Flora Hastings

Flora's doctoral research explores the growth of deeply ecological ways of being in the city of Barcelona, an ethical and ontological orientation to the world that they call ‘urban eco-centrism’. 

While ‘urban eco-centrism’ can be materialised through an array of environmental actions, from erecting off-grid systems to climate campaigning, they focus on individuals who are driven to set up and become stewards of alternative green spaces in the city. Partly in response to increasing drought and heat waves, over 100 green spaces have burst through Barcelona’s concrete pavements in the last twenty years. Their fieldwork (12 months) took place in three of these urban green spaces, and it is from their leafy contours that they unravel what ‘urban eco-centrism’ looks like. These multi-species infrastructures are shaped through differing visions, from urban huertos (allotments) growing organic food to micro-climates that host biodiverse assemblages of flora and fauna.

Their ethnography unfurls the psychological and embodied dimensions of deep ecological being emerging from these green spaces, from forms of personhood dependent upon ongoing interaction with plants to ontologies that demand physical proximity to ecological processes. Contributing to environmental anthropology, they make interventions into broader discussions around ‘personhood’ and ‘the social’ through exploring their formation within conflicting inter-species, anthropocentric, and urban neoliberal contexts and discourses. Their research also sheds light on the challenges faced by urban individuals who have prioritised the environment in their everyday lives. The semi-conscious emergence of anthropocentric values in everyday social interactions forms one such challenge. Contributing to the anthropology of Europe, their findings shed light on the ways in which urban Europeans grapple with radically conflicting discursive and infrastructural relations to the environment, as opposed to having absorbed a singular nature-cultural ontology.

After completing a BA in English Literature at UCL and spending a year as a freelance photojournalist in Barcelona, they earned an MSc in Anthropology from UCL in 2018. Following ethnographic research in one of Córdoba’s oldest mosques, they explored Spanish Moroccan Muslims’ historical consciousness of Spain’s Islamic past and its relation to both public and private modes of religiosity. Their MRes in Anthropology at SOAS focused on the growth of public displays of Jewishness in Barcelona. This research culminated in the co-organisation of a three-day workshop exploring public Jewish identity. During this time, they also co-ordinated the Jewish-Muslim Research Network and continue to write journalistic articles.

They are currently a doctoral candidate at SOAS, University of London, supervised by Dr. Naomi Leite and Dr. Kostas Retsikas. Situated within environmental anthropology, their ESRC-funded doctoral research explores the emergence of ecological ways of being in the city of Barcelona. They designed and delivered a one-off undergraduate module for the SOAS Anthropology Department titled Exploring (Non-)Human Identities, which introduced students to key theoretical frameworks in environmental anthropology. They also deliver outdoor, sensorial workshops aimed at critically unpacking participants’ relationships with the environment, drawing on anthropological tools and frameworks such as self-reflexivity and the examination of naturalised epistemological relations to ‘the environment’