Alison Laurie Neilson

Alison Laurie Neilson is an interdisciplinary researcher who transcends boundaries between arts/sciences, academic/non-academic and researcher/researched in knowledge creation and fisheries governance. She works on environmental justice issues in small-scale fishing communities of the Azores Islands Portugal. She conducts narrative and arts-informed research on the way sustainability is understood and used in education and fishing policy.

Alison has taught creative and outdoor teaching methods and arts-informed research methodology in Canada, Portugal, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Ecuador. Her PhD dissertation and subsequent book Disrupting Privilege, Identity, and Meaning: A Reflexive Dance of Environmental Education (2008) used arts-informed research to explore power and privilege, and to deal with questions of equity and social justice within environmental practice and involved educators from Iran, Tanzania, Brazil, Paraguay, Columbia, Canada and First Nations.

Alison uses arts to challenge norms within academic publishing, communications and education. This includes performance, graphic communications and creative facilitation. Alison initiated a Portuguese Arts-Informed Research Network to support boundary crossing experiments in scholarship, outreach and art. She has initiated other transdisciplinary collaborations including Research in Social Marine Issues in the Azores, and RCE Açores, a UN Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development.