Rate My Professor Katherine Brickell

Professor Katherine Brickell is Professor of Urban Studies in the Department of Geography and Associate Dean (Impact & Innovation) for the Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy at King’s College London. Her feminist-oriented research and scholarship on home and domestic life crosscuts urban, social, political, and legal geography. She has nine years of research experience examining family homelessness, debt, and life in Temporary Accommodation for domestic abuse survivors and children in urban centres of England, including London and Greater Manchester, and Ireland, including Dublin. Collaborative research with Mel Nowicki and Shared Health Foundation has resulted in the UK government's National Plan to End Homelessness (2025) committing to updates in statutory guidance on social housing allocations to address barriers faced by domestic abuse survivors with debt. Additionally, research with Rosalie Warnock explores experiences of neurodivergent children and families in Temporary Accommodation, leading to collaboration with the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Households in Temporary Accommodation, Shared Health Foundation, and Autistica for the first national call for evidence. Their report, 'It's Like Torture': Life in Temporary Accommodation for Neurodivergent Children and their Families, was published in January 2026.

Katherine Brickell has two decades of research expertise in Cambodia and is co-editor of The Handbook of Contemporary Cambodia (2020). Her books include Debt Trap Nation: Family Homelessness in a Failing State (2025, co-authored with Mel Nowicki), Home SOS: Gender, Violence and Survival in Crisis Ordinary Cambodia (2020, winner of the Royal Geographical Society’s Social and Cultural Geography Research Group Prize in 2022), The Handbook of Displacement (2020), Geographies of Forced Eviction (2017), and Translocal Geographies (2011). She led the 'Blood Bricks' project, awarded Times Higher Education ‘Research Project of the Year: Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences’ (2020). Awards include the Gill Memorial Award from the Royal Geographical Society (2014), Philip Leverhulme Prize (2016), and British Academy mid-career fellowship (2023). She is Editor of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (2023 ongoing) and was Editor of Gender, Place and Culture (2017-2023). As co-researcher, she contributed to the Royal Geographical Society’s scoping report ‘Geographers and Legal Impact’ (2022).