Professor Katherine Brickell joined the Department of Geography as Professor of Urban Studies in January 2023 and is the research lead of Urban Futures. She was previously Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. Katherine’s feminist-oriented research on precarious home and working lives crosscuts urban, social, political, development, and legal geography. Her books, which include Home SOS: Gender, Violence and Survival in Crisis Ordinary Cambodia (2020), The Handbook of Displacement (2020), Geographies of Forced Eviction (2017), and Translocal Geographies (2011) reflect this expertise.

She has two decades of research expertise in Cambodia, and is the co-editor of The Handbook of Contemporary Cambodia (2020). Her research specifically on housing also encompasses urban centres of England (London, Greater Manchester) and Ireland (Dublin). Katherine’s current research examines the pressing issues of debt, family homelessness, and temporary accommodation in England. Supported by the Urban Studies Foundation and The British Academy, the research report ‘The Debt Trap’ (with Dr Mel Nowicki) was launched at the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Households in Temporary Accommodation in October 2023.

She is particularly committed to collaborative and engaged research and is co-researcher of the scoping report ‘Geographers and Legal Impact’ (Royal Geographical Society, 2022). Katherine is Editor of the flagship journal Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (2023 ongoing) and was previously Editor of Gender, Place and Culture (2017-2023).

In recognition of research excellence, she was conferred the Gill Memorial Award by the Royal Geographical Society (2014) and the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2016). The Times Higher Education (2020) ‘Research Project of the Year: Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences’ was awarded to the ‘Blood Bricks’ project she led. Katherine’s monograph Home SOS won the Royal Geographical Society’s Social and Cultural Geography Research Group Prize (2022).

Research

• Home (un)-making, violence and displacement
• Labour and climate precarity across the rural-urban divide
• Debt-financed social reproduction
• Feminist legal geography and practice

Katherine has led multiple funded grants on these topics with interdisciplinary teams and external partners:

• (2023-2024, The British Academy) A Feminist Geography of Debt and Housing Precarity
• (2022-2023, Urban Studies Foundation) Navigating Debt-Trap Urbanism in Pandemic Times: Family Homelessness and Temporary Accommodation in Greater Manchester
• (2020-2022, UKRI) Social Protection and the Gendered Impacts of COVID-19 in Cambodia: Longitudinal Research to ‘Build Back Better’ in the Global Garment Industry. www.refashionstudy.org
• (2019-2022, UKRI) Depleted by Debt? Focusing a Gendered Lens on Climate Resilience, Credit, and Nutrition in Translocal Cambodia and South India. https://www.debt-climate-health.org
• (2017-2019, UKRI) Blood Bricks: Examining the Climate Change-Modern Slavery Nexus in the Cambodian Construction Industry. www.projectbloodbricks.org
• (2012-2015, UKRI) Lay and Institutional Knowledges of Domestic Violence Law: Towards Active Citizenship in Rural and Urban Cambodia.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• 6SSG3072 The Right to the City 

Postgraduate

• 7SSG5209 The Right to the City

PhD supervision

Katherine is interested in supervising postgraduate research at doctoral level and is happy to discuss research topics and funding avenues with prospective students. She is especially interested in the following areas:

• Feminist geopolitics and feminist political economy
• Gender-based violence
• Urban displacement and eviction
• Geographies of home and homelessness
• Labour geographies
• Debt and over-indebtedness
• Climate precarity and everyday life
• Legal geography and practice
• Development in Southeast Asia

Further details

See Katherine's research profile