Project Team and Partners

The project includes senior academics, experts and organisations from all around the world in the field of austerity and altered life-courses.

Project team

Professor Sarah Marie Hall, Project Investigator and co-lead for research in Greater Manchester

a picture of Professor Sarah Marie Hall

With my research I develop understandings of how socio-economic changes, such as austerity, are shaped by gender relations, lived experience and social difference. My interests and contributions focus on everyday life and the economy; social reproduction, care, ethics and consumption; and feminist methods and praxis. I also go to lengths to share widely insights from this research, across publics, policy and practice. This includes in writing, expert advisory roles, animations, podcasts, zines, films and in broadcast media. You can read more here.

Dr Liz Ackerley, Research Associate and lead for research in Sardinia

a picture of Dr Liz Ackerley

I am interested in young people’s politics and activism and how the socio-economic context shapes young people’s everyday lives particularly in terms of relationships and ideas about the future. I studied languages at undergraduate level (Italian and French) and spent a year teaching English in Rome. Since then I have worked mainly in educational contexts and recently completed my PhD in Human Geography, exploring young people’s activism in times of austerity. You can find out more about my research here.

Dr Alison Briggs - Research Associate for Creative Sharing 

a picture of Dr Alison Briggs

My research examines food insecurity and charitable food aid through a relational lens to understand how intimate and social relations are (re)configured in this context to provide more holistic and nuanced understandings of food insecurity at both a personal and organisational/community level. Prior to coming into Higher Education, I worked as an Early Years Practitioner supporting children and families in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, and where I witnessed the harmful effects of poverty on children’s capacity to learn. This drives me to strive to make a difference with my research in order to provoke the policy changes needed to address persistent structural inequalities. I completed my PhD in Human Geography in 2022 on Everyday Relational Geographies of Food Insecurity and Charitable Food Aid in Stoke-on-Trent, UK, in Times of Austerity and Crisis. Since then, I have led on two public-facing reports under the umbrella of the Austerity and Altered LifeCourses project and supported the Methods for Change project at the University of Manchester. I am also supporting local charitable organisations working across Greater Manchester in their efforts to build an anti-poverty community. 

Poppy Budworth - Research Associate for Creative Sharing

a picture of Dr Poppy Budworth

I am interested in youth, the lifecourse, lived experience, and flexible methodologies. My doctoral research focuses on the everyday lives of young people living with an ileostomy or colostomy, in the UK. Through a relational lens, I explore how participants negotiate with space, time, relationships and their youth identities; expanding on what it means to be young and disabled beyond normative, dependency, and expectation-based narratives. I have a keen interest in creative and inclusive methodologies, and in making meaningful relationships with organisations and communities.

Dr Laura Fenton, Research Associate and co-lead for research in Greater Manchester

a picture of Dr Laura Fenton

I am interested in how young people’s lives change over time, both in terms of the life course and socio-historical time. I am particularly interested in how young people’s transitions into adulthood act as a litmus test for the state of societies – the nature and extent of (in)equality, social (in)justice, the quality of life they offer, and so forth. I work with others to develop creative, non-extractive ways of generating and communicating insights about young people’s lives and transitions. I completed a PhD in Sociology in 2018 on British women’s changing relationships to alcohol. Since then, I have worked on projects on youth, generation and the life-course, including Girlhood and Later Life  at the University of Manchester and Youth Drinking in Decline at the University of Sheffield. 

Dr Santiago Leyva del Rio, Research Associate and lead for research in Barcelona

a picture of Dr Santiago Leyva del Rio

My interests focus on forms of collective organisation that resist the precariousness of life and the housing crisis and that at the same time propose decommodification and decent access to common goods and basic rights. My research in this project tries to clarify how the concatenation of socioeconomic crises since 2008 affects the young adult population. You can find more information about my research here. 

Hazel Burke, Communications Officer

I work at The University of Manchester sharing our research data and analysis with different audiences. I'm delighted to be working on Austerity and Altered Life Courses project and my email is hazel.burke@manchester.ac.uk. 

Academic partners

Partner organisations

Academic advisors

Kathy Burrell, Clare Holdsworth, Kathrin Hörschelmann, and Alison Stenning

Project mentors

Jenna Ashton, Wendy Bottero, Ian Bruff and Pam Qualter

Linked projects and activities

Here are some additional projects that members of the team are involved in:

We are also supporting the work of several colleagues, including Dr Matina Kapsali, Dr Alison Briggs and Maddy Routon. Over the summer (2023) a recent UoM graduate Shannon Jones joined our team as a policy research intern, you can read more about her time with the team here.