Annabelle Dawson

Profile

I graduated from the University of Leeds in 2015 with a BA English & Spanish. After a year teaching English with the British Council in Chile and volunteering as Communications Officer with an NGO in Peru, l completed an MA Global Development (University of Leeds). My MA dissertation explored education policy and student protest in Chile. From 2018 to 2021, I worked on the editorial team of a Brussels-based political ecology magazine, the Green European Journal. My PhD project bridges my research interests in environmental politics, critical development and Latin American studies.

Research interests

My PhD research looks to critically explore energy transitions in South America. The shift from fossil fuels to renewable energies is widely understood as crucial to climate change mitigation and sustainable development, and in this context large-scale renewable energy projects such as wind farms or solar parks are often represented as clean, green and sustainable. Nonetheless, such projects have been also associated with negative social and environmental impacts which at times generate local conflict. My research seeks to understand this dynamic in the context of renewable energy development in Chile, with a focus on how discourses of sustainability are forwarded, contested and (re)configured. My PhD project is supported by the POLIS Politics of Global Challenges Scholarship.

Qualifications

• MA Global Development
• BA English & Spanish

Research groups and institutes

• Centre for Global Development