Emma Burnett is a researcher and writer. She is a Director at Rooted in Place and an Honorary Research Associate at TABLE. She is interested in food, agriculture, and resilience.
Emma completed her doctoral research at the Centre for Agroecology, Water & Resilience. Her PhD focused on self-organisation, competition, cooperation, and resilience in local agri-food systems. Emma’s experiences are deeply rooted in Oxford’s food scene. In 2012, along with four others, she co-founded Cultivate, a cooperative social enterprise that worked to produce and distribute local food within Oxfordshire, and to help the community get involved in food-related issues and solutions. Before that, she got an MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management from Oxford University. Following her PhD, Emma worked at Fielden Whisky as their Sustainability and Agriculture Researcher, where she researched the environmental and economic sustainability of grain production for distilling, and best practices for regenerative agriculture in arable systems.
Emma also writes science communication and fiction. She is a regular award nominee and an occasional award winner, and has been published in the Conversation, Urban Food Futures, and Good Food Oxfordshire’s blog. Her fiction has appeared in dozens of magazines, including Grimdark Magazine, Nature:Futures, Mythaxis, Northern Gravy, Radon, Uncharted, Flash Fiction Online, Apex, MetaStellar, The Forge, and more. She’s pretty excited that her first book, Ex Partum, will be released in June 2026 by Atthis Arts.
If you want to support Emma’s writing, you can sign up to her Patreon.
If you want her to do some writing for you, please do get in touch.