My research agenda is focused on the following research questions: How does employment insecurity - such as unemployment, gig work, non-standard work - shape gendered inequalities at home and in paid work? How do professionals conceptualise their professional pathways given an economic context where layoffs are built into organisational logics? Central to this agenda is my book manuscript, Crunch Time: How Married Couples Confront Unemployment, published by the University of California Press (2020), which examines involuntary unemployment.

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I am currently working on three key lines of research to further my research agenda:

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1) DAPEW: A collaborative, interdisciplinary and multi-method project on the links between diversity and productivity in the UK titled "Diversity and Productivity: From Education to Work." Our team has been awarded a £2 million grant from the ESRC from 2022-2025. I am especially focused on how talk of employment insecurity shapes feelings of productivity. 

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2) Redundancies in Journalism: This project focuses on how journalists experiencing redundancies navigate the insecure and unstable economic terrain of their profession, and how this shapes their professional goals. Journalism is an “extreme” case that renders visible key employment processes for three reasons. First, journalism is at the vanguard of employment trends which shift risk onto workers and that are likely to intensify and percolate to other sectors. Second, journalism is an empirically important sector because at its best, a strong journalism sector is a public good and functions as a check for democracy. The consequences of journalists’ careers affect all of us with an interest in high-quality, balanced news. Third, studying redundancies in journalism can help advance our understandings of the individual-level impacts of redundancies.

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3) The Buffering Role of Career Coaches:

Labour market intermediaries such as career coaches play a key role in shaping  cultural frames for how unemployment – and the unemployed – are understood. Unemployment can be framed as a business decision, a personal decision, an individual problem of attitude, or an individual problem of technical skills, amongst just some framings. Drawing on qualitative data from career coaches working in the U.K., including interviews and document analysis, I argue that career coaches are acutely aware of the structural conditions that produce precarious employment. They view the contemporary workplace as a harsh space that dehumanizes individuals. Career coaches seek to provide a space to “see” workers who often feel invisible, overlooked, and poorly treated. Career coaches also see their role as equipping workers to feel as though they are exercising individual agency within this context of economic insecurity. I connect research on career coaches with the recent concept of connective labour, to develop an argument illuminating how career coaches function as buffers in a precarious employment landscape rife with insecurity, rather than legitimating or amplifying it.