Dr Brian Garvey

Reader

Work, Employment and Organisation

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Personal statement

My current research investigates local and global tensions regarding labour, land use and commodification of natural resources.  I have a particular interest in Scottish land reform, mineral prospecting in Ireland and the territorial demarcations and resistance by agrarian, traditional and indigenous communities in the Global South.  I currently work closely with academics and civil society organisations in Scotland, Europe, Africa, Brazil and Latin America and share an ambition to challenge Eurocentric and colonial paradigms in our collective research. I am co-founder of the Centre for the Political Economy of Labour, which seeks to reflect this ambition in its praxis. 

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Area of Expertise

I favour and am experienced in participative and action research methodologies. I have consistently worked across disciplines, including sociology, environmental studies, geography, engineering and law, to place changes to work and labour in the context of new technologies, new sites of production and emerging commodity chains.  I am regularly involved in creative group facilitation and worker representation beyond traditional academic practices.

Prize And Awards

Nevile-Plowman Prize for best article 2023
Recipient
7/2024
Best doctoral presentation
Recipient
2003

More prizes and awards

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Teaching

At the Department of Work, Employment and Organisation, I teach on several undergraduate and MSc courses and focus on labour, migration, organisational strategies and collective resistance linked to globalised commodity chains and extractive industries. I have supervised PhD and post doctoral studies on south-south migration, pesticide harm, forestry and land reform, labour organisation and gender, and community repsonses to dispoessession and deindustrialisation.  I welcome interest from potential PhD candidates on any of the broad themes of my research.

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Professional Activities

Mining the Amazon
Recipient
5/9/2024
Reweaving the Wind
Host
14/5/2024
Extraction and appropriation
Participant
8/5/2024
Confronting the degradation of labour and the nature in agro-industrial commodity chains in Brazil: the ‘quilombolas’ resistance
Contributor
4/4/2024
Counter-mapping thought and affection
Participant
8/3/2024
Contemporary issues for land, labour precarity and resistance Centre for Political Economy of Labour Colloquium programme
Participant
7/3/2024

More professional activities

Projects

Climate change and the rise of precarious work among agriculture and construction workers in a small island developing state.
Sambajee, Pratima (Academic) Garvey, Brian (Academic)
Small island developing states (SIDS) are among the first and worst affected by climate change despite making a very small contribution to the overall global emissions that cause climate change.. For over 20 years, the World Health Organization (WHO) has played a key role in raising awareness of and implementing actions to manage the health risks of climate change, particularly global warming within SIDS (WHO, 2018) but the challenges remain. Risks can arise from direct exposures, indirect exposures and via economic and social disruptions (Smith et al., 2014). In this proposed research we focus on direct exposures to high atmospheric temperature extremes that are increasing in frequency and intensity in SIDS and are projected to continue along this trend (Hoegh-Guldberg, 2018). Specifically, we focus on Mauritius, an Indian Ocean-African SIDS, where there is an increasing trend of reported heat stress and heat-related injuries in the construction and agricultural sectors (ILO, 2019). We situate precarious work in the context of climate change, in this case extreme temperatures associated with global warming. We will examine climate change as a potential factor exacerbating experiences of precariousness among agriculture and construction workers, often migrants from global south countries like India, Nepal and Bangladesh. The study will collect evidence to (a) explore the relevance of climate change as a contributor and multiplier of precarity at work, and (b) produce occupational health policy-relevant evidence for workers in the two sectors. Both outcomes are timely for improving the climate change preparedness of relevant sectors in SIDS.
01-Jan-2023 - 30-Jan-2027
The Unauthorised Biography of Globalised Commodity Chains
Garvey, Brian (Principal Investigator) Torres, Mauricio (Co-investigator)
Focusing on the Brazilian Amazon, this project explores how illicit labour and resource exploitation contribute to contemporary commodity trades as a system of global (dis)order.
01-Jan-2023 - 31-Jan-2025
(UN)EARTHING NEW PATHWAYS FOR A JUSTICE TRANSITION: CULTIVATING HOPE AND FOOD ON CONTESTED TERRAINS IN SCOTLAND, AMAZON AND THE ARCTIC
Garvey, Brian (Principal Investigator) Combe, Malcolm (Co-investigator) Shapovalova, Daria (Co-investigator)
The programme brings together a multidisciplinary team of researchers from Law, Geography, Sociology of Work and Political Economy with leading figures from crofting, smallholding and indigenous communities in Scotland, the Amazon and Arctic.

This project aims to collectively produce and share both ancestral and new academic knowledge across a nexus that is critical to a just transition: the globalised financialisation of land for both the carbon and green economy, smallholder and community access to land, and sustainable production of food. These dimensions come to ground, literally, in arable land that has been an increasingly prized destination for corporate finance, with subsequent rising land prices and a deepening of contestation between commodity and food production. The programme is attentive to new policy instruments in Scotland including land reform, transparency and local empowerment and the plural ways in which other communities negotiate tensions between land asset capture for speculation, monocultures and energy forms on one hand; and rural or forest based livelihoods on the other.

The programme hinges on a hopeful dialogue across these frontiers in order to i) unearth commonality in values, experiences and aspirations for socially and ecologically committed cultivation of land; ii) investigate legal instruments within and across borders for their realisation; iii) make recommendations for effective policy implementation in Scotland.
01-Jan-2022 - 03-Jan-2022
(UN)EARTHING NEW PATHWAYS FOR A JUSTICE TRANSITION: CULTIVATING HOPE AND FOOD ON CONTESTED TERRAINS IN SCOTLAND, AMAZON AND THE ARCTIC
Garvey, Brian (Principal Investigator) Combe, Malcolm (Co-investigator)
The programme brings together a multidisciplinary team of researchers from Law, Geography, Sociology of Work and Political Economy with leading figures from crofting, smallholding and indigenous communities in Scotland, the Amazon and Arctic.

This project aims to collectively produce and share both ancestral and new academic knowledge across a nexus that is critical to a just transition: the globalised financialisation of land for both the carbon and green economy, smallholder and community access to land, and sustainable production of food. These dimensions come to ground, literally, in arable land that has been an increasingly prized destination for corporate finance, with subsequent rising land prices and a deepening of contestation between commodity and food production. The programme is attentive to new policy instruments in Scotland including land reform, transparency and local empowerment and the plural ways in which other communities negotiate tensions between land asset capture for speculation, monocultures and energy forms on one hand; and rural or forest based livelihoods on the other.

The programme hinges on a hopeful dialogue across these frontiers in order to i) unearth commonality in values, experiences and aspirations for socially and ecologically committed cultivation of land; ii) investigate legal instruments within and across borders for their realisation; iii) make recommendations for effective policy implementation in Scotland.
01-Jan-2022 - 31-Jan-2022
UKRI CoA Covid Extension
Garvey, Brian (Principal Investigator) Portes Virginio, Francis (Researcher) Cardesa-Salzmann, Antonio (Researcher)
UKRI sponsored extension of projects affected by Covid-19
01-Jan-2021 - 30-Jan-2021
Self-demarcation and scientific protection against pandemic, illegal logging and mining in Brazil's Amazon
Garvey, Brian (Principal Investigator)
15-Jan-2020 - 15-Jan-2022

More projects

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Contact

Dr Brian Garvey
Reader
Work, Employment and Organisation

Email: brian.garvey@strath.ac.uk
Tel: 548 3999