About
I am a feminist cultural and social geographer. My research is concerned with the political life of emotions and affect, with a particular focus on intimate life, affect, power and ideology.
I am currently the Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Lead for the Faculty of Environmental & Life Sciences.
Prior to joining Southampton I was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Leeds.
Research
Research groups
Research interests
- Affect and emotion
- Feminist and queer theory
- Housing and home
- Loneliness and solitude
- Precarity
Current research
My work centres around the various ways in which normative ideals of the ‘good life’ can fail and falter— the gaps, fissures, the moments when we desire something more. My work is interested in how power is secured and maintained, but also, how power is challenged and transformed through the emergence of new forms of affective relationality. I am particularly interested in expanding the affective registers through which progressive social change can be imagined, thinking in particular about how feelings of disaffection and ambivalence can help us imagine other life-worlds.
My recent research has focused on political impasse, and the slow violence of austerity and housing insecurity. This work examines the ordinary affects of welfare reform, asking what happens when infrastructures fail and people find themselves violently cut off from the world.
My current research examines the feminist politics of loneliness, asking what a specifically feminist theorisation might bring to contemporary conceptualisations of loneliness. This work starts from the proposition that loneliness is not just personal but political. This strand of work emerges from my previous research on single-life, queer friendship, and the geographies of solitude.
Research projects
Completed projects
Publications
Supervision
Current PhD Students
External roles and responsibilities
Biography
Prizes
- Mike Clarke Teaching Award (2021)
- British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (2014)
- Association of the American Geographers (Sexuality and Space Specialty Group) (2011)
- Latitude Prize (2022)