Bryonny Goodwin-Hawkins

Bryonny Goodwin-Hawkins is an interdisciplinary researcher working towards inclusive futures for rural people and places. Her work investigates how historic and contemporary policies and practices help (or hinder) thriving regions, and experiments with new models to re-enable those ‘left behind’. Bryonny joined the CCRI in 2020 as Senior Research Fellow in the National Innovation Centre for Rural Enterprise (NICRE).

At WISERD, Bryonny worked as part of two major projects funded by the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme – IMAJINE and ROBUST, which work across 13 and 11 countries respectively. Through IMAJINE, Bryonny works to develop new policy responses to territorial inequalities. Through ROBUST, she works in partnership with the Welsh Local Government Association, focussing on public infrastructure, sustainable food, and rural culture. As one of the few social anthropologists working in Wales, she brings ethnographic perspectives to real-world problems. Her research can take her from villages, to town halls, to government offices, to Brussels.

Bryonny joined the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University, in 2018, after previous appointments at the University of Melbourne, where her doctoral research won the Australian Anthropological Society’s Best Thesis Award. Bryonny has published her work from academic journals to The Independent. She has been a speaker at the European Week of Regions and Cities and for the National Trust’s SHEDtalks, and was one of the thirty emerging research leaders selected by the 2019 Welsh Crucible.