Dr Kirsten Stevens-Wood is a senior lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan University. She initially trained as a Community development and youth worker, receiving her Bsc Youth and Community back in the early 2000s. After ten years as a practitioner, she returned to higher education and completed a Master's degree in research methods and then her Ph.D.; an ethnographic study of a single Intentional Community. Prior to becoming an academic, Kirsten spent 10 years in community development, including as a policy officer in the city farm movement and project manager for a community-based mentoring programme for prisoners leaving custody. Her research interests include all forms of collective living (Intentional Community) as well as low-impact development and carbon reduction, namely through innovations in the built environment. She is also interested in the scope and form of ethnography as a research method.