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 geographer interested in the waiting body, disorientation, non-work life, and the geohumanities. Conceptually I am drawn to the affective and sensorial dimensions of situations.

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.

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.

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.