Professor Linda McDowell

Linda McDowell is now Professor Emerita in Human Geography, following her retirement from the chair in human geography. She then held a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship for two years, followed by an emerita research fellowship at St John’s College Oxford. She was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2008 and was appointed as a CBE for services to Geography and Higher Education in the New Year's Honours List in 2016. 

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 and 1999.

She is a labour geographer interested in the connections between economic restructuring, labour market change and age, class, ethnicity and gender divisions in Great Britain. Her theoretical and empirical work straddles the nature, form and implications of economic and social restructuring in contemporary Britain, issues related to poverty and inequality, especially access to labour market and their segmentation; transnational migration; and feminist theory and methods.

Linda's 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.

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. 

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' was on display at the Women's Library in London and was preserved after its close in December 2009 as a website.

In 2009, Linda McDowell published Working Bodies: Interactive service employment and workplace identities (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) written when she held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship between 2006 and 2008. 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.

This was followed by two further books about labour market change that explore the working lives of women migrants in the UK following World War II – Working Lives (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and  Migrant Women’s Voices (Bloomsbury 2016). Working Lives explores the ways in which the UK labour market has changed since the end of World War Two. The book was the subject of an 'author meets the critics' session at the RGS annual conference in 2013 when Professor Bev Skeggs and others discussed its contribution. It was also the subject of a review symposium in Work, Employment and Society in September 2015. 

Migrant Women's Voices: talking about life and work in the UK since 1945 is based on oral narratives of 74 women talking about their journeys to the UK and their lives after migration, as they worked on the line in factories, in hospitals and care homes, banks, hotels, shops, universities and driving buses.

Linda McDowell delivered the 2014 Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography on 'The Lives of Others: Gendering Labour Geography' at the 2014 Association of American Geographers Annual Conference. A video of the lecture is available on the Economic Geography website. 

Linda McDowell has also completed funded research about the working lives of young unskilled working class men in Britain. With Esther Rootham and Abby Hardgrove, she explored the impact of worklessness and marginal forms of employment on young men living in Swindon and Luton as part of the Oxford Diaspora Programme funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Publications from this research with Abby Hardgrove and Esther Rootham are included in the list of articles below. A second project with Carl Bonner-Thompson, also funded by the Leverhulme Trust extended that work to the situation of young men without employment in British coastal cities, published as a series of articles between 2019 and 2022 (see below).

More recently, as an emerita research fellow in Oxford, she is writing an introductory book for students about human geography, as well as planning to bring together work from three earlier sets of interviews about the position of young men in the labour market.

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 was also the chair of the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies, which is a charitable foundation awarding grants for doctoral study. She also held editorial positions on the boards 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, as well as a member of its virtual college. 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.

She was a council member of the British Academy as well as some-time chair of its research committee. She has assessed research applications and appointments for a wide range of international bodies including research councils in Ireland, Finland, Switzerland and Poland, examined almost 50 doctoral dissertations in the UK and other countries, as well as supervised numerous students and appointed many geographers to academic posts.

Linda McDowell has a long-standing commitment to the diffusion of the social sciences. In her career she 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 no longer teaches undergraduates nor accepts applications for doctoral work.