Katherine Brickell

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

Further information

Katherine’s feminist-oriented research on precarious home and working lives crosscuts urban, social, political, development, and legal geography. Her books reflect this expertise, including: 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).

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).