Katie Walsh

I am a social/cultural/feminist geographer researching home. I am especially intrigued by the everyday embodied and sensory experience of domestic space in relation to intimacy and personal life, housing inequalities, ageing and care.

My contributions to academic scholarship have been primarily in three areas:

1) Intimacy and personal life

My ethnographic monograph - Transnational geographies of the heart: intimate subjectivities in a globalising city (2018, RGS-IBG Book Series) - examines the geographies of intimacy and personal life in the context of transnationalism in Dubai. It explores how people's experiences and understandings of community, friendship, couple, and family relationships are reconfigured by international relocation and how this shapes the textures of belonging in transnational urban spaces.

I am currently exploring sleep practices and the everynight geographies of personal life using the Mass Observation Project directives at The Keep, Brighton. Based on an analysis of the 'Your Bedroom' (Spring, 2017) directive, I have produced an article on sleep and bedroom soundscapes published in Social and Cultural Geography.

2. Home and belonging

I have been engaged with critical research and teaching on home for over two decades and recently had the privilege to co-edit The Routledge Handbook of Home with Elaine Stratford (2025). This global, critical, and interdisciplinary handbook spans 46 chapters across four parts ("Theorising Home," "Housing and Home," "Domesticities and Everyday Life," and "Global Challenges and Home Futures"). Authors examine housing, displacement, domesticity, climate, care and the intimate labours, subjectivities, and practices of home. Across diverse contexts and with varied perspectives, including feminist, queer, and decolonial appraches, the handbook chapters challenge romanticised ideals and illuminate home’s inequalities, exclusions, and possibilities. Designed for a broad audience, this handbook supports undergraduate learning, graduate teaching, and advanced research. It equips scholars, educators, activists, policymakers, and practitioners with essential insights and resources to engage with home as a site of power, identity, and struggle in a rapidly changing world.

Much of my work on home, belonging, and homemaking has been conducted with British migrants. This has consisted of three projects: My doctoral ethnography on British migrant homemaking in Dubai; a comparative study of British migrant belonging across the rapidly urbanising GCC cities funded by an RGS-IBG Small Research Grant, and a project with British migrant returnees in later life. I have used varied qualitative methods in this research, including participant observation, in-depth and repeat interviewing, photo-elicitation and home tour methodologies focused on materialities.

Outputs from this research on home/belonging/ageing/migration are listed on my publications page, including the coedited (2016, with Lena Nare) Transnational Migration and Home in Older Age.

3. Privileged migration

Building on my research with British migrants, I have also published several important interventions in debates on privileged migration, including an edited collection conceptualising British Migration (2019, coedited with Pauline Leonard) and the 2010 Special Issue of Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, coedited with Anne-Meike Fechter, which was a landmark publication in its adoption of a postcolonial approach to mobile professionals. These editing projects built on understanding developed in my critical empirical work on Britishness, 'expatriate' subjectivities, and whiteness in Dubai, the wider GCC, and upon return.

Within the field of Migration Studies, my continued active engagement includes regular reviewing and doctoral supervision of research relating to home, personal relationships, embodiment, emotion, materialities, and belonging.