Dr James Scott Vandeventer

My profile

Biography

James Scott Vandeventer is a Senior Lecturer in Sustainability, and joined the department in September 2023. He previously worked as a Lecturer in Management at the University of Huddersfield.

James’ research asks: What does socioecological change mean for organisation? To respond, he pursues interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of organisation studies and human geography, informed by an ecological critique of political, economic, and social systems. He is an ethnographer and primarily uses qualitative methods, drawing on poststructuralist and new materialist philosophies as well as Science and Technology Studies (STS) to inform new vantages on old problems.

His current research interests include: organizational geographies and the organisation of everyday life; the implications of degrowth/post-growth for management and organisation; housing and urban futures; ontological politics; organising virtual space; and management pedagogies.

James is the Principal Investigator for a British Academy/Leverhulme-funded project ‘Conceiving sustainable space’, which is examining how a Manchester-based architecture firm and their partners integrate sustainability into the design and construction of a building project. The research focuses on how organisation is enacted with(in) the built environment. James is a co-founder and collective member of Management Educators Navigating Degrowth (MEND), which critically explores ideas and practices of post-growth and degrowth in management pedagogies. James is also co-leading an ongoing project exploring post-growth housing futures in England and Germany.

James completed his PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2020. His doctoral thesis, ‘Rhizomatic Assemblage: A diffractive ethnography on the geographical constitutiveness of organising’, involved an ethnography of everyday organising on a housing estate in Manchester’s Hulme neighbourhood. He also has a MSc in Environmental Sustainability from the University of Edinburgh (UK) and a BA in Economics from Georgetown University (USA).

Research outputs