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Jessica Pykett

Prof

Accepting PhD Students

PhD projects

Past and current students:

Fiona Clarke (ESRC 1+3) (2021-), “Compassion, Performance, and Wellbeing in Female Athletes” (with Prof Jennifer Cumming, SportExR)

Jessy Williams (ESRC 1+3) (2019-2024) “A critical posthuman geography of digital youth mental health” Partner: (anon) national youth mental health charity (with Prof Matthew Broome, Institute for Mental Health, and Prof Dominique Moran, GEES)

Alice Menzel (ESRC 1+3) (2018-2024) “The emotional geographies of expectant fathering” (with Prof Peter Kraftl, GEES)

Rita Gayle (AHRC) (2017- 2024) “The Collective Utopia: Black British Feminists’ Creative Escape from the Margins of Society” (with Prof Patricia Noxolo, GEES)

Victoria James (MRes 2020-2024) “The role of repair cafés in addressing the value action gap relating to clothing repair”

Shivani Singh (ESRC 1+3) (2017-2023) “Exploring responses of the police and support services to Islamophobia” (secondments: Home Office, Stop Hate UK) (with Dr Phil Jones, GEES)

Hannah Absalom (ESRC +3) (2018-2023) “An investigation of Behavioural Public Policy in social housing in England” Collaborative Studentship with Collaborative Change. (with Prof Andy Lymer and Dr James Gregory. School of Social Policy)

Grace Wood (UoB studentship) (2019- 2022) “Co-creating age- and activity-friendly urban environments with older citizens and community stakeholders” (with Prof Afroditit Stathi, SportExR)

Maria Jesus Alfaro Munoz, (Peru Government funding) (2018-2021) “Youth happiness in the city: young people's experiences of happiness in the urban environment of Lima, Peru” (with Prof Peter Kraftl and Prof Sophie Hadfield-Hill, GEES)

Tessa Osborne (ESRC 1+3) (2015-2019) "Embodying heritage: a biosocial investigation into urban conservation areas" (with Dr Phil Jones, GEES)

Deyala Altarawneh (Jordanian Government stipend) (2013-2017) “Derelict landscapes of Amman: Unfolding the potential of neglected terrains” (with Dr Phil Jones and Dr Lauren Andres, GEES)

David Bovell (ESRC) (2012-2016) "Mobility, immobility and empowerment: the importance of place in shaping the educational outcomes of children in care" (awarded posthumously) (with Dr Simon Pemberton and Dr Jonathan Oldfield, GEES)

Forough Jafary: (Iranian Government stipend) (2010-2016) ‘Participatory Modelling platform for groundwater irrigation management with local farmers in Iran (Kashan)’ (with Dr Chris Bradley, GEES)


Professor Pykett welcomes enquiries from prospective doctoral researchers with project proposals in her areas of interest, including:

Emotional politics and emotional regulation
Behavioural public policy and neuroscience informed public policy
Digital affective governance
Embodied geographies and critical social theories of the body, mind and emotions
Critical neuroscience approaches to urban design, architecture, built environment
Geographies of welfare, wellbeing and mental health
Psychological governance and citizenship
Government advertising, communications, social marketing
Ethics advisory bodies
Museums which create, imagine and educate about future worlds

20072024

Research activity per year

Personal profile

Research interests

Jessica Pykett is a social and political geographer with research interests in citizenship, governance, and political subjectivities.  Her research to date has focused on affective and emotional techniques of governance, and the influence of neuroscience and behavioural science on public policy and economic theory. Current work is on the intersections of neuroscience and geography, concepts of urban stress and urban wellbeing, political geographies of emotional regulation, and tracing the sociodigital futures imagined and deployed in research, applications and governance within these fields.

She is currently Principal Investigator of the ESRC Ethics and Expertise project, and Co-Investigator of the Leverhulme Biology, Data Science and the Making of Precision Education project and ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures

Jessica is Co-Director of the Centre for Urban Wellbeing and serves on the leadership team for the Centre for National Training and Research Excellence in Understanding Beaviour (CENTRE-UB)

Biography

Before joining the University of Birmingham in September 2012, Jessica was a lecturer in Human Geography at Aberystwyth University. Here she worked on a Leverhulme funded grant on the ‘Time-Spaces of Soft-Paternalism’. Previously she was an ESRC research fellow at The Open University and has held research positions at the University of Bristol and Futurelab Education.

Qualifications

PhD, University of Bristol

MSc Society and Space, University of Bristol

BSc Geography, University of Bristol

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):

  • SDG 3 - Good Health and Well-being
  • SDG 4 - Quality Education
  • SDG 9 - Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
  • SDG 10 - Reduced Inequalities
  • SDG 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities
  • SDG 13 - Climate Action
  • SDG 16 - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

Keywords

  • G Geography (General)
  • governance
  • governmentality
  • emotions
  • mental health
  • wellbeing
  • embodiment
  • welfare
  • social policy
  • sociodigital

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Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years

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  • 17 Editorial board of a journal
  • 7 Grant peer review
  • 1 Publication peer-review
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