Kent MSc Graduate Kay Evelina Lewis-Jones explains what one is and how she came to be one in this weekend’s Guardian Education section.
School of Anthropology and Conservation alumna Dr Kay Evelina Lewis-Jones says studying for our one-year taught ethnobotany MSc led first to a PhD in Environmental Anthropology at Kent in 2018, and then her current job, which entails improving people’s engagement with the environment.
“The course fuses natural and social science,” says Lewis-Jones. “It’s taught me how to identify plants and their core families, the basics of ecology and botany, plus vital field skills such as how to preserve specimens good enough to be archived.”
Convenor Dr Raj Puri expands on the course, “The Ethnobotany MSc is an intellectual crossroads, with students coming from a range of disciplinary and work backgrounds, converging at Kent for an intensive year of multidisciplinary learning and training in research on people and plants, and then heading off in different directions in research, policy and practical engagements.”
“Kay is typical arriving with a degree in social anthropology,” he continued “doing research on the social life of seeds at Kew’s Millennium Seedbank for her MSc, extending that work with research in Georgia and the USA for her doctoral thesis, and then moving into a career in environmental policy with the UK government.”