Ms Catriona Parpworth BA MA MPhil

PhD student

Social and feminist geographer interested in women’s everyday lives in times of socio-economic change.

Biography

Career

• 2020-present PhD in Geography, Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge: Between Continuity and Change: Women’s Everyday Lives within and beyond the ‘Lost Decade’, ESRC Funded.
• 2019-2020 MPhil in Geographical Research, Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, ESRC funded.
• 2018-2019 MA in Risk (Security and Politics), Van Mildert College, Durham University: ‘See it. Say it. Sorted.’: The role of Public Vigilance Campaigns in Communicating Risk and Enacting Responsibilisation.
• 2015-2018 BA in Geography, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge. Part II Dissertation: Living the ‘Multicultural Model’?: Perceptions, Experiences and Practices of Multiculturalism in Leicester.

Qualifications

• MPhil in Geographical Research, University of Cambridge
• MA in Risk (Security and Politics), Durham University (Distinction)
• BA in Geography, University of Cambridge (Double First Class)

Awards

• ESRC DTP 1+3 Studentship (2019-2023)
• William Vaughan Lewis Dissertation Prize, Department of Geography (2018)
• Bedford Travel Grant, Department of Geography (2017)
• Rosemary Murray Scholarship, Murray Edwards College (2016, 2017, 2018)

Research

Interested in what Polly Toynbee and David Walker (2020) have termed the ‘lost decade’, my PhD research broadly examines women’s lives within the context of marked socio-economic upheaval. Against the backdrop of a decade of austerity politics, a decline in real wages, rising living costs, increasing precarity/in-work poverty, worsening health, falling life expectancy, soaring foodbank usage and ever-widening inequalities, I explore how women have differentially lived, felt and negotiated these shifts at the scale of the everyday. Methodologically, my work is informed by feminist geographical scholarship and takes a participatory and collaborative approach which engages with a mixture of traditional and innovative ethnographical techniques. By foregrounding the voices and experiences of those that have often been marginalised within much of the existing literature and policy discourse, I seek to build upon a nascent field of research centred upon ‘everyday austerity’.

Teaching

• Supervisor, Part 1B Citizenship, Cities and Civil Society (LT 2021)
• Demonstrator, Geographical Skills and Methods: Coursework (LT/ET 2021)

External activities

• Member, The Cambridge Network for Participatory and Collaborative Research Methods (2020-present)
• Member, Infrastructural Geographies research group (2019-present)
• Member, Cambridge University Geographical Society (2015-present)