Dr. Amelia Farber is passionate about access to and the effects of environmental education globally, addressing inequities of exclusion and invalidation of oppressed entities and voices, including the environment, children, and Indigenous peoples. She particularly focuses on work that is situated within frameworks that destabilize and seek to question and step away from dominant narratives and structures, decentring the West, adult lenses, and anthropocentric approaches to environmental concerns. In this way, her research is child centric, ecocentric, and seeks to learn from historically and contemporarily excluded human and more-than-human voices.
She is currently a Research Fellow in the Environmental Change theme at Reuben College, Oxford. She is also an environmentalist and early career researcher who recently completed a doctorate within the Department of Education. She is also currently a researcher on a Net Zero Education project at Oxford, a project looking at how teachers in England teach about both climate change and net zero emissions with the goal of creating a framework for how to weave net zero through multi-subject lessons.
She has conducted multiple projects in the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador, working with children, schools, non-profits, and the National Park to understand how children engage with components of environmental literacy to inform environmental education and empower young people’s stewardship of local and global environments. Her DPhil research, under the supervision of Dr. Ann Childs and Dr. Steve Puttick, centred children as local experts in the Galápagos Islands, learning from them what they know, how they learn, and how they feel and take care of their local natural environment, focused on how children constructed local ecological knowledge.
She advises the non-profit, EcoEducate, on current and future sustainability literacy programs in Latin America. She has taught and teaches undergraduate and masters courses on education, and worked for nine years in international partnerships, marketing, and operations for tech start-ups in the US. She holds undergraduate degrees in Anthropology and Music, and a masters degree in Latin American Studies from Stanford University.
In her free time, she is a free-lance food photographer, food stylist, food blogger, recipe developer, and gluten free baker. She also continues to sing informally and focuses on finding spaces of peace and reflection in more-than-human environments around the UK and internationally (which entails lots of quiet, observational walks through green spaces). She is a neurodivergent researcher herself, and a proponent of seeking justice and accessibility for marginalized students and people within academia and beyond.