Dr. Ian Cook

Dr. Ian Cook is an Associate Professor of Human Geography at the University of Exeter.

He tries to examine how social, cultural, economic, physical and other processes feed into everyday acts of purchase and consumption; explore research practices which can best enable these connections to be appreciated; develop pedagogic approaches which can bring home the uncomfortable political and ethical responsibilities which arise when such connections are made; and involve non-academic publics in this work through collaboration and co-authorship.

Ian graduated from UCL in 1986 with a BSc in Human Sciences, from the University of Kentucky in 1992 with an MA in Human Geography, and from the University of Bristol in 1997 with a PhD in Human Geography. He began his academic career at the University of Wales, Lampeter (1993-9), then worked at the University of Birmingham (1999-2007), before moving to Exeter in August 2007.

Ian has worked with Shelley Sacks since the parallel worlds of his research on relations between Jamaican papaya farm workers and UK consumers and her work with St Lucian banana farmers merged in 2000 when he interviewed her about Exchange Values for a piece published in the ‘cultural geographies in practice’ section of the journal Ecumene. Ian became fascinated by the relations between social scientific and social sculptural understandings of connective aesthetics, materialities, methodologies and pedagogies, and continues to think these through in his research and teaching.

Almost everything he writes contains some reference to Exchange Values, and he has thereby drawn attention to this work in the geographical and wider social scientific community, at school and university level. Ian also convened a 'connective aesthetics' session at the Royal Geographical Society conference in 2002, a 'connective aesthetics' ThinkTank at the International Project Space, UCE, Birmingham in 2004, and helped the Exchange Values website to become a resource for the teaching of a ‘pilot’ GCSE, a core theme of which is ‘People as consumers: the impact of our decisions’. He has been an Associate of the Social Sculpture Research Unit since 2000