Kim England
Research Interests
I am an urban social and feminist geographer
interested in the interconnections between inequalities, labor markets,
and care work in North America. My research triangulates between power, space and
social difference, mapping the ways in which social identities, both shape and
become shaped by consequential geographies of power. In particular my research takes
account of discourses and practices of gender, but in various projects I also
address class, race/ethnicity, (dis)ability, national
identities and sexualities. Generally my
research focuses on four themes: (1) economic and social restructuring, local
labor markets and workplaces, especially in terms of gender and femininities
(e.g. office work, child care arrangements, and home health care work); (2)
households, paid care work and ‘the home’, especially in terms feminist
theories of ‘the state’, social policy formation and welfare systems; (3) the
gendering of urban spaces, places and landscapes; and (4) the interconnections
between critical theories, epistemologies and research methods, including the
politics and ethics of doing research.
My recent and
ongoing projects include:
I have a long-standing interest in the shifting
geographies of care work. I have written
a series of papers addressing the emergence of a neoliberal agenda for home care policy
and its impact on the paid home care work experience. Primarily written with Isabel Dyck
(Geography, University of London, Queen Mary), our work draws from an
interdisciplinary project on the home as a site
of long-term care in urban and rural locations across Ontario. We investigate home health care from the
perspective of the paid home care workers – nurses, attendants, and personal
support workers, as well as the clients and their family caregivers. Isabel and I have framed our papers around
the home, risk
and care ethics, the body (body work), and migration.
In earlier projects I have explored parents’ child care strategies and the work experiences of domestic
workers/nannies. I have an ongoing
interest in the shifting contours of welfare and care
and the meaning
of home associated with neo-liberal social policy reforms. This work raises questions about equality,
social justice and the
relationships between the state, citizenship, and collective versus individual
responsibilities.
More recently I have focused on the migration of
Registered Nurses in the US and the UK
and I am currently looking at ways in which care work is stratified by intersectionality, especially race/ethnicity/immigration
status, gender and education.
Previous projects:
These include my Neoliberalization:
States, Networks, Peoples (2007) edited with Kevin Ward
(Geography, University of Manchester), published in the International
Antipode/Blackwell Book Series. The book
engages with theoretical concerns and empirical interrogations of the
multi-dimensional and multi-scalar process of neo-liberalization through a
series of spatially and substantively diverse case studies written by scholars
from across the social sciences. We
deliberately move away from the ‘ideological heartland’ of neoliberalism - the
UK and the US - to address peripheries within the Global north, as well
as ‘centers’ in the Global south. We aim
to underscore the interconnections and uneven development of
neoliberalism.
In the past I have also investigating social identities
and the gendered urban geographies of office work in North American cities. This work explores the gendered employment, home-work linkages and socio-economic in large cities, and
considers the social and cultural dimensions of workplace dynamics and the
organization of firms. One strand is
driven by questions of diversity, social justice and social policy aimed
at the workplace, and I have addressed gender, class, disabilities
and ethnicity in the context of employment equity in Canadian banks. Another strand involves a historical analysis
of the constructions of urban femininities in US and Canadian white-collar
workplaces in the context of social and technological change over the broad
sweep of the 20th Century. This work was in collaboration with Kate
Boyer (Geography, University of Southampton); we examined the
co-constitution of gender, work
and technology in the clerical workplace, and the feminization and the
shifting meanings of clerical work, especially in the finance and insurance
sector.
Last updated March 2013