I have a longstanding interest in how understandings of the past are projected into imagined futures. After nearly a decade working as an Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Consultant in Victoria, Australia, I completed a PhD in Socio-cultural Anthropology that explored the use of Aboriginality in New Age and neo-pagan projects of self-making and in their visions of a new kind of post-colonial nation. Since coming to Manchester, and working with the Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life, I have undertaken research into the ways in which ‘family traditions’ in the English northwest are imagined, deployed and contested.

Now at CRESC, I am currently working on the Step-Change project, a large-scale qualitative panel study designed to understand the mix of factors underlying transport practices and associated social and behaviour changes. We are following households in Leeds and Manchester over four years with the aim of putting participant mobility biographies into a historical context and to explore the ways in which travel choices are influenced by the built environment, by social institutions and by life events.