Michael has previously worked on the human rights impacts of tourism and also sustainability but decided to retrain on climate solutions, recognising that oppressed and marginalised people are part of the environment, but often lack voice. The latter brought him to the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales and a MSc in Sustainability and Adaptation Planning. There Michael looked at the intersections of oppression on the Black community, finding that heritage is an understudied variable in climate change especially in the UK.
Michael’s PhD research uses the Black Radical Tradition and antiblackness as theoretical, ontological and conceptual frameworks to interrogate and uncover truths in climate change discourses. His research takes him back to Hull, a city at risk from flood and climate hazards. In Hull as an activist-scholar working with the local Black community, they together look for solutions that are emancipatory, equitable, inclusive and therefore more efficient. Michael is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts and Manufactures.
