Dr. Jessica Cockburn
Lecturer in the Department of Environmental Science at Rhodes University
TRANSECTS Co-Applicant involved in Teaching & Learning and Monitoring & Evaluation
- Address
- Rhodes University, South Africa
Jessica Cockburn is a Lecturer in the Department of Environmental Science at Rhodes University in Makhanda, South Africa. She grew up on a farm in a family passionate about conservation and social justice. These early experiences shaped her interest in understanding landscapes in an integrated way. Jessica completed her PhD in 2018 in the same department. The title of her thesis was ‘Stewardship and collaboration in multifunctional landscapes: a transdisciplinary enquiry’. Before that Jessica worked as a practitioner-researcher in a diversity of applied environmental research and practice settings: catchment management, urban ecosystem management and land use planning.
Through her work on Landscapes, Linkages, and Learning Jessica has come to appreciate the value of a critical realist philosophy in underpinning and deepening inter- and transdisciplinary social-ecological research. She is curious about how people work together to address complex sustainability challenges in a variety of contexts and configuration: whether they are diverse stakeholders in rural landscapes, researchers working in partnership with policy-makers and practitioners, or researchers working together across disciplinary boundaries. She is interested in human-nature interactions as they play out in stewardship and sustainable livelihoods. She draws on learning theories, realist evaluation approaches and transdisciplinarity to support her engaged research and teaching on multistakeholder collaboration for sustainability.