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University of Oxford
School of Geography and the Environment

 School of Geography and the Environment

Professor Linda McDowell

Academic Profile

Linda McDowell has just published a new book: Working Bodies: Interactive service employment and workplace identities (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). It examines the theoretical underpinnings and empirical nature of the noticeable shift to interactive and embodied forms of work in service economies and includes case studies of different types of jobs, drawing on her own research and a wide range of other published work about low-paid service employment.

She is an economic geographer interested in the connections between economic restructuring, labour market change and class and gender divisions in Great Britain. Before joining the School of Geography and the Environment at Oxford, she held lectureships at the Open and Cambridge Universities, a visiting position at the University of California Los Angeles, and chairs at the London School of Economics and University College London. At the Open University she was the Vice-Dean of the Social Sciences Faculty and at Cambridge and UCL the Director of Graduate Studies, as well as Vice-Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge between 1997-1999.

She has been at the forefront in the development of feminist perspectives on contemporary social and economic change, as well as in the development of feminist methodologies and pedagogic practices. She has published widely in geographical journals, as well as in feminist journals including Signs: a journal of women and culture and Women's History Review. She is the author or editor of numerous books, including Capital Culture (Blackwell, 1997), Gender, Identity and Place (Polity, 1999), Redundant Masculinities? (Blackwell, 2003) and Hard Labour: the forgotten voices of Latvian volunteer workers (UCL Press, 2005). Hard Labour is based on oral histories with Latvian women recruited in displaced persons camps in Germany by the British Government between 1946 and 1949 to work in the UK. Her most recent book - Working Bodies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) was written when she held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship between 2006 and 2008. She is part of the ESRC Gender Equality Network, where teams of social scientists from several British Universities are mapping the changing nature of gender relations in Britain (see GeNet: Gender Equality Network). As part of that Network she directed a case study of new divisions of labour in a London hotel and hospital, working with Dr Adina Batnitzky and Dr Sarah Dyer. A number of journal articles based on this research have now been published.

Between 2007 and 2009, she was the co-director with Professor Ruth Pearson at the University of Leeds of a project on South Asian women's political involvement in the UK. This was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) as part of its Diaspora, Migration and Identity Programme. An exhibition of material about the Grunwick strike (1976 to 1978) and the dispute at Gate Gourmet in 2005 entitled 'Striking Women: Voices of South Asian women workers from Grunwick and Gate Gourmet' is currently on display at the Women's Library in London and will be preserved after its close in December 2009 as a website: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/strikingwomen

Professor McDowell's papers and books have been translated into a number of languages including German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. She has held the editorship of Area and Antipode, was the review editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, as well as a member of the editorial board for the journal's book series: Studies in Urban and Social Change, published by Blackwell. She is also the chair of the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies, which is a charitable foundation awarding grants for doctoral study. She is currently an editorial board member of Economic Geography, Journal of Economic Geography, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society and the Service Industries Journal. She was a founder member of the Royal Geographical Society's Women and Geography Research Group. She has been on the RGS (IBG) Council twice, as well as a member of the Steering Group of the Geography, Environmental and Earth Sciences Subject Centre. She has been a member of a number of ESRC Committees for the assessment of research training and course recognition and is currently a member of its virtual college.

She currently is the Director of St John's College Research Centre which was established to encourage interdisciplinary research within and beyond the college.

Hard Labour, by Prof. Linda McDowell
Hard Labour: the forgotten voices of Latvian migrant 'volunteer' workers.

In what has been termed a venomous postscript to the Second World War, the fit and able among the vast homeless and often stateless population that ended up in camps run by the Allies in war-devastated Germany were recruited as 'volunteer' workers for the post-war reconstruction of western economies. Two schemes were established by the British Government - the Baltic Cygnet scheme and Westward Ho! - under which migrant labourers entered the UK to work in a range of jobs. Women were the initial recruits and Hard Labour tells the story of women originally from Latvia who came to Britain as domestic workers in the health service and as textile workers between 1946 and 1949. Their memories of their lives, including the flight from Latvia, their ambiguous status in Nazi Germany and their long exile in Britain, are at the centre of the book. These narratives are set in the context of current work in feminist history and debates about displacement, loss and migration. Available from UCL Press. UCL Press.

Current Research

Linda's current research interests include: Theoretical and empirical work on the nature, form and implications of economic and social restructuring in contemporary Britain, examining issues related to poverty and inequality, especially access to labour market and their segmentation; transnational migration; feminist theory and methods.

Selected Research Projects (since 2001)

Teaching

Prof. McDowell typically teaches part of the human geography undergraduate compulsory paper where she offers lectures on work and employment, methods for qualitative research for both undergraduates and graduate students and the theory and philosophy option for D.Phil. students within the School of Geography and the Environment.

Linda McDowell has a long-standing commitment to the diffusion of the social sciences and in her career to date has taught both conventional and adult students across a range of subjects, including social policy, urban and women's studies as well as geography. She is committed to encouraging and increasing applications from school students to read geography at university. At Cambridge she was the departmental representation on a university initiative to encourage minority applicants to the university. She is now a member of the Equalities Committee at St John's where she was Tutor for Women between 2005-7. She is a long-standing member of the AUT (now UCU), with a particular interest in equal opportunities. She has contributed to policy debates through research for the (former) Departments of Education and Health and Social Security. She has advised the Humanities Research Council of South Africa on post-liberation curriculum and research developments.

Current graduate students include:
  • Michelle Buckley
    Building the global Gulf city: tracing urban geographies of labour and capital in Dubai, UAE
  • Amrita Hari
    Migration of Indian immigrants in Canada
  • Tanya Kumar
    Privatising Mumbai: a study of the impact of privatization on the residents of Mumbai's airport
  • Sahar Romani
    Youth post-NGO: development and experiments in growing up in India
  • Esther Rootham
    The social organisation of the labour market experiences of youth in the Banlieues in Paris - three years after the 2005 uprisings
  • Sarah Stillman
    Mapping the 'Missing White Girl Syndrome': a gendered geography of peril
  • Christiane Wirth Forsberg
    Access to employment and housing for new migrants: exploring the limits of local governance
D.Phil. students successfully completing since 2001:
  • Michael Ekers (2010)
    Working the landscape: cultures of labour in the British Columbia tree planting sector
  • Adam Ramadan (2009)
    Violent geographies of exile: Palestinian refugees and refugee camps in Lebanon
  • Louise Ashley (2008)
    The new economy of inequality: the reproduction of disadvantage in the UK's legal sector
  • Jennifer Morrissey (2008)
    Life on the outside: negotiating school to work transitions
  • Laura James (2006)
    Working women: gender, class and place.

Selected Publications

Books
Articles and Book Chapters
Book chapters
  • McDowell, L. and Court, G. (2010) Performing work: Bodily representations in merchant banks. Reprinted in Oakes, T. and Price P.L. (eds.) (2010) The Cultural Geography Reader (New edition 2010). Routledge, Section 8, pp.457-465. ISBN: 9780415418744. First published in Environment and Planning D, (1994), 12: 727-750.
  • McDowell, L. (2006) Feminist economic geographies: gendered identities, cultural economies and economic change. In, B. Sen and H. Lawson Smith (eds.) Economic geography: past, present and future. Routledge, pp. 34-46.
  • McDowell, L. (2005) The men and the boys: bankers, barmen and burger makers. In, Van Hoeven (ed.) Spaces of Masculinity, Routledge, pp. 19-30.
  • McDowell, L. (2005) Geographies of difference: feminist interpretations of urban space and everyday lives. In, S. Aiken and G. Valentine (eds.) Key Approaches in Human Geography, Sage.
  • McDowell, L. (2004) Thinking through work: Gender, power and space. In, Barnes, T. et al. Reading Economic Geography, Blackwell, pp. 315-328.
  • McDowell, L. (2004) Sexuality, desire and embodied performances in the workplace. In, Bainham, A. et al. (eds.) Sexual Positions: Sexuality and the Law. Hart, Oxford, pp. 85-107.
  • McDowell, L. (2003) Space, place and home. In, Eagleton, M. (ed.) Feminist Theory. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 11-31.
  • McDowell, L. (2002) Problems of/for theory. In, Johnston, R. et al. Geographies of Global Change. Macmillan, revised version, pp. 296-309.
  • McDowell, L. (2002) Workplace cultures. In, Barnes, T. et al (eds.) Handbook of Cultural Geography, Sage.
  • McDowell, L. (2002) Geographers and sexual difference: feminist contributions. In, Johnston, R. and Williams, M. (eds.) A Century of British Geography. Oxford University Press (for the British Academy).