Kathleen Stokes

Kathleen Stokes is an urban political geographer whose research investigates how the governance of urban infrastructures and spaces shape individual and collective life and livelihoods. She is committed to undertaking relational comparative research around urban spaces and infrastructures to understand and contest unevenness, oppressions, and exclusions in contemporary settler-and post-colonial cities. Kathleen holds a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Manchester, which considered infrastructural labor and citizenship by studying the material and discursive implications of state-led community waste initiatives in South African cities.

Kathleen is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She recently completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship on Rethinking Urban Vacancy, an Irish Research Council-funded project which investigated urban vacancy in Dublin amidst post-crash Ireland’s housing crisis and property bubble. By investigating underlying factors contributing to urban vacancy and questioning how urban vacancy is identified, categorized, and measured, this research looked to complement existing literature on housing inequality, financialization, rights and responses. Having previously worked in policy and research in the charity and public sectors, Kathleen is committed to pursuing research that engages with a variety of audiences and collaboratively produces engaging outputs – including Laboring Urban Infrastructures, a collaboratively-written digital magazine which considers the role of labor in urban infrastructural research.