Flora Hastings

Flora completed her ESRC-funded doctorate in 2026, supervised by Dr. Naomi Leite and Dr. Kostas Retsikas. 

Beyond teaching on multiple undergraduate anthropology modules, in 2025 Flora designed and delivered an undergraduate module for the SOAS Anthropology Department titled Exploring (Non-)Human Identities. The module introduced students to key theoretical frameworks and debates in environmental anthropology. In collaboration with anthropology departments and third-sector organisations, such as Kent Wildlife Trust, Flora also delivers outdoor workshops that empower participants to critically explore their relationship with the environment.

More recently, Flora has begun to work with The Centre For Anthropology and Mental Health Research In Action (CAMHRA) and The SHM Foundation, a mental health charity. This research will allow The SHM Foundation to better understand challenges facing community mental health practitioners around the world as they deliver care. Flora has also published a series of long and short-form photojournalistic articles for international media outlets (The New Internationalist, Haaretz, Novara Media, Huck). 

Flora is an environmental anthropologist. Her research theorises the intersections between urban ecological care and emotional tension. Around the world, urban inhabitants increasingly pour physical and emotional energy into making cities more accommodating for non-human beings, whether through urban agriculture or cleaning up polluted rivers. These diverse acts of care can be categorised as ‘urban ecological land care’, involving the creation of biodiverse habitats where humans and non-humans co-exist in ways that differ markedly from urban surroundings often perceived as environmentally destructive. 

As Flora demonstrates through the lens of squatted urban food gardens in Barcelona, the interspecies identities, economic pressures and environmental ethics that emerge in these spaces often lead to emotional stress and tension. Making a timely intervention into social scientific literature that centralises the positive aspects of urban environmental action, Flora’s research explores how urban ecological land care is often accompanied by environmental distress, internal contradiction or falling short of one’s environmental ethics. Her research more broadly brings emotion, affect and inter-species sociality to bear on debates around urban sustainability and contributes to understandings of what makes human-environmental relations distinctly ‘urban’.