Caitlin Henry

My research sits at the intersection of the fields of feminist political economy and health geography, investigating how health care and health care work are impacted by economic and welfare state restructuring. My research interests and contributions fall into three areas: social reproduction and care, everyday life and health geography, and feminist praxis.

I came to the University of Manchester in September 2018 as a Lecturer in Human Geography. Previous to this I was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Geography at the University of Delaware. I completed my PhD in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto in 2017. I am also a member of the Manchester Urban Institute.

Research interests: Feminist theory and feminist political economy, social reproduction and care ethics, health restructuring, gender, labor, and anti-work politics

Geographies of Need (2017-present)

• This project follows up on research begun in my PhD dissertation focusing on hospital closures. Hospital systems across the US, as well as other parts of the world, are downsizing, as care provisioning increasingly moves into smaller clinics and home care. This project follows up on research published in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, by tracing the process of a hospital relocation rather than a closure. I ask: how does the remaking of the health care landscape affect not only the provisioning of health care services, but also the social, political, and economic role of health facilities in the urban and suburban landscape? What effect do these changes have on the health, broadly defined, of communities, cities, and workers? What new geographies of health and health care does this transformation produce?

Reproducing Care (2013-2016)

• My dissertation research examined how health care restructuring – in both macro and micro ways – impacts upon nurses’ ability to do their jobs. I conducted qualitative research in two US cities, New York City and St Louis, Missouri, bringing together two very different contexts to understand how changes in health care and nursing work such as documentation practices and hospital system downsizing impacts the everyday work lives of those on the  front lines of health care. From this research, I published in Antipode, the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, and Women’s Studies International Forum.  

I am happy to supervise PhD students who are interested in any of the following topics:

-       Feminist geographies and gender

-       Care, commodification, and value

-       Labor geography

-       Political economy and health geography

-       Crisis, debt, economic restructuring

You are welcome to contact me at any time to discuss ideas you may have for a PhD.