Dr Danny McNally is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Teesside University, specialising in creative approaches to environmental issues. His research critically explores how participatory art and creative geographies can engage communities facing ecological crises, with a particular focus on the climate emergency. His forthcoming monograph, Aesthetic Encounters: Cultural Geographies of Participatory Art (RGS-IBG/LSE Press), offers a novel contribution to geographical thought by arguing that participatory art fosters prefigurative, ethical, and aesthetic engagements with socio-environmental issues.

Danny has published widely in leading journals such as Progress in Human Geography, Cultural Geographies, and Planning Theory and Practice, and has received research funding from the British Academy, AHRC, and ESRC. His projects involve extensive collaboration with artists, local communities, and environmental agencies, including a recent participatory flood resilience project in Morpeth, UK.

Dr McNally has played a key role in developing interdisciplinary and environmental programmes at Teesside. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and supervises doctoral research on creative responses to environmental concerns. He also serves on the editorial board of GeoHumanities, is Treasurer for the RGS-IBG Social and Cultural Geography Research Group, and sits as an independent member on the Northumbria Regional Flood and Coastal Committee, advising on public engagement and communication.

My research centres on the creative geographies of environmental problems, with a strong interdisciplinary commitment to community engagement, participatory practice, and social and environmental justice. At its core, my work explores how creative practice, including participatory art, aesthetic inquiry, and experimentation, can offer novel ways of understanding, experiencing, and responding to socio-environmental crises such as climate change and flooding.

My forthcoming monograph, Aesthetic Encounters: Cultural Geographies of Participatory Art (RGS-IBG/LSE Press), exemplifies this approach. The book is an exploration of how participatory art shapes and is shaped by the spaces and relations it inhabits. Drawing on cultural geography, art theory, and new materialist thought, the book critically assess the encounters and relations forged through participatory artworks. It has two central, interrelated arguments. First, it argues that participatory art is a practice of prefigurative gesture, a mode through which artists and participants collaboratively perform and embody alternative, hopeful worlds. These artistic practices do not simply represent change but actively rehearse it through relational, often experimental forms of engagement. Second, the book contends that the aesthetic encounter, the relational space where art and life meet, should be understood as both a site of ethics and aesthetics. Ethical relations concern the democratic constitution of participation: who is involved, how, and on what terms. Aesthetic relations refer to the intensities and affective dimensions that emerge through these encounters. Together, these perspectives aim to offer a richer, more nuanced account of the politics of participatory art.

I am particularly interested in how creative and participatory methods can challenge dominant narratives of environmental governance by foregrounding the everyday experiences, embodied knowledge, and emotional geographies of affected communities. My current research investigates how creative practice can serve as both a methodological tool and a critical lens through which to approach environmental issues.

My current British Academy-funded project, Critical and Creative Geographies of Flooding in Morpeth, brings together local residents, artists, environmental activists, and flood officers in a six-month participatory art programme. This initiative explores how creative practice can support community resilience, emotional engagement, and shared knowledge around flood risk. Rooted in Morpeth, a town with a long history of flooding, the project uses creative workshops, exhibitions, and collaborative storytelling to surface embodied experiences and challenge conventional risk communication. The project is also supported with AHRC Impact Acceleration funding to deepen its practical and policy impact, particularly around co-produced resilience strategies and inclusive environmental governance. 

I teach across the social science programmes in the Department. 

Current PhD Students

Lesley Hicks (Primary supervisor / Director of Studies)

Drawing upon Landscape

Livia Bird (Third supervisor)

An ecocritical exploration of poverty and class in African American women’s literature 

Duncan Evennou (Second supervisor)

“Petrified Museum” Performing the present tense through geological archives 

Danae Contou  (External supervisor, with Prof Phil Steinberg and Prof Paul Harrison, Durham University)

Cartographic Arctic Uncertainties