Human Geography Research Cluster

Dr Yaw Adjei-Amoako is a Lecturer in Human Geography specialising in development geography. His research focuses on the intersections of disability, health and development in low- and middle-income countries, with a particular focus on how structural inequalities shape lived experiences and access to services. He also engages critically with questions of climate and energy justice in these contexts, examining their implications for equity, inclusion and sustainable development. 
Theoretically, Yaw’s work is grounded in critical geography and informed by decolonial and postcolonial scholarship. He draws on social justice and rights-based frameworks to interrogate power, inequality and inclusion in development contexts. 

Methodologically, his work is grounded in qualitative, participatory and action-oriented approaches that prioritise co-production, reflexivity and socially meaningful impact. Empirically, his work focuses on Sub-Saharan Africa, engaging with multiple scales of analysis through collaborations with state actors, international and local NGOs and community groups in both rural and urban settings.

Yaw’s doctoral research examined the experiences of disability and inclusive development in Ghana, focusing on the factors that enable and constrain participation. This foundational work informs his current research on eco-ableism in climate adaptation and mitigation initiatives within coastal Ghanaian communities, extending his earlier concerns with inclusion into the domain of environmental and climate justice. Beyond academia, Yaw has undertaken consultancy work on gendered vulnerability to HIV in Ghana for USAID. He has also collaborated with disability inclusion organisations, including ShareCare Ghana and the Eastern Disability Network Ghana to support inclusive practice and policy development.

Professor Ruth Evansis a feminist geographer whose research focuses on geographies of care, emotions and family relations in diverse contexts, including migration, young caregiving, disability and chronic illness, ‘bereavement’ and responses to family deaths.  Her current research investigates the relationships between care, inequalities and wellbeing in transnational families from an intergenerational, intersectional perspective. 

Ruth’s recent collaborative project, ‘Care, Inequality and Wellbeing in Transnational Families in Europe: a comparative, intergenerational study in Spain, France, Sweden and UK’ (2021-2024, JPI/ UKRI ESRC) investigated intergenerational care and intersecting inequalities in transnational families from an intersectional, ethics of care perspective. The project used a multi-sited family focused participatory action research and ethnographic methodology, working with community researchers from migrant backgrounds. The UK team co-produced a series of resources, including short films for policy and practice with families and actors with lived experience of migration using participatory theatre.  She is currently co-editing a special issue of Population, Space and Place and a Routledge edited volume based on the findings and methodological approaches. 

Previously, she has investigated caring relations and responses to family deaths in urban Senegal (20213-2015, Leverhulme Trust), inheritance and gendered and generational inequalities in access to land in Senegal and Ghana, and young caregiving in families affected by HIV in the UK, Tanzania and Uganda. Ruth’s full list of publications is available via Orchid and Google Scholar

Professor Hilary Geoghegan is a cultural geographer who researches life in a climate change world, focussing on emotions, knowledge-making, and more-than-human relations. A consistent thread in Hilary’s work is imagining and building alternative futures that honour diverse ways of being, doing, and knowing. Informed by the NERC-funded Engaging Environments project and lived experience as a neurodivergent person, Hilary collaborates with colleagues and organisations on equity-centred research and contributes to more inclusive university cultures through the Staff Disability+ Network. 

Hilary’s research spans geographies of enthusiasm, examining how emotion, care, and passion shape and sustain engagement, from forest management and modernist architecture to museum collections. She also researches citizen science and public engagement, exploring how knowledge is made and how research can become equitable, including work on environmental monitoring, public history, and climate change. Conceptually, her work contributes to affirmative engagements with enchantment and critique in geography; methodologically, it develops creative ways of working with trees and collections, imagining a more-than-human approach to tree health and introducing curation as method.

Hilary has served as PI and Co-I on interdisciplinary projects on citizen science, climate change, public engagement, and tree health and plant biosecurity. Most recently, the NERC-funded Engaging Environments project (2019–2024) brought researchers and communities together to reimagine research collaboration through practices that prioritise equity and cultural relevance. Hilary received the RGS-IBG Gill Memorial Award (2018), has advised NERC, UKRI and DEFRA, has held editorial roles with Area and People and Nature, and is an academic advisor to the Museum of English Rural Life. 

Professor Michael Goodmanis interested in the critical cultural geographies of food, humanitarianism and the environment, political ecology and the politics of sustainable consumption and digital politics and cultures. 

Mike is an interdisciplinary, critical human geographer focusing on the cultural politics of food, humanitarianism and the environment. Mike’s research spans a range of topics, including: fair trade networks, alternative food networks, the rise of celebrity politics in the context of food, climate change and global development and ways society is attempting to make life more just, liveable and care-full in the Anthropocene. 

Mike is particularly interested in conceptualising how these issues and connections are framed in the media in order to understand their social and geographical significance to building more sustainable societies, challenging existing structures of power and offering critical spaces for marginalised voices. Mike’s full list of publications is available via Orchid and Google Scholar

Dr Sally Lloyd-Evans is the University’s Public Engagement with Community Research Fellow, with interests in social inequalities, community development and participatory geographies.  She leads a programme of community-led and Participatory Action Research (PAR) projects with local community and public sector organisations on issues around health inequalities and wellbeing, cultural inclusion and food insecurity, and manages a team of PAR Research Fellows, community researchers and a community research collective in Reading called the “Whitley Researchers”.

Sally has been involved in a wide range of projects. For example, the Community-Led Research Pilot (CLRP) was a programme of six projects which were co-created between community groups across Reading and Slough, the University of Reading (UoR), the British Science Association (BSA), and funded UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) from 2021-25. The CLRP was designed to position diverse communities at the heart of the research process, shaping and developing their own research questions, hoping to address community need, priorities, and development goals.

Using our PAR toolkit, The Community Participatory Action Research (CPAR) 2021-25 programme, funded by NHS England, has worked with service providers and diverse, seldom-heard communities across South East of England to investigate and address health inequalities since 2021. Across three cohorts, the programme has trained 78 community researchers who have designed and delivered over 30 culturally and socially responsive research projects. CPAR has been delivered in partnership between the University of Reading, the NHS, Scottish Community Development Centre (SCDC) and the Institute for Voluntary Action (IVAR).

The Whitley Researchers and our partner, the Whitley Community Development Association (WCDA), are also working on UKRI funded FoodSEqual (2020-2026), which focuses on co-producing healthy sustainable food systems with disadvantaged communities.

Professor Avril Maddrell is Professor of Social and Cultural Geography. A feminist geographer, Avril’s research interests span deathscapes and inclusive cemeteries-crematoria; sacred mobilities and pilgrimage; charity shops; and historiography.

Avril is author/co-author/co-editor of ten books and has been principal investigator / project leader for  UKRI and European projects. Books include Mobilities in Life and Death (Springer/ IMISCOE 2023) which won the 2020 IMISCOE (International Migration Research Network) proposal first prize of open access publication. This drew on the European-funded HERA Public Spaces Project: Cemeteries and Crematoria as public spaces of belonging in Europe: a study of migrant and minority cultural inclusion, exclusion and integration (CeMi) (HERA), (also see explainer animation: Why are there different Funeral rituals? now used internationally in education and cemetery services training). Related books include: Deathscapes. Spaces for death, dying, mourning and remembrance (Ashgate 2010); Consolationscapes … (Routledge 2020) ; and Memory, Mourning, Landscape (Rodopi 2010).

Other books include the Royal Geographical Society research monograph Complex Locations. Women’s Geographical Work in the UK 1850-1970 (RGS-Wiley 2009and Charity Shops. Retailing, Consumption and Society (Routledge 2002); ); Contemporary Encounters in Gender and Religion (Palgrave 2017); Pilgrimage, Landscape and Heritage (Routledge 2015); Sacred Mobilities (Ashgate 2015).

Avril has worked with a range of partners in policy and practice-facing research, including the RTPI, ICCM, Manx National Heritage and Bristol City Council. Avril’s 2016 AHRC project brought local partners together to found Pilgrimage Isle of Man and The Triskelion Way faith heritage trail. She is visiting professor in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences at the University of Bath and has served as a RGS-IBG Research Group Chair and as Co-editor of international journals Social and Cultural Geography and Gender, Place and Culture.

Dr Nathan Salvidge is interested in the complex and evolving relationship between youth, cities and precarious livelihoods. Nathan is particularly interested in young people’s spatial and temporal livelihood mobilities within increasingly uncertain urban environments. His research has drawn on ethnographic and qualitative research with young vendors running small-scale businesses in urban Tanzania, his work examines how young people navigate everyday opportunities and constraints as they seek to sustain and develop their livelihoods.

Nathan continues to generate methodological and conceptual contributions to understanding young vendors’ everyday spatial practices, complex life course trajectories, and future-making practices in contexts of urban precarity.

More recently, Nathan’s work has centred on how young people draw on smartphones and social media platforms to run informal businesses. Funded by the Royal Geographical Society (2025) and The British Academy (2026-2027), this research contributes to emerging debates on youth, digital technologies and contemporary urban work in Global South cities.

Lastly, Nathan is particularly interested in collaborating widely with colleagues across the Department and the University. Alongside Dr Anna Jackman and Prof Mike Goodman (Geography and Environmental Science), Nathan co-facilitated a workshop on ‘thinking with the digital’. With Drs Jade Siu (Economics), Ren Ren (Henley Business School) and Elisavet Kitou (Research and Innovation), Nathan organised a workshop exploring the diverse ways researchers across the University engage with questions around economic geography. Nathan’s full list of publications is available via Google Scholar, and Nathan can be reached on LinkedIn.

Professor Steve Musson is School Director of Academic Tutoring. He has worked at the University of Reading since 2005. Steve works on a Teaching Intensive contract and is a University Teaching Fellow.

Steve’s current teaching focuses on social data analysis using qualitative and quantitative methods, including the use of large secondary data sets. He also teaches on urban regeneration and local economic development, in collaboration with colleagues in Real Estate and Planning and Economics. Steve has previously taught modules on urban and economic geography and is developing new teaching on the geography of sport. 

Steve’s PhD was undertaken at the Centre for Census and Survey Research at the University of Manchester and he was Co-I and PI on ESRC-funded projects on devolution and local government at the University of Bristol. He has also undertaken externally funded research on housing regeneration in Berkshire and led a major university widening participation initiative in Reading. He is a project review panel member for the Luxembourg National Research Fund. Steve provides frequent media commentary on behalf of the University, on issues relating to retail and local regeneration.