My research is characterised by transdisciplinary working to address important societal and ecological challenges, exploring critical design pedagogies, artistic spatial practices, and urban commoning. I understand the eco-social both as an area of investigation and methodological approach, that is collaborative, exploratory, rigorous, and situated, with a strong feminist ethical underpinning.

Over the past 15 years, I have worked with intercultural competence to develop infrastructures, relationships and pedagogical tools that operate at the highest levels, to enable academics to come together with civic, cultural and community actors and institutions both locally and globally, to have impact that matters.

My recent publications explore urban commoning in relation to micropolitics, economies, cultures and learning; the spatialities of repair produced by networks of Little Mesters and engaged architectural pedagogies. I am a director of architectural collective Studio Polpo, who designed a room ‘The High Street of Exchanges’ at the 2021 British Pavilion ‘The Garden of Privatised Delights’.

I am a Senior Lecturer in Architecture and have taught primarily at postgraduate level for 17 years. I lead the pan-European Life-centering Cultural HEritage Network (LICHEN), which mobilises innovative art and design approaches, and transdisciplinary participatory methods, to support communities to reconnect with nature through care for their cultural landscape and local economies.

I have a PhD in Architecture from The University of Sheffield (Full Faculty Scholarship) ‘Tools to Create Agency at Portland Works, the Craft of Commoning’ completed in 2016. This was activist design-research into how, in the context of gentrification and loss of affordable space for small-scale industry and making in UK cities, communities can come together to safeguard their spaces in ways that are just, equitable and resilient.

In exploring the case of Portland Works, I proposed that through the co-design of a number of tools, social, political, democratic and pedagogical agencies can be achieved that can support common ownership, and the sharing and development of such resources. I initiated the campaign to save the birthplace of stainless steel from speculative redevelopment, which resulted in the purchase by over 500 shareholders, to retain it as a place of making. As an active member of group from 2009, I helped to lead the process of setting up an Industrial and Provident Society, leading the process of writing the business plan and forming the governance structure, and in the subsequent development for community benefit. I developed a number of business skills during this period, including around how successful organisations operate.

I was the Postdoctoral Research Associate on the AHRC Connected Communities large grant project, ‘Stories of Change’, which investigated energy and industry, past, present and future, working across a number of factory sites in the Don and Derwent Valleys. Using scenario making and storytelling this project sought to engage communities to support agency in relation to energy transitions. I trained as an architect in the UK at the Mackintosh School of Architecture (B.Arch) and Sheffield School of Architecture (M.Arch hons), and I have worked in architectural practice for 20 years in Sheffield and London. I am a director of social enterprise architectural collective, Studio Polpo since 2008.

I am a fellow of the Future Architecture Platform (2021), for the collaborative project, Sonic Acts of Noticing, a prototype of a pedagogical tool to explore listening as critical spatial practice. This project explores how such practice might alter subjectivities and produce space in ways that emphasise care, and shared learning as crucial for collaborative survival.