Russell Hitchings

After graduating I briefly worked in advertising before returning to research through an MSc centred on environmental and society issues here at UCL. This led to a doctorate and a postdoctoral fellowship also at UCL where both were supported by the Economic and Social Research Council. After that, I moved to Hull to take up an academic fellowship in Human Geography before returning as a lecturer in 2007. In 2013, I was promoted to Senior Lecturer / Associate Professor. In 2023, I was promoted to Professor of Human Geography.

More about Professor Hitchings

Education

2004 University College London PhD: Human Geography
2000 University College London MSc: Human Geography
1997 Cambridge University BA: Geography

Academic Appointments

2018 - present University College London: Associate Professor of Human Geography
2013 - 2018 University College London: Senior Lecturer in Human Geography
2012 - 2013 Wollongong University: Senior Visiting Research Fellow
2007 - 2013 University College London: Lecturer in Human Geography
2005 - 2007 University of Hull: RCUK Academic Fellow in Human Geography
2004 - 2005 University College London: ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Human Geography

Teaching

I teach on the following modules:

Methods in Human Geography (GEOG0018)
Overseas Field Class (coursework based) (GEOG0045)
Independent Study (GEOG0042)
Social Science Research: Methodologies and Methods (GEOG0155)

Publications

To view Professor Hitchings's publications, please visit UCL Profiles:

Publications

Research Interests

My research examines various aspects of everyday life that may be changing in ways that have important implications for social wellbeing and environmental sustainability. The wider aim is to identify the most effective means of positively influencing the processes involved. These interests have been substantiated so far through the following projects:

People and plants in the gardens of London

These interests first took shape during my doctoral work on how people live with plants in the domestic gardens of London. Domestic gardens were, at the time, being repositioned in terms of their media portrayal and, given that these spaces cover over three per cent of our national land mass, I reasoned that any corresponding changes in physical practice would likely have significant impacts in terms of issues ranging from social wellbeing and wildlife preservation to water consumption. With this in mind, this project deployed conceptual ideas about material culture and nonhuman agency across a series of London sites (the garden centre, the garden design studio and different types of domestic garden) to understand how and whether these changes were actually taking place. Through interview and ethnographic work, the study particularly considered whether the ways in which people related to 'living' plants were changing and why this was so as a means of stimulating debate about the roles that domestic gardens were, at the time, coming to assume.

Professional office workers and the urban outdoors

Since then I have become interested in exploring the value of cultural studies of ambient experience through a further grant from the Economic and Social Research Council. People in the west now spend over ninety per cent of their time within buildings that are increasingly air conditioned and this trend is troubling in terms that range from resource consumption to social sustainability. With this in mind, this second project took a sample of professional office workers in the city of London, as those at the forefront of a wider movement towards sanitised indoor existences, and tracked their activities as they passed through the changing outdoor conditions presented by one calendar year. In the context of a need to understand the mundane adaptations entrained by global climate change and the means by which we might steer cities toward more sustainable futures, this study considered how a societal indifference to the seasons, the weather, and other aspects of immediate climatic change might be practically engineered and subjectively experienced.

Older people and the winter transition

There are many reasons to be interested in how older people organise their winter warmth within ageing societies such as ours. Winter mortality rates are highest amongst this group and several initiatives have been set up to alleviate the fuel poverty some older people are prone to experience. Yet many older people are also wealthier than ever and this leads to alternative environmental anxieties about how their home heating could exacerbate wider climatic changes. By straddling these two issues, this third project in collaboration with Rosie Day (Birmingham) began with the contention that existing studies of older person winter adaptation were relatively neglectful of evolving social conventions of keeping warm at home. We argued that it was only through close consideration of how these changes are lived out that we will fully understand the reasons why older people are inclined to organise their winter experience in some ways instead of others and what this means for positive intervention. By applying a novel approach to the evolution of personal practice to a stratified sample of older people in UK, this project aimed to address this issue and thereby uncover policy relevant and academically instructive insights about this increasingly important sector.

Indoor versus outdoor running

This project, in collaboration with Alan Latham (UCL geography) and Courtney Kipps (UCL Surgery and Interventional Science), sought to understand how recreational runners come to find themselves running either indoors on treadmills or outside along streets or in parks. By spending time with those who generally ran in one or other of these two environments and talking with them about the physical experiences involved we sought to generate fresh suggestions about the effective promotion of public health through regular exercise.

Dirt and disruption at summer music festivals

This project in collaboration with Alison Browne (Manchester) and Tullia Jack (Lund) also focussed on physical experience. This time, however, the spot light was on dirt at summer music festivals in the UK. More specifically, we were interested in whether and how festival goers develop new cleanliness norms and ways of relating to being ‘dirty’ when at these festivals and what that tells us about the wider establishment (and potential unsettling) of different ways of using water in everyday life. Framing the festival as a naturally occurring ‘practice disruption’, our ambition was to extract wider lessons about how more or less sustainable ways of living with dirt come about and about how this process may be influenced to positive effect.

Post-retirement leisure travel and energy demand

Most recently I have joined a team of academics across UK and France aiming to develop an original line of research focussed on how energy demand can be usefully studied as an outcome of wider processes of social change. For more information on this see the ‘Demand Centre’ website. My role within the centre is to jointly lead a collaborative project seeking to understand how post retirement leisure mobility may be changing in the UK. The core question we ask here is: how have certain policies and pressures lead to the current situation and what does that tells us about the future of post retirement mobility?

Thermal modernity and air-conditioning in Qatar

Together with academics from Australia and Singapore, this project develops my interest in how 'thermal comfort' and the energy demand associated with this idea can be examined through a cultural lens. Through a series of different research activities, and funded by the Qatari National Research Fund, we have been examining the link between ideas of social and cultural 'progress' and the provision of air-conditioning in Qatar. The broader aim is to see what such an exercise reveals about whether alternative, less energy consumptive, answers to the question of human comfort may yet be possible in this context. My own work has particularly sought to explore this by comparing how different social groups (older Qataris, younger Qataris, ex-pat residents) talk and think about air-conditioning in their everyday lives.

Areas of interest

In the process of completing these projects I have become interested in a range of academic topics. These include:

theories of social practice and social norms
ways of studying nature and environmental experience
human adaptation and sustainable consumption
energy research and the social sciences
qualitative interview and ethnographic methods

Impact

My research aims to combine academic originality and policy relevance. I have accordingly sought to ensure my findings are disseminated outside as well as within academia. My project on how older people keep warm during winter, for example, was developed in collaboration with Help the Aged (now AgeUK) and my study of city office workers and outdoor experience was supported by the Corporation of London. Tailored policy reports have been produced and disseminated on completion of recent projects and I have also written articles for identified trade journals highlighting how readers might respond to my findings. I have also addressed wider audiences through various presentations, workshops and consultancy activities. Knowledge transfer/exchange in my two most recent projects in more detail:

Older people and winter adaptation

We ended the fieldwork for this project with a policy workshop hosted here at UCL. This provided policymakers from across government departments (DECC, DEFRA), the energy sector (EDF and EON), and campaigning groups (Help the Aged, Attend Rights to Warmth) with the opportunity to discuss how they might work together to tackle the issues identified in our study (reluctance to respond to campaigns targeted at older people, the social stigma of particular energy-saving actions etc.). This also led to various further policymakers requesting the report we went on to write upon completion of our analysis. Indeed we used the feedback from this policy event to ensure our recommendations were practicable and sensitive to the wider policy context at that time. Since then I have been involved in various further knowledge exchange activities around the topic of ‘thermal comfort’, most notably a policy workshop hosted at UCL with colleagues at Lancaster University, and civil servants at DECC on the matter of ‘thermal comfort standards’, how they evolve, and how they may be encouraged to take more sustainable paths.

Office workers and the urban outdoors

Again the end of this project was marked by a tailored policy report being distributed to identified stakeholders. I also wrote a short opinion piece for the journal ‘GreenSpaces’ which targets those working in city green space policy. As a result of this work, I was asked to give expert advice at a Corporation of London strategy meeting and a keynote speech at the annual conference of their ‘green spaces’ team. As a consequence, they have since piloted an innovative mobile phone text-based service that alerts city workers to the potential benefits of spending time outside at particular points in the year. One paper from this project has also since been selected by the European Commission’s environmental news service to be distributed to policymakers in all member countries.

Alongside this work outside the academy, I have contributed to scholarship in various ways:

I have reviewed major grant proposals for the ESRC, the NERC, the EPSRC and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. I am currently serving my third term on the ESRC peer review panel and have reviewed over 35 grant proposals to date. I have reviewed book proposals for Ashgate, Wiley-Blackwell, Sage and Pearson and over 120 academic papers across a range of social science journals.

Over the last four years, I have given various invited talks per year, including overseas presentations in France, New Zealand, Australia, The US, Singapore, and Finland. I have been a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society since 2006, serving as secretary of the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group between 2007 and 2012. I am an associate of the Higher Education Academy and a member of the British Sociological Association Climate Change group.

Research Students

Current Students (2022)

Antonia Hodgson - Weather experience and recreational running in London
Yaqian Zhang - Community gardens as social infrastructure in Shanghai
Hao Wu - Social media and gay life online in Chengdu
Wanhao Zhang - Intergenerational negotiation around air-conditioning in Shenzhen
Helene Shultze - Cultures and practices of seed sharing in London
Xiaoxue Chen - Nature and technology in everyday life in China
Yidan Cao - Square dancing in public space in Shanghai

Previous Students

Catherine Willan, 2016-2019: Energy targets in the Construction Industry
James Hudson, 2015-2019: Older collaborative housing communities in Berlin
Michael Nattrass, 2015-2019: Cycling policy and cycling practice in the UK.
Faye Wade, 2012-2016: An ethnographic approach to boiler installation in UK homes
Anna Plyushteva, 2011-2016: City mega projects and new modes of commuting in Sofia
Rebecca Collins, 2009-2013: Young people and sustainable consumption through divestment
Regan Koch, 2009-2013: Eating in public and ways of making cities more hospitable

I am interested in looking across different disciplinary perspectives to see how they can usefully inform one another. My graduate students have accordingly examined a range of topics in this way. What unites them, however, is that they have all generally used qualitative research methods and they have all generally begun with identified aspects of everyday life. Those who have completed their PhDs with me so far have gone on to secure a range of exciting academic appointments. Regan and Rebecca are now Geography Lecturers at Queen Mary and Chester Universities respectively, Anna is now a Marie Curie Research Fellow in Brussels, and Faye is a Research Fellow in Energy and Society at Edinburgh University. Feel free to get in touch if you are interested in working with me.

Research Grants, Prizes and Awards

Qatari National Research Foundation 2015 Thermal modernity in Qatar (£500,000)
UCL Grand Challenges Collaborative Grant. 2015 Architects and energy consumption in 'minor works' (£3,500)
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council 2013 The DEMAND centre (£5,000,000)
UCL Dean's Travel Fund 2012 Grant for Research Trip to Australia (£750)
UCL Grand Challenges Collaborative Grant 2012 The spaces of recreational running (£4,500)
UCL Mead Scholarship 2012 Grant for a research trip to Finland and Sweden (£400)
The Nuffield Foundation 2008 'Older people and the winter transition: accounting for thermal practice' (£7,500)
British Academy 2007. 'Geographies of practice and the urban outdoors' Conference grant (£500)
Economic and Social Research Council 2006. ‘Professional office workers and the urban outdoors’ (£98,000)
Research Councils UK 2005. Academic Fellowship in 'critical environmental politics and policy (£125,000)
UCL Graduate School 2005. 'The social accommodation of nonhuman difference' Conference grant (£1000)
UCL Mead Scholarship 2004. Grant to attend the European Sociological Association Conference (£500)
Economic and Social Research Council 2004. Post-doctoral fellowship (£30,000)
Royal Horticultural Society 2003. 'The changing role of plants in the London garden economy' Project grant (£500)
European Science Foundation 2002. Sustainability Summer School Internship (£600)
Economic and Social Research Council 2001. Doctoral Studentship (£39,000)