Katherine Brickell

• Home (un)-making, domestic abuse and displacement
• Debt-financed social reproduction
• Feminist legal geography and practice

Further information

Katherine’s feminist-oriented research and scholarship on home and domestic life crosscuts urban, social, political, and legal geography. Her books include Debt Trap Nation: Family Homelessness in a Failing State (2025), Home SOS: Gender, Violence and Survival in Crisis Ordinary Cambodia (2020), The Handbook of Displacement (2020), Geographies of Forced Eviction (2017), and Translocal Geographies (2011).

Katherine has nine years of research experience examining the pressing issues of family homelessness and life in Temporary Accommodation for domestic abuse survivors and children in urban centres of England (London, Greater Manchester) and Ireland (Dublin). Together with Mel Nowicki, their debt-focused work on these issues has been supported by the Urban Studies Foundation, British Academy, Wates Family Enterprise Trust, Impact on Urban Health, and People’s Health Trust. The research has led to the government's National Plan to End Homelessness (2025) committing to the update of statutory guidance on social housing allocations which 'address the barriers faced by survivors of domestic abuse with debt when applying for social housing, highlighted by recent research'. See https://www.debt-trap-nation.org for more information.

Katherine is additionally undertaking research with Rosalie Warnock exploring the experiences of neurodivergent children and their families living in Temporary Accommodation in the UK. As part of the Sensory Lives study supported by the Leverhulme Trust, they have collaborated with the APPG HTA, Shared Health Foundation and Autistica to lead the first ever national call for evidence on this topic. The report will be released on 27 January 2026.

Katherine also has two decades of research expertise in Cambodia, and is the co-editor of The Handbook of Contemporary Cambodia (2020). She is committed to collaborative and impactful research and is co-researcher of the scoping report ‘Geographers and Legal Impact’ (Royal Geographical Society, 2022). Katherine is Editor of the flagship disciplinary journal Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (2023 ongoing) and was previously Editor of Gender, Place and Culture (2017-2023).

In recognition of research excellence, Katherine was conferred the Gill Memorial Award by the Royal Geographical Society (2014) and the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2016). The Times Higher Education (2020) ‘Research Project of the Year: Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences’ was awarded to the ‘Blood Bricks’ project she led. Katherine’s monograph Home SOS won the Royal Geographical Society’s Social and Cultural Geography Research Group Prize (2022).