Sébastien Dujardin

After having studied geography in Belgium and the United-Kingdom (King’s College London), Sébastien was recipient of a FRIA fellowship from the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS) and undertook his PhD at the Department of Geography from the University of Namur and the Research Centre for Local Governance from the Holy Name University Tagbilaran (Philippines). Since his PhD, he worked on research projects financed by the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO) and completed two post-doctoral research stays at the KULeuven and USalzburg (Z_GIS Department). He was F.R.S.-FNRS post-doctoral researcher between 2020 and 2023 and is currently teaching and researching at UNamur. Prior to starting his PhD, Sébastien worked two years for the Standing Conference of Territorial Development (CPDT) within the Lepur, a research centre on territorial, urban and rural sciences based at the University of Liège.

Dr. Sébastien Dujardin’s research interests lie in urbanization processes and climate change adaptation pathways in Europe, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa in the background of global sustainable development challenges. While working for the CPDT, he got the opportunity to investigate how spatial planning can mitigate for climate change at the scale of the Walloon region by quantifying the potential reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from more compact urban forms and sustainable travel behaviours. During his PhD research, he then focused on how to plan with climate change by qualifying stakeholders’ local knowledge and providing evidence of place-based adaptation strategies in the Philippines. Currently, his post-doctoral research leverages crowdsourced geographic information and digital traces (e.g. social media data, mobile phone data, citizen science data) for climate-related risks assessments and adaptation research in general.

He is particularly interested in hybrid geographies that combine both quantitative geospatial analysis (Geographical Information Systems, remote sensing, machine learning techniques, big data) and qualitative understandings of lived experiences (interpretive discourses analysis, participatory mapping, Q-method) to provide complementary insights into the complex interactions between climate and human agency in local and regional contexts. He values plural research designs and mixed-methods as he believes these are more likely to produce politically and ecologically more robust solutions to sustainable development challenges.