through a portfolio of projects spanning the Horden Mine Heating Network, wind turbines, solar panels, and anaerobic digestion. Ashqar examines what community energy makes negotiable: relationships to place and landscape, identities shaped by a coal-mining legacy, infrastructures of trust, and the everyday practices that constitute being “community rich.” Methodologically, he combines participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and co-designed workshops with residents, volunteers, and practitioners.
Beyond documenting outcomes, his research traces process - how partnerships form, how expectations are managed, and how notions of benefit, ownership, and responsibility are defined. The goal is to generate grounded insights that are useful to local partners while contributing to wider debates on just transition in post-industrial regions. By bridging engineering literacies and ethnographic sensibilities, Ashqar seeks practical pathways that align technical feasibility with community aspirations.
Dr Christina Bosbach’s research seeks to understand how rural, coastal and island communities navigate daily life, coping with structural inequalities and climate change challenges. She currently works as a postdoctoral researcher in the COAST project on active and sustainable travel in East Durham. In collaboration with local authorities and third sector partners, this research looks at experiences and challenges of getting around in day-to-day life.
Christina holds a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Aberdeen (2024). Her thesis on living with uncertainty reflects on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Scottish island life. She conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork on the Isle of Coll, researching issues like provisions, sociability, ferry mobilities and walking practices.
In her research and writing, Christina uses creative methods to emphasise embodied and affective ways of knowing and share research outputs more widely. She is currently collaborating with a filmmaker and an illustrator to share findings of the COAST project with communities.
Danielle is a postdoctoral researcher exploring the social complexities associated with energy supply disruption, extreme weather, infrastructural and community resilience in the Northeast. As part of the interdisciplinary SAT-Guard project Danielle is developing ethnographic case studies with communities, electricity distribution organisations and emergency management practitioners in areas such as County Durham, Hartlepool, Middlesborough, and Northumberland. These case studies will examine the (uneven) lived experience of extreme weather, power cuts and their management within communities across the region, and ask what it would take to create systems, processes, and solutions for managing electricity demand and supply under extreme weather conditions that are sensitive to local social contexts and the diversity, inequities, and nuance therein.
Danielle has a background in Human Geography and Anthropology and is broadly interested in the relationships between people, place, wellbeing, identity, and climate change. Prior to her role at Durham, she was working as a Social Scientist at New Zealand’s National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) and primarily involved in climate adaptation and hazard management research with local authorities, Indigenous governance organisations, community groups, and the private sector.
Thomas Yarrow is a professor of anthropology at Durham University. Through ethnographic projects in the UK and West Africa, his work explores themes of heritage, conservation, expert knowledge, materiality and time. Recent and ongoing research develops these interests in relation to collaborative projects on the post-industrial significance of the industrial past of the North East, particularly in relation to heritage steam and living museums. These projects are part of a broader interest in the nature of progressive time in a post-progressive age, and in the logics of restoration and nostalgia in an era when hope is increasingly directed backwards.
Michael Crawley is a social anthropologist who has worked in Ethiopia, Nepal, Mexico, the U.S and the U.K. He is interested in endurance, self-tracking technologies, performance enhancement and social cohesion. His first book, Out of Thin Air: Running Wisdom and Magic from Above the Clouds in Ethiopia, won the Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association in 2022. He has recently started ethnographic work in Ashington on future-making and integration, with a focus on football as a site for bringing together asylum seekers and local people.
Dr Felix Ringel is a social anthropologist working on issues of time and the future in postindustrial cities. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in the German cities of Hoyerswerda and Bremerhaven on urban decline, regeneration and sustainability. More recently, he conducted research on the use of plastics in the post-industrial slum of Ndirande, in Blantyre, Malawi. Felix is currently involved in ethnographic work in Ashington and Horden on issues relating to future-making and social sustainability.
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