Professor Gillian Rose

I joined the School of Geography and the Environment in 2017, moving here from The Open University. I was Head of School from 2019 to 2022.

I was awarded my PhD from the University of London in 1990 and I've also taught at the University of London and Edinburgh University. I was Andrew W Mellon Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Pretoria in 2015, and the Ander Visiting Professor of Geomedia at Lund University 2018-19. In 2015 I was elected a fellow of the British Academy, and in 2018 became a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

I'm a cultural geographer. Although my research interests have shifted over time, a central theme has been the techniques and politics of knowledge production about places. My longest-running project is the book Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials; its sixth edition will be published in 2027.

My first book was Feminism and Geography: The Limits to Geographical Knowledge (1993), which explores questions surrounding the politics of knowledge production in relation to the discipline of geography itself. As part of the arguments in Feminism and Geography, I drew heavily on various feminist theorisations of visuality, and since then my work has been in dialogue with various aspects of contemporary everyday visual culture. I've written about community arts projects, family photography and the visual experiencing of urban places like high streets and shopping malls. More recently my work has focussed on the the visual mediation of urban spaces by digital technologies. 

My interest in the intersection of digital technologies, visuals and urban spaces was sparked by an ESRC-funded project with Monica Degen and Clare Melhuish fifteen years ago, which was a two-year ethnographic study of computer-generated images and their role in the architectural design process. Subsequently I led the ESRC-funded project 'Smart cities in the making: learning from Milton Keynes', which explored a wide range of digital interventions in MK and how they intervened in the social geography of the city. This work culminated in a book co-authored with Monica Degen, The New Urban Aesthetic: Digital Experiences of Urban Change (2022).

My most recent work has been for the book Animated Urbanism: Bringing Cities To Smart Digital Life (2026). It explores how the spatial and temporal organisation of cities is being shifted by various uses of digital visualising technologies, from navigation apps on smartphones to VFX effects in movies to the fly-throughs created for urban planners and developers. I'm especially interested in how different kinds of embodied experiences are produced in these visualisations. I also edited the collection Seeing the City Digitally: Processing Urban Space and Time (2022) as part of this work. 

Between 2023 and 2025 I was also part of the research project on 'Trust and visuality: everyday digital practices'. Funded by the CHANSE ERA-NET Co-fund programme with the ESRC, which received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant Agreement no 101004509). Led by Professor Katrin Tiidenberg at the University of Tallin, Estonia, it was a 3-year qualitative research project looking at health-related images on social media. It examines what images are trusted by young people across Europe, how health influencers try to create trust-worthy images, and what role the different platform affordances play.