My research interests include:

- the waiting body
- affect, feelings and emotion
- disorientation
- the sensory (in particular olfactory stimuli)
- matter and materiality
- embodied research methods. 

I am an interdisciplinary artist, designer and human geography researcher, currently Assistant Professor at Northumbria University. I graduated with a Fine Art BA (hons) from Camberwell School of Art in 1992 and have exhibited since as an installation artist in the UK and internationally.

I retrained in Design for Print in 1997 and practiced as a graphic designer for nine years, developing design for web skills as that new technology emerged and expanded. From 2006, I worked for eight years at Cardiff Metropolitan University as part of the Design Wales strand of PDR an international design research centre. During that time I became an advisor about the design sector for the Welsh Government, sector skills councils, and organisations such as the UK Design Council. This role included two terms as chair of the UK Design Alliance. In 2010 I gained an MA in Design by Practice at University of Wales Newport.

In 2018 I was enabled to pursue a long-term interest in Human Geography theory by gaining an ESRC scholarship to study for a PhD at Durham University which I completed in 2023. I am drawing on my Human Geography knowledge and social research methods experience in my teaching at Northumbria University.

With a past work history in design research, in 2024 I completed a ESRC funded PhD in Human Geography from Durham University. I am a cultural geography researcher interested in the waiting body, disorientation, non-work life, and the geohumanities. Conceptually I am drawn to the affective and sensorial dimensions of situations.

The Waiting Body

I understand the waiting body as a microcosm of the conditions that surround it, making waiting a fertile situation to explore human experience with and within environments. I am particularly interested in the emotional and sensory affects and space-times of waiting across a range of social and cultural contexts. I have written about the experiences of waiting in COVID-19 shopping queues, through which I explored feelings of suspension. My PhD study explored the experiences of workers furloughed through the Coronavirus Job Retention scheme during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. Through conducting the study I found that being detached from the orientation afforded by work life and its rhythms, had made life disorientating for those who waited through furlough. My PhD thesis conceptualised disorientation as having a plurality of forms. In 2022 I spent two days conducting fieldwork in Queen Elizabeth II’s lying in state queue. Waiting in that queue surfaced temporal and corporeal disorientations and certain inequalities.

Disorientation

An off shoot of my exploration of waiting, is an interest in notions of disorientation. My PhD study explored waiting through furlough as a disorientating experience and I have started to publish journal articles based on that study. I have ambition to write a monograph based on the data from my PhD study, which would explore the different forms of disorientation that emerged from the study. This is towards connecting the disorientations of furlough with other forms of paid non-work life such as sick leave, maternity leave and unretirement. At the RGS-IBG annual conference in 2024, I co-organised and chaired (with Dr. Robin Finlay) two panel sessions exploring Contemporary Forms of Disorientation, we have ambition to extend this work into an edited volume.

Geohumanities

These themes are interconnected through a relational research approach which methodologically involves interview, participant observation, and autoethnography. I have an interest in different forms of writing up research and in my own work I am continually developing a narrative approach towards representing participant’s experiences.

During a co-research project with Dr. Julian Brigstocke, ‘Harena’, we explored the process of sand dispossession. To do this we employed an embodied research approach devised to be in empathy with the experiences of grains of sand. The project, funded by Leverhulme Trust through Royal Holloway University’s Centre for Geohumanities, involved embodied methods such as floating in flotation tanks, flying through indoor skydiving, listening in an anechoic chamber and bodily resonances through beatboxing.