I am a feminist urban geographer and CMHC-SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow working in the School of Public Health and Social Policy at the University of Victoria. I received my Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Washington in 2023 and my M.A. in Geography from Simon Fraser University in 2018. My research interests are at the intersections of care geographies, housing, and urban politics, centred on renters’ experiences of housing crises. My current work examines the role of care in responses to urban housing crises, focused on Vancouver, B.C. and Seattle, W.A.

At the University of Victoria, I am supported by the CMHC-SSHRC Housing Research Training Award. I am exploring the impact of housing crises on housing co-op residents’ experiences of housing and care. I work with Dr. Jeff Masuda in the School of Public Health and Social Policy. 

I hold a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Washington and Dr. Sarah Elwood supervised my dissertation. My dissertation, titled Caring in Crises: Spatializing Infrastructures of Care through Tenant Protections, focuses on the ways that local state care infrastructure, such as landlord-tenant laws, shapes tenants’ experiences of housing crises in Vancouver, BC and Seattle, WA. This work was supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for which I am very grateful.

In 2018, I completed my Master of Arts in Geography at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, under the supervision of Dr. Eugene McCann. My thesis is titled, ‘It’s yours’: Tenant experiences of home and care in women’s non-profit housing. It uses a feminist geographical framework to explore relationships between the co-production of home and care work in women’s housing, with a focus on tenants’ experiences.

I am passionate about cities, housing, and care. I approach these issues from a intersectional, feminist perspective informed by work on anti-racism and decolonization.

I acknowledge that my research occurs on unceded Coast Salish land, on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations (Vancouver) and Duwamish, Muckleshoot, Suquamish, and Tulalip territories  (Seattle). It is important to do so because in recognizing the land we are on, we acknowledge that the land was stolen from these First Nations by settler colonizers, and as such these remain Indigenous lands.

Photo credit: Karl Varga