Research Fellow, Department of Geography, University of Durham

Lizzie's research draws from approaches to culture, economy and politics in human geography to develop geographies of urban life and liveliness. Through ethnographies of British cities, she is interested in how cities work, in how they perform as shared space, and explores this through a focus on:

(i) Work and representation: relationships between urban life and work are spatially rendered. Flexibility and insecurity around work manifests in the changing geographies of working practices and worker identities, notably through digital technologies. Lizzie is examining the political and economic implications of how people represent and are represented through working space.

(ii) Senses of sharing: shared space is produced through ambivalent senses. Networking technologies can produce intimacies through movements that involve (dis)connections and (dis)orientations, challenging typologies of public and private, past and present, centre and margin. Lizzie is exploring how these evolving aesthetics of shared space provide opportunities for redistributions, concentrations and diffusions of resources that sustain urban life.

(iii) Embodiment and urban technologies: as tools for communication, capture and attachment, technologies can contribute to diverse embodied experiences of the urban environment. Combining imaginations of the machinic city and mechanical accounts of embodiment, Lizzie is interested in how reconfigurations of urban nature result in complex experiences of human agency, autonomy and skill.

Her research therefore contributes to key socio-economic debates in the UK and beyond: relationships between work and the distribution of income in society; the possibilities of sharing practices for resource usage; and the implications of digital technologies for social life.

After completing her PhD at Durham University in 2014, Lizzie worked as a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Cambridge where her research was funded by an RGS-IBG Small Research Grant and a Cambridge Humanities Research Grant. Moving back to Durham in 2016, her research is supported by the award of a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship.