My background is in interdisciplinary feminist studies. I have worked at the universities of Sussex, Plymouth, Keele and UEA before coming to CRESC in 2005.

I am currently working on a number of projects:

The Changing Nature of Feminism 

I have recently submitted this book manuscript to University of British Columbia Press. The book is based on ethnographic research, including oral history interviews with women environmental activists involving in campaigning against clear-cut logging of temperate rainforest in Clayoquot Sound, on the West Coast of Canada. As well as addressing what it might mean to describe the Clayoquot Peace Camp of 1993 as ‘ecofeminist’, the book specifically addresses the disavowal of ecofeminism because of its purported ‘essentialism’. The book examines how essentialism figures in the narration of the recent feminist past, addressing the challenges of conducting research and writing about feminist activism at a time when others have proclaimed the end of feminism. In doing so the book asks how we might tell more hopeful stories of feminism.

Changing Mobilities

I am Co-I on an EPSRC funded SUE3 project: Step-Change (Sustainable Transport Evidence and modelling Paradigms: Cohort Household Analysis to support New Goals in Engineering design). I lead strand 3 of the project on 'intergrating diverse data sources'. See http://www.changing-mobilities.org.uk/ for further details.

Archiving and Reusing Qualitative Data

This programme of research relates to key CRESC concerns – the challenging of epochalist accounts of sociocultural change through theoretically informed empirical research; research which not only relies on the generation of new data, but which examines the possibilities afforded by existing data sources. These issues dovetail with an increasing interest across the social sciences in reusing qualitative data. Yet despite the increasing turn to reuse, it has proved a controversial practice with continuing concerns about methodological pitfalls and clashes over its epistemological status.

In September 2005 we held a workshop on ‘Reusing Qualitative Data’

We followed this up with a series of seminars and a conference on ‘Archiving and Reusing Qualitative Data’, which was funded by the National Centre for Research Methods (www.ncrm.ac.uk). The series aimed to develop approaches to archiving and reusing qualitative data which both significantly develop recent debates in the social sciences and also contribute to a recent rethinking of the archive in history, oral history, cultural studies.

For a full description of the series as well as conference papers see here: http://www.restore.ac.uk/archiving_qualitative_data/projects/archive_series/index.shtml

For further research see under the projects tab.

I am keen to supervise PhD students whose research interests relate to these areas:

• ecofeminist and feminist theory, history, politics, methodology;
• the politics of nature
• qualitative methods and methodology: research using and/or examining methodologies including oral history, narrative interviewing and narrative analysis, using archives and (re)using qualitative data;