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Biography I am something of an accidental geographer; my undergraduate degree, which I completed in 1998, was a BA(Hons) in English, with a major in Cultural Studies, from McGill University. After several years out of academia I returned to do an MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Policy at University of Oxford. I stayed on to complete my DPhil, which was funded by an ESRC CASE studentship and an SSHRC Doctoral Award, working with Professor Gordon L. Clark and Professor Linda McDowell. After completing my doctorate I started as a part-time Postdoctoral Researcher with The Inter-University Centre for Research on Globalisation and Work (CRIMT) (http://www.crimt.org/), working with Professor Judy Fudge at University of Victoria. I was based at University of Glasgow as an Honorary Research Fellow, and in April 2010 I took up the position of Research Associate in Urban Political Economy. Research interests I am a feminist economic geographer with intersecting empirical interests in welfare state institutions (especially pension systems, and, more recently, health systems), labour markets, and decision-making. Theoretically, I am interested in applying geographical historical materialist and critical/feminist political economy approaches, through the bi-focual conceptual lens of gender and social reproduction, to contemporary capitalist processes such as finalisation, individualisation, and the construction of ‘flexible’ labour markets. This focus on social reproduction is combined with an interest in life-course approaches that seek to understand social and physical processes of ageing and states of health and well-being in the context of patterns of labour commodification, caring and unpaid work.
Areas of research include:
- The UK pension system and pension decision-making
- Flexible labour markets, low paid work, and social reproduction over the life-course
- Migration, labour intermediaries, and unfree labour
I also retain a strong analytical and theoretical interest in the co-constitution of nature, culture and economy. My MSc thesis was on geographical imaginations of environmental change in contemporary Anglo-Americal literature; I am developing some of these ideas into a research agenda on the gender and urban eutopias.
Current research I am currently engaged, with colleagues Andy Cumbers, Danny McKinnon, Dave Featherston and Ant Ince, on a JRF-funded project ‘Connection, Empowerment and Exclusion in Contemporary Britain: Lived Experiences of Globalisation'. The project is part of their research stream on globalisation, poverty and communities in the UK (http://www.jrf.org.uk/work/workarea/globalisation).
Publications
Strauss, K. Globalization and the service workplace: Citizenship, entitlement, and the future of UK occupational pensions. American Behavioral Scientist. Forthcoming.
Strauss, K. and Clark, G. L. (2010) Geographies of UK pensions. In Coe, N. M. and Jones, A. (eds.) Reading the Economy: the UK in the 21st Century. London: Sage. In press.
Strauss, K. (2010) Challenging hegemonic deregulation? The UK Gangmaster Licensing Authority as a model for the regulation of casual work. Working Papers in Employment, Work and Finance , WPG 09-18 (http://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/research/transformations/wpapers/).
Clark, G. L., Duran-Fernandez R., Strauss, K. (2010) 'Being in the market': the UK house-price bubble and the intended structure of individual pension investment portfolios. Journal of Economic Geography, 10(3), 331 – 359.
Strauss, K. (2009) Financialisation and gendered risk in occupational pensions. Monk, A. and Dixon, A. (eds.) Managing Financial Risks: From Global to Local. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 258-279.
Clark, G. L., Marshall, J. and Strauss, K. (2009) Financial Knowledge. In Kitchin, R. and Thrift, N. (eds.) International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography. Oxford: Elsevier.
Clark, G. L., Knox-Hayes, J., and Strauss, K. (2009) Financial sophistication, salience, and the scale of deliberation in UK retirement planning. Environment and Planning A, 41(10): 2496-2515.
Strauss, K. (2009) Cognition, context, and multimethod approaches to economic decision-making. Environment and Planning A, 41(2): 320-317.
Strauss, K. (2009) Accumulation and Dispossession: Lifting the Veil on the Subprime
Mortgage Crisis. Antipode, 40(1): 10-14.
Strauss, K., (2008). Re-engaging with rationality in economic geography: behavioural approaches and the importance of context in decision-making, Journal of Economic Geography, 8(2): 137-156.
Clark, G. L. and Strauss, K. (2008) Individual pension-related risk propensities; the effects of socio-demographic characteristics and a spousal pension entitlement on risk attitudes. Ageing and Society, 28: 847-874.
Clark, G. L., McDowell, L., Caerlewy-Smith, E., and Strauss, K. (2005) After the welfare state: financial welfare and the social sciences. Environment and Planning A, 37(3): 383-384.
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