Sophie LE FLOCH

Researcher, Irstea Bordeaux

Dr. Sophie LE FLOCH is a researcher at Irstea (National Institute for Environmental Science and Research). Her research interests deal with human interactions with nature and the environment. Drawing from geography and anthropology, and based on extensive fieldwork, her work focuses on everyday experiences of environmental changes. She addresses the potential tensions / gaps between, on the one hand, the way « lay people » live and shape their environment ; on the other hand, the way public stakeholders as well as organized social groups establish the environmental issues that legitimate their interventions. She addresses questions spanning perceptions of environmental change (forest and fallow land growth, climate change impacts on river and estuarine areas, aquatic invasive species spreading...) ; environmental conflicts in changing rural areas (afforestation, wind turbine installation...) ; the politics of landscape and its « de-politicizing » effect ; public participation processes and the misleading idea of « social acceptability »...