Research interests
- The complex interrelationships between people’s working lives and private lives
- Geographies of self-employment, micro-enterprise and entrepreneurship
- Microspaces of economic activities and enterprises in homes and beyond homes including in coworking spaces and other people’s homes
- Daily mobilities, residential migration and interconnections with work, employment and gender relations
- Neighbourhoods and housing in relation to how they shape people’s employment decisions, business start-ups and business practices
- Longitudinal research and modelling change over time particularly with respect to people’s employment careers
Research Projects
ESRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) : Pathways to Inclusive Entrepreneurship and Business Creation in Europe
This grant was awarded to ‘accelerate’ impact of the ERC WORKANDHOME project over a duration of 12 months in 2017. Specifically, we are working with the Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs and Local Development (LEED) in the OECD, Paris, to produce a policy brief ‘Policies for Home-based Businesses’ and organising an event for discussing policies of fostering home-based business creation and growth with key policy stakeholders across the OECD member states.
Reshaping society and space: home-based self-employment and businesses (WORKANDHOME)
WORKANDHOME is an international research project funded by the European Research Council through a Starting Grant to Dr Darja Reuschke, 2015-2020. WORKANDHOME investigates the intersection of the economic and the social, and production and reproduction, through the lens of self-employed workers who mainly use their home as workplace.
Digital Workplace for Innovation and Participation (DigiWIP)
Online marketplaces have dramatically increased in importance with the rise of platforms such as Freelance.com and Upwork. Existing research points at the risk of reproducing social inequality and exploitation of ‘traditional’ labour markets on those platforms. This project adds to existing knowledge of online platforms and crowd work through investigating links with innovation and collaboration. The key objective is to reveal new ways of working and collaborating between enterprises and individuals, to encourage innovation and participation building towards a new vision for ‘Factories of the Future’.
Urban Studies Foundation Seminar Series: Spatial Reconfigurations of Work in Cities
Work is increasingly organized outside employer-employee systems, people hold multiple jobs and an increasingly mobile workforce works in multiple places including own homes, other people’s homes, co-working spaces, warehouses, virtual spaces, public spaces and ‘third-spaces’. This seminar series brings together cutting-edge interdisciplinary research on the changing geographies of workplaces in cities.
Microbusiness Online Research Hub
This project was developed in partnership with the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the Centre for Enterprise and Economic Development Research (CEEDR) at the Middlesex University. The online portal provides all information and data-sources concerning micro-enterprises including those that are home-based.
ESRC Seminar Series ‘Entrepreneurship in Homes and Neighbourhoods’
Housing equity and the mortgage crisis, Regional Studies Association
Research group
Economy, Society and Governance
Dr Darja ReuschkeBuilding 44 University of Southampton University Road Southampton SO17 1BJ
Room Number: 44/2060
