Our Trustee Spotlight series highlights the people guiding the Landscape Research Group. Through these features, we share the diverse experiences, research interests, and motivations that shape the direction of our work.
This month we introduce Dr Amanda Byer, an Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow in International Law and Global Justice at University College Dublin’s Sutherland School of Law. An environmental legal scholar by training, her work brings a distinctive perspective to landscape research through the lens of law, justice and cultural heritage, shaped in part by her early research in the Caribbean. As a trustee of the Landscape Research Group, Amanda is helping to build stronger connections between landscape scholarship and legal thinking, and is particularly interested in how landscape can offer a vital framework for understanding identity, sustainability, displacement and participatory justice in the context of the climate crisis.
1. What first inspired you to get involved with the Landscape Research Group and what does being a trustee mean to you?
I first came to landscape as a PhD student working on cultural heritage law in the Caribbean. My mentor Amy Strecker introduced me to the works of Kenneth Olwig and Mike Jones and I’ve been working with landscape ever since.
Landscape has a complex relationship with law – it emerges from law, has been destroyed by law, and is now trying to recover its place in the law. I’m originally an environmental legal scholar, but I was delighted to learn of LRG not only because of its dynamic research community but because there is real interest in building a landscape law research network within LRG.
Being a trustee means I can bring a unique lens on landscape and the law, as well as the complex geographies of the Caribbean region which has connections with Africa, Asia and Europe, thus engaging and complicating issues of empire, globalisation and land use in the climate crisis.
2. What are you most proud of contributing to LRG during your time as a trustee?
I enjoy engaging with the LRG community on issues involving landscape, law and justice. Landscape geographers have actually made a significant contribution to legal research because of the way they conceptualise law and justice – but landscape is still a fairly new concept within the law itself. Engaging with the LRG community (during Coffee Hours, event planning, through the Landscape Research Journal) has been very rewarding because synergies between landscape law and the more established landscape disciplines are very much present, and the landscape community is very open to exploring these interlinkages. I hope these conversations and connections will be the basis for the establishment of a landscape law research network.
3. How do you see the role of LRG evolving in the coming years and what opportunities should landscape research focus on next?
I think LRG has a real opportunity to engage the public on the relevance of landscape to so many timely issues and topics – the climate crisis and the just transition, civil conflict, rights of nature, technology. Landscape offers a language and a framework for articulating the value of locally derived people-place connections to identity, community and sustainability, and this introduces a lot of nuance into the current discourse, moving us away from spectacular and sensational narratives, cautioning against stereotypes, misinformation and quick fixes for land harm in the longue durée. Understanding landscape (whether or not one becomes a landscape professional or academic) can actually make us better researchers.
4. What excites you most about the future of landscape research – both within LRG and in the wider field?
Although we have new technologies and new challenges, landscape’s insights into unequal land and resource use, cultural identity and sustainable communities remain as relevant as ever. Those synergies I mentioned? Lots of opportunities to explore the relationship between landscape protection and participatory justice, landscapes and displacement, even landscape and pedagogy. I’m looking forward to new perspectives on these issues from the landscapes that are often underrepresented, and I think there are potential collaborations and partnerships with LRG in this respect that are exciting and necessary.
About Dr Amanda Byer, LRG Trustee
Amanda is based in Ireland, where she is an Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow in International Law and Global Justice at University College Dublin’s Sutherland School of Law, contributing academic expertise at the intersection of legal scholarship, landscape and global justice.