Dr Ersilia Verlinghieri
Ersilia Verlinghieri is a Senior Research Fellow at the Active Travel Academy, University of Westminster and a Senior Researcher in Urban Mobility at the Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford. Since 2012, her work focuses on developing theoretical and methodological approaches to issues of social and environmental justice in transport. Her research has a specific focus on participatory planning and research methodologies and in analysing the contribution of grassroots actors in reshaping transport policy and planning. Between 2016 – 2020 she was also the Coordinator of the Global Challenges in Transport Programme, which brings together practitioners, campaigners, and academics to discuss the future of transport..
Ersilia uses an interdisciplinary approach to develop new ways of theorising, researching, and reconfiguring transport systems to tackle contemporary ecological and social crises.
Her work can be grouped under 3 main themes:
1. From distributive to procedural justice: Developing theoretical and methodological approaches to better understand the unequal distribution of the social impacts of interventions
This theme includes the development of new methods to assess the impacts of transport interventions (including spatial analysis, as well as social impact and health impact assessment frameworks), with a specific focus on complementing the desk-based spatial analysis with participatory methodologies (see for example Lucas, Philips and Verlinghieri, 2021).
2. Restorative and epistemic justice: Opening the theoretical and methodological horizons to new theories and voices (decolonizing the discipline)
The research in these theme aims to promote justice as recognition of the different voices and needs within planning, and links to the broader agenda of decolonising transport studies. The theoretical work on expanding the understanding of transport and mobility justice (see for example Verlinghieri and Schwanen 2020) is linked to attempts to redesign decolonised spaces for teaching and researching on transport and mobilities (Verlinghieri and Middleton, 2020).
3: Building mobility justice: Contribute to rethinking the processes of transport planning and putting into action of different futures.
The work in these theme aims to open up planning to actions and contributes from grassroots actors and radical theory, not only recognizing their validity, but trying to understand their contribution in connection with the socio-political and economic dynamics that form 'mobilities'. Works include the study of the influence of social movements into transforming transport planning (Verlinghieri 2020; Verlinghieri and Venturini 2018) and the recent involvement as researcher in the Car-Free megacities project led by the climate change charity Possible.
A full list of publications is available at: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=m1uhxrAAAAAJ&hl=en&...