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Publications
I publish in international peer-reviewed journals and books, as well as in formats for policy makers, practictioners and the wider public. My recent publications have particularly focused on volunteering in humanitarian and development settings, and covered issues including citizenship, gender, international mobilities, youth, digital technologies, climate and dispacement. I have also published on civil society, NGOs and development, engaging with debates around professionalisation, cosmoplitanism, environmental and global citizenship, and development education. Reflecting my interests in qualitative and participatory methodologies, I have also published on approaches to development research, including on emotion in development research, life-history methods and participatory design. To access my publications, you can visit either: You can also find publications including policy briefs, working notes and other forms of outpurs on project websites, including: |
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Selected recent publications
2025, Reconceptualising volunteering, crisis and precarity: the experiences of refugee youth in Uganda during Covid-19, Social and Cultural Geography
This paper provides new knowledge on, and reconceptualises our understanding of, the relationship between volunteering, crisis and precarity. This paper critically examines how COVID-19’s impact on volunteering has been varied and spatially differentiated, drawing on the example of young refugee volunteers in Uganda. Our mixed methods data provides an important counterpoint to dominant global narratives around volunteering’s upsurge during COVID-19. We show how COVID-19 starkly exposed the precarity inherent in refugee youth volunteering and related volunteering economies, contributing a step change in current understandings of youth volunteering and employment in geography and the social sciences. We make a wider call for an approach attentive to the multiple spatial, social and economic impacts of volunteering. 
2025, Refugee Volunteering and Responses to Displacement in Uganda: Navigating Service-Delivery, Work and Precarity, Journal of Humanitarian Affairs
By analysing refugee experiences of volunteering in Uganda, we argue that current dominant constructions of volunteering remain contained by established humanitarian and development imaginaries. Superficially, volunteering may be invoked as evidence of local ownership or destabilising top-down technocratic approaches. But this obscures a more ambivalent contribution to refugee lives and overshadows forms of voluntary labour by refugees that may offer greater scope for destabilising existing systems and recognising and mobilising refugee agency. 
2025, Building new constituencies amidst destruction: the missing piece in shifting power agendas, Alliance Magazine
As aid is cut and development devalued, Professor Nicola Banks, Helen Underhill and I reflect on the failure to build constituencies of support and meaningful solidarities, and suggest ways forward. We argue that a space was left for populist politics and misinformation to fill, and that there was a failure to deepen understanding of what aid and development could be about. But we also argue that there are ways forward, with new forms of connection and solidarity - such as those of One World Together - providing an important jumping off point for part of what comes next. 
2024, The scale, forms and distribution of volunteering amongst refugee youth in Uganda, Population, Space and Place: Geographies of volunteering have examined the relationships between people, places and forms of voluntary action, but there has been limited geographical scholarship on the scales, forms and distribution of volunteering amongst specific populations in different settings, particularly in the global South. This paper explores volunteering amongst young refugees in Uganda, and how it articulates with social inequalities within and between the spaces and places where young refugees live. 
2024, The reproduction of inequality through volunteering by refugee youth in Uganda, Voluntas:
Research confronting inequality in volunteering has mostly focused on the attribution of its benefits to different groups and communities, with little attention paid towards fundamental factors that shape such inequalities and how these intersect with volunteering opportunities. This paper highlights the importance of volunteering for young refugees in Uganda, as a means of both learning new skills and earning a livelihood. However, evidence suggests that not everyone has equal access to these opportunities, with inequalities primarily distributed along the lines of language, gender and education. 
2022, Youth participation in environmental action in Vietnam: Learning citizenship in liminal spaces, The Geographical Journal
Youth participation has become an important element of environmental governance and is also a way that young people learn about the expectations of citizenship. In the global South, young people are confronted with multiple understandings of citizenship as international development organisations may introduce citizenship in a liberal, democratic framing which may differ from national citizenship norms. In Vietnam, state agencies have a history of supporting youth participation linked to nation building and community service. More recently, liberalisation policies have opened the door for activities of international organisations which extend imaginaries of citizenship to the global scale and beyond status to a process centred on creating a sense of belonging. This paper explores how the diversity of this landscape creates liminal spaces of citizenship which young people navigate, working within and between different scales and imaginaries. 
2022, Uneven geographies of youth volunteering in Uganda: Multi-scalar discourses and practices. Geoforum:
However, despite the mainstreaming of volunteers as development actors, less attention has been paid to the unique local and national geographies of volunteering in global South settings. This paper explores how and why different ideas and practices of volunteering take shape and prominence in Uganda and how this impacts patterns of youth inclusion, inequality and opportunity. We show how a multi-scalar geography of volunteering enables us to build richer, more nuanced conceptualisations of volunteering in the global South that address the different ways global discourses, local histories, community organisations and social inequalities come together across space and time to produce uneven geographies of volunteering in particular places. |
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