Dr Samantha Day is a Research Affiliate in the Department of Geography, specialising in the socio-political complexity of tropical forest conservation partnerships. Her research explores the power dynamics, governance structures, and relationships that shape conservation practices, particularly within politically constrained tropical forest environments.

Dr Day’s PhD thesis, Juggling in the Jungle: IENGO Legitimation in Cambodia’s Protected Forests, supervised by Professors Sarah Bracking and Kate Schreckenberg, examined the challenges and complexities of normative legitimation in international environmental non-governmental organisations (IENGOs). Focusing on expertise, relationships, and efficacy as sources of NGO legitimacy, her research explored how conservation actors establish and maintain legitimacy within Cambodia’s protected forests.

Through this work, Dr Day developed the “whitespace” framework to explain how geographically bounded social, political, and cultural silences co-constitute IENGO legitimacy, conservation arrangements, and environmental practices. The framework maps what can be said, by whom, and where, revealing how silences, constraints, and spatially contingent forms of expression shape conservation partnerships, particularly in constricted political environments.

Her broader research interests include conservation situated within authoritarian and hybrid political regimes; conflict and post-conflict forest landscapes; shifts in international development aid and global soft power; and questions of power and placemaking from a poststructural perspective. Her work brings together political geography, political ecology, and critical conservation studies to better understand the changing political and spatial dimensions of environmental governance.

Dr Day is committed to interdisciplinary research that bridges geography, political ecology, conservation science, and development studies. She is particularly interested in fostering meaningful engagement between academic research, policy, and practice, with an emphasis on generating research that can inform conservation governance, support context-sensitive partnerships, and contribute to more equitable and effective environmental decision-making.

Further details

See Samantha's research profile