Staff profile

I am a PhD researcher in Human Geography at Durham University. My research lies at the intersection of cultural and rural geography, gender and feminist geography, tourism, migration and mobility, and social and spatial inequality. I am particularly interested in how places come to be understood and represented through everyday practices and mobility, especially in a gendered perspective.

My doctoral research asks how place is storied through gendered place-making. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Dali, Southwest China, and more than one hundred interviews, I examine how particular people and labour become visible representations of local culture and ways of life. More specifically, I ask who stories place and how; why particular gendered people, practices and situations come to shape what counts as place; and how mobility reconfigures these relations and re-stories place over time.

Rather than treating gender simply as a comparison between men’s and women’s participation, I understand gendered place-making as a relational process in which people occupy different, situated positions. This makes gendered hierarchy not a fixed ranking, but a situated form of social ordering, in which particular people, practices and narratives become more or less able to stand for the place.

My academic background is interdisciplinary. I was originally trained in landscape architecture and spatial planning, with earlier research on rural settlements, cultural landscapes and human–environment relations using spatial and quantitative approaches. This work gradually led me towards questions about the social relations and inequalities through which rural places are produced and transformed. My current research therefore primarily draws on ethnographic and qualitative methods.

My earlier research and professional experience also included work on heritage conservation and rural heritage, including an internship at the Palace Museum in Beijing. These experiences continue to inform my interest in how cultural meanings are produced, represented and negotiated, while my current work places these questions within the broader study of gendered place-making and rural transformation.

My doctoral research is supervised by Michael Crang and Penelope Anthias. I welcome opportunities to connect with researchers working on related questions of place, gender, rural transformation, tourism, migration and mobility.

• Cultural and rural geographies
• Place-making and place narratives
• Gender and feminist geographies
• Tourism, migration and mobility
• Chronopolitics and social inequalities
• Critical heritage studies
• Ethnography and qualitative methods
• China, particularly Southwest China