Lead supervisor:
Dr Kate Boyer 
Other supervisor(s):
- Prof Jon Anderson
Start date: October 2025 (Full time)
Award: General
Subject Pathway:
Human Geography
Thematic Cluster:
Place, Environment and Development Cluster
Affective Infrastructures: Trans Spatialities and the Politics of Belonging in Bristol.
This PhD research examines the spatial, emotional, embodied, and political dimensions of trans and gender-diverse lives in Bristol. It explores how trans and gender-diverse communities create, sustain, and transform spaces of belonging, care, solidarity, joy, and euphoria within urban environments shaped by shifting socio-legal and political contexts.
Situated within feminist, queer, affective, and cultural geographical scholarship, the project attends to everyday lived experiences and practices of community-making, alongside the ways these are shaped through governance, legislation, and public discourse. Rather than approaching trans geographies solely through narratives of exclusion, the research foregrounds mutual aid, activism, creativity, and collective world-making, positioning trans communities as active producers of urban space, care relations, and knowledge.
Conceptually, the thesis develops an account of emotion, embodiment, and everyday practices as affective infrastructures through which trans life is held in place and made meaningful in the city. Methodologically, the research employs qualitative, participatory, and creative methods to centre lived experience and support reflexive, community-engaged research. As one of the first WGSSS-funded researchers to progress directly from undergraduate study into doctoral research, the project brings an early-career perspective to trans and feminist geography.
Research Impact
This research advances a transfeminist body of geographical scholarship by developing affective, embodied, and relational approaches to understanding trans urban life. By centring care, joy, solidarity, and world-making, the project contributes conceptual and methodological tools that move beyond risk-based or securitised framings of gender-diverse experience in cities.
The research strengthens transfeminist commitments to knowledge production grounded in lived experience, relationality, and ethical engagement, demonstrating how trans communities actively shape urban space through everyday practices, collective care, and creative resistance. In doing so, it contributes to wider feminist debates on embodiment, affect, and belonging, while offering a geographically grounded account of how gender-diverse lives are sustained within changing socio-legal contexts.
Beyond academic contribution, the project generates insights relevant to policy and practice by challenging narrow understandings of inclusion and safety. It supports the development of care-led, participatory approaches to urban governance and community provision, with relevance for local authorities, third-sector organisations, and cultural institutions working to support gender-diverse lives in cities.
Bibliography
Ahmed, S. (2014) The cultural politics of emotion. 2nd edn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Browne, K. and Nash, C.J. (2010) Queer methods and methodologies: Intersecting queer theories and social science research. In: Browne, K., Nash, C.J. and Hines, S. (eds.) Ashgate research companion to queer studies. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 1–25.
Butler, J. (2004) Undoing gender. New York: Routledge.
Gorman-Murray, A. and Nash, C.J. (2017) Queer methods and methodologies. London: Routledge.
Halberstam, J. (2005) In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York: New York University Press.
Johnston, L. and Longhurst, R. (2010) Space, place, and sex: Geographies of sexualities. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
McGlotten, S. (2016) Virtual intimacies: Media, affect, and queer sociality. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Oswin, N. (2008) Critical geographies and the uses of sexuality: Deconstructing queer space. Progress in Human Geography, 32(1), pp. 89–103.
Puar, J.K. (2007) Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Valentine, G. (2007) Theorizing and researching intersectionality: A challenge for feminist geography. The Professional Geographer, 59(1), pp. 10–21.