Emma Linford

Em is a postgraduate researcher who joined the Global Sustainability Institute in 2024 to explore creative embodied practices in place with support from the Vice Chancellor's scholarship.

Email: [email protected]

Connect with Emma on LinkedIn

Background

Emma has a 20-year career of facilitating and leading expeditions, journeys and outdoor transformative learning experiences for a diversity of people. She has turned to academia on a quest to meet the demands of the polycrisis and is exploring place-based encounters, making a shift from an anthropocentric lens to a more kin-centric perspective. Following on from her Masters research focus on the phenomenology of human/nature relations, her PhD research focusses on empathic embodied encounters enabled by the wayfaring technology of journeying with place. Her work is collaborative and trans/inter-disciplinary.

Research interests

• Environmental and social justice
• Creative methodologies and pedagogies
• Embodiment and Pro-environmental behaviour
• Outdoor Sector systems change
• Wayfaring as journeying

Teaching

• MA, Mediating Boundaries - Movement, Mind and Ecology, Schumacher College, 2023
• BA - EDI from a more than human perspective - Outdoor Adventure and Environmental Education, Cumbria University, 2024

Qualifications

• MA Movement, Mind and Ecology (Distinction). Schumacher College (Plymouth University)
• International Mountain leader (UIMLA)
• BA (Hons) Design and Communication, Kingston University

Memberships, editorial boards

• Member, Venture Shift – Pioneering the future of the Outdoors
• British Association of International Mountain Leaders (BAIML)
• Fellow, Royal Geographic Society (FRGS)

Selected recent publications

Wild Service. Why Nature Needs You – ‘Education’ (Ed. Hayes, N & Moses, J. Bloomsbury, 2024).

The Book of Books. Stories from a Yorkshire Moor and other Peatlands – ‘Hospitable Encounters’ (Ed. Chilvers, A & Shaw, C. Little Toller, 2025).

Borrowed Time. On Death, Dying and Change – ‘Movement Ecology Across Scales. The Temporality of an Embodied Landscape’ (Ed. Osmond, M & Povall, R. art.earth, 2022).

Recent presentations and conferences

Crossing the divide; cultivating a new relational ontology decentreing the human for self, community and planet. International Adventure Conference, Germany 2023.

‘Unrunning; desire and enchantment’ workshop. Sentient Performativities: Thinking alongside the human. Dartington, 2022.

Media experience

Wild Service: Education (2025). Watch here.

The Adventure Podcast, The Far Reaches Ep. 2 (2024). Watch here.

SS Small is Beautiful Ep. 6. Watch here.

The Outdoors Group – The Stars are for Everyone: Wild camping on Dartmoor and the Right to Roam (2023). Watch here.