Michael Woods

Michael Woods is Professor of Human Geography at Aberystwyth University, which he joined in 1996 as a Lecturer. He is Director of the UKRI-funded Rural Wales Local Policy Innovation Partnership, an innovate project to connect research, policy and communities to support inclusive, sustainable development, and is a Co-Director of the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data (WISERD).

His research primarily concerns rural studies and political geography, with key interests including: rural politics and protest, currently being explored as PI for the UKRI Frontier Research grant 'Rural Discontent, Spatial Justice and Disruptive Politics' (Rural-Spatial-Justice, 2024-9); globalisation and the 'global countryside', examined in ERC Advanced Grant GLOBAL-RURAL (2014-19); and spatial justice and territorial inequalities, as coordinator of Horizon 2020 project IMAJINE (2017-22). From 2013 to 2024 he was Co-Director of the ESRC WISERD Civil Society Research Centre, and he has also been Co-Director of the Centre for Welsh Politics and Society (2016-24), Director of the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences (2007-13), and Professor of Transformative Social Science (2014-16), all at Aberystwyth University. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

He is a former Editor of the Journal of Rural Studies, author or co-author of the books 'An Introduction to Political Geography (Routledge, 2004; 2e 2014), 'Rural Geography' (Sage, 2005), 'Contesting Rurality: Politics in the British Countryside' (Ashgate, 2005), and 'Rural' (Routledge, 2011), and editor of 'New Labour's Countryside' (Policy Press, 2008) and 'Globalization and Europe's Rural Regions' (Ashgate, 2015). He has provided advice to policy-makers, including in the UK and Welsh Governments, and was a member of the Diamond Review of Student Finance and Higher Education Funding in Wales.