Katherine Brickell
Professor of Urban Studies, King's College London
I am Professor of Urban Studies and Associate Dean (Impact & Innovation) in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. My research explores home, inequality, displacement, and social justice through the lenses of urban, social, political, and legal geography. I was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2016. My work has also received recognition from the Royal Geographical Society and the Times Higher Education Awards. I am the author of Debt Trap Nation: Family Homelessness in a Failing State (2025) and Home SOS: Gender, Violence and Survival in Crisis Ordinary Cambodia (2020). Over the past decade, I have examined family homelessness, debt, and temporary accommodation in the UK and Ireland, helping to inform national policy on housing and domestic abuse. My current Leverhulme Trust-funded Sensory Lives project investigates the experiences of neurodivergent children living in temporary accommodation. I have also spent more than twenty years researching social change in Cambodia and co-edited The Handbook of Contemporary Cambodia.
EXPs by Katherine Brickell
Child homelessness is one of the most urgent yet least visible social crises in Britain today. Increasingly, it is the result of a structural debt trap—driven by rising housing costs, welfare pressures, and a shortage of affordable homes—that leaves thousands of children living in temporary accommodation and growing up without stability or security.