Andrew Ainslie
Current position:
Lecturer, International Rural Development, and
Programme Director: MSc Environment and Development,
School of Agriculture, Policy and Development,
University of Reading
I trained as a social anthropologist at Rhodes University in South Africa and at UCL. I have spent some 20 years conducting rural agrarian research in rural African contexts, into land reform, shifts in governance, livestock systems, livelihood changes and wider environmental change (including climate change), all whilst affiliated variously to a university institute, a parastatal research institute and to an NGO. From 2010, I worked first in the Scenarios Development Team of the CGIAR programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), then at Oxford Brookes University, and most recently as Lecturer in International Rural Development at the University of Reading. Here, I am involved in research in the Lake Victoria Basin as part of the recently launched Future Climate for Africa (FCFA) programme.
Other than the research interests mentioned above, my research involves the global food system and agricultural commodity/value chains, particularly related to the global beef value chain. I am interested in critical perspectives on international development theory and practice, interdisciplinarity, particularly in relation to scientific/agricultural/local knowledge systems and interfaces, as well as technology-enhanced methods of teaching and learning. I am the co-developer of the free Open online course ‘Our Hungry Planet’, see https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/our-hungry-planet
I am an Associate of the Walker Institute for Climate System Research at the University of Reading. I am an Associate Editor of the African Journal of Range and Forage Science and a Committee Member of both the Biosocial Society and of the ‘Anthropology and the Environment’ Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute, London.
Please see my institutional webpage at:
http://www.reading.ac.uk/apd/staff/a-m-ainslie.aspx
