Dr Clare Devaney is a Research Fellow and lead for GSA Rural Lab, a cross-school research and knowledge exchange programme which is rooted in rural communities of place, enquiry and interest and based at the GSA Highlands & Islands Campus in Forres.

Clare's work is purposefully and unapologetically interdisciplinary. She holds a PhD in Built Environment and her earlier degrees are in English Literature. Her research interests include the languages, semiotics and sensory dynamics of place, materialist and multi-dimensional understandings of space and time, and the poetic rhythms, devices and dialectics of social, spatial, cultural, and economic systems.

Clare's doctoral research explores the role of cultural heritage in embedding innovation in sustainable economies, presenting a new, and nuanced, taxonomy for place and a four-dimensional economic organisational system characterised as ‘A Fourth Way’. Her proposal to develop an alternative economic measure to GDP on this basis was published as a finalist in the 2017 Global Indigo Prize for Economics and is the subject of her two TEDx talks (TEDxBrum in 2017 and TEDxUoChester in 2018). The concept is further extended in her first book, ‘Panonomics’, which was published on global release with Palgrave Macmillan in 2021.

Clare’s professional experience includes a one-year tenure as Strategic Lead for Place and Culture in the North of England, leading a high-level national partnership (with commissioning partners including the NP11, Arts Council England, the National Lottery Heritage Fund and the Environment Agency) in the co-production of a pan-Northern strategy for Place (2021/2), three years with the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), where she co-led its national ‘Heritage, Identity and Place’ research portfolio (2014-7) and led its international ‘Citizens and Inclusive Growth’ programme (2017), several consultancy and in-house roles across the arts, including with Liverpool’s FACT new media and digital arts centre, Heart of Glass, St Helens, the ACE NPO for socially engaged art, and CREATE, Ireland’s national agency for collaborative arts. She has also held various roles in economic development and public policy, including as Head of Innovation and Special Projects for the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (2012-14).