D.V. Nixon

Denver’s broadest research interest is in the relationship between embodied knowledge—such as understandings shaped by individual and collective experiences and practices—and just and sustainable transitions; and, a substantive research interest in mobilities / transportation.

Before coming to Maastricht, Denver researched grassroots walking and cycling infrastructure innovations for disadvantaged communities in London and São Paulo while at the Transport Studies Unit at the University of Oxford.  This project (part of the international collaborative project DePICT) sought to evaluate the potential contributions of these community-led projects to just and sustainable mobility transitions.  In a short postdoc before Oxford, Denver performed mixed methods analyses of boundary changes in the Fraser Valley’s (Canada) Agricultural Land Reserve.

Denver’s funded dissertation research examined how the techno-practices of walking, cycling, and driving mediate commuters’ tacit and conveyable understandings of their social and physical environments, and how this knowledge reproduces or challenges (often inequitable) mobility regimes.  A partially funded Master of Environmental Studies took Denver to China to research Daoist (Taoist) environmental praxiologies vis-à-vis Western theories of sustainable practice.

Denver has also worked as a consultant and for various levels of government in different capacities, including regional planning.