Dr Theresa Ashford is a Lecturer in Social Science whose passion is exploring interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary borderlands. Her under graduate and post graduate education is in Geography and spans science, human and cultural geography domains. She has worked in the regional planning field in Canada and her Masters research explored the use and role of public spaces in the support and construction of homeless punk youth identities in Winnipeg, Canada. Her work with homeless youth led her to change careers and move into Education, where she taught high school social studies, geography and history.
Dr Ashford’s PhD research (2018, Education, UQ) used Actor-network theory to investigate the emergence of digital ethics in 1:1 classrooms and the role of technology mediating, supporting and translating human behaviour and understandings. Her interest is in human-non-human hybridity and how this approach changes how we view and be in the world.
Dr Ashford is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA) and is keenly interested in new pedagogies, nurturing future-oriented thinking, and the shift required to teach in the Anthropocene. She has worked on several funded Learning and Teaching projects that investigated synchronous and asynchronous learning methods and technology-based simulations. Her work with the Learning and Teaching centre at UniSC (CSALT) included program and course design, assessment, with specific interests in embedding sustainability, employability and graduate attributes into curriculum.
Professional Memberships
- Institute of Australian Geographers Inc.
Awards/Fellowships
- Senior Fellow HEA
Currently Supervising
- Investigating Infrastructure Strategy in Disruptive Futures, Richard MacGeorge
- Tracing regional sustainable development: a critical appraisal of a practitioner’s engagement in regional Australia 2004-2022, Peter Waterman
Research areas
- Applications of Science and Technology Studies (Actor Network Theory and New Materialisms)
- Ethics and Technology
- Critical thinking in Geography
- Teaching in the Anthropocene
Teaching areas
- Geography
- Sustainability
- Sociology
- Ethics
Dr Theresa Ashford is a human geographer and lectures in the School of Law and Society. Her main areas of research are human-environment relations and currently span youth – tech relations in public parks using Pokémon Go; rethinking mapping extinction following the EPBCA and the Planning Act; better understanding student experiences during COVID; working from home; and Education for Sustainability approaches. Her main focus is thinking through ethical and responsible relations. She is interested in working with community, thinking about transformation, and collaborations.