Steyn is an interdisciplinary researcher and visual ethnographer working at the intersection of critical development studies, socio-technical transitions, and justice in the Global South. His research examines how (urban) communities experience, negotiate, and contest processes of transition, particularly in relation to marginality, energy access, food security, and everyday infrastructures.
Grounded in visual and sensory ethnography, his work uses documentary photography, film, and long-term field engagement as research methods for understanding lived experience beyond conventional development narratives. Rather than treating transition as a linear process of technological or economic progress, his research draws on critical development theory, decolonial critique, and transition thinking to ask whose futures are being imagined, whose knowledge counts, and who bears the costs of change.
Through longitudinal, mixed-methods inquiry, Steyn explores how justice can be understood from situated, local, and relational perspectives. His work is especially concerned with contexts marked by inequality, precarity, and contested development. By combining academic analysis with documentary practice, he seeks to contribute to more grounded accounts of socio-technical change and to advocate for just futures shaped by local ontologies, social equity, and lived realities.
At Loughborough University, Steyn’s current research and teaching are connected to the Centre for Sustainable Transitions: Energy, Environment and Resilience (STEER). He is also affiliated with the Expertise Centre for Humanitarian Communication as a board member and works with Lund University in Sweden. Alongside his academic work, he is co-founder and director of the Last Supper Project Foundation in Ghana, and Founder and director of a Better Future Today, through which he provides impact advisory services.