Academic Profile
Linda McDowell is a Senior Professorial Researcher in the School, after 12 years as a Statutory Professor of Human Geography. She is a Fellow Emerita at St John's College where is is also the Fellow for Graduates and Early Career Researchers. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and in the New Year's Honours List in 2016 she was appointed CBE for services to Geography and Higher Education. From January 2017 she is a Leverhulme Fellow Emerita, working on a study of intergenerational mobility, labour market change and the position of unskilled white men.
In 2015 she was awarded a grant under the EU Horizon 2020 programme to work on European-wide collaborative research on solidarity at different spatial scales to challenge growing inequality since the 2007/08 financial crisis and subsequent austerity policies. The programme is called Solidus - Solidarity in European Societies: Empowerment, social justice and citizenship.
In February 2016 her new book Migrant Women's Voices: talking about life and work in the UK since 1945 was published by Bloomsbury Press. It is based on oral narratives of 74 women talking about their journeys to the UK and their lives after migration, as they worked in 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: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/%28ISSN%291944-8287/homepage/2011_roepke_lecture.htm
In 2013, Linda published a book about gender, migration and women's working lives - Working Lives: Gender, migration and employment in Britain, 1945-2007. Published by Wiley-Blackwell, the book explores the ways in which the UK labour market has changed since the end of World War Two through oral narratives by women migrants from different parts of the world who came to the UK in the second half of the twentieth century. 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 the subject of a review symposium in Work, Employment and Society in September 2015.
She has recently completed a research project with Esther Rootham and Abby Hardgrove about 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.
In 2009, Linda McDowell published 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.
Migrant Women's Voices: talking about life and work in the UK since 1945
Between 1945 and the new century millions of women, including mothers and migrants, joined the labour force. These changes are brought to life through the stories of migrant women, working in factories and hospitals, banks, care homes, shops and universities over a period of 60 years.
Migrant Women's Voices is an autobiography of the post-war period as Britain became a multi-cultural society and waged work the norm for most women. McDowell illustrates the shift in migration patterns as post-imperial migrants to the UK replaced the immediate post-war pattern of migrants from war-torn Europe and who were then themselves joined by migrants from an increasingly diverse range of countries as the 20th century drew to a close.
