Doug Elsey is completing an MPhil in Global Environmental Politics at the School of Humanities. His research is focused on elaborating the conceptual and material basis of collective agency in order to articulate the conditions of a politics capable of addressing what is commonly referred to as “the environmental problem”. The central thesis is that contemporary responses to the environmental crisis - as exemplified by ecological modernisation and market-based policy mechanisms - effectively depoliticise essentially political problems, generating the need for a new theories of the political. This project is supervised by Dr Paul Hopper, Dr Mark Devenney, and Professor Neil Ravenscroft. Doug teaches on the Humanities undergraduate degree at the University of Brighton, working as a seminar tutor for the courses ‘Philosophic Inquiry’ and ‘Democracy: From Athens to Baghdad’, is involved in the Philosophy of Environmental Politics Research Project in the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE), and has volunteered as an independent researcher for various non-governmental organisations. He is proud to be a founding member of the Critical Studies Research Student Group of the School of Humanities.
Elsey’s research interests broadly include the following fields: green political theory, democracy, critical theory, applied ethics, political ecology, globalisation theory, actor-network theory, speculative realism and object oriented ontology, and new materialist philosophies.