My work lies at the intersection between space, security and mobility, and Cultural and Political Geography. I am former Chair of the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group, one of the largest research groups of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) and in 2011 I was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for my contributions to Human Geography. I joined Monash in 2025 after 13 years at Royal Holloway University of London, and 6 years previous at Keele University.

Many of my contributions have been to the field of ‘mobility studies’ an interdisciplinary area of study which explores the centrality of movement, or mobility, to social life at multiple scales – from the experience of the body to planetary socio-ecological systems. In this space my empirical research orbits around three interrelated concerns surrounding the cultures, geopolitics of security, and aesthetics of, mobility (including transport and migration). These are: 1. Air-travel, infrastructures and emerging technologies; 2. The climate emergency and just transitions to decarbonisation and low-carbon mobilities; 3. A climate of emergency, examining the emotions, affects and mobilities of emergency and its governance. While my home discipline is Human Geography my research and teaching also intersect fields such as Sociology, Anthropology, International Relations, History and Design.

I am a co-editor of the journal Mobilities, one of the leading journals for research on mobility, migration and transport, as well as a co-editor of the Handbook of Mobilities (2014), The Handbook of Displacement (2020), From Above: war, violence and verticality (2013), the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Mobilities and the Changing Mobilities book series. My first books Mobility (2009; 2017 2^nd edition, 3^rd edition under preparation), Aerial Life: spaces, mobilities, affects (2010) and Air (2014), focused on mobility, air-travel and the politics of air. 

My work on emergencies, mobilities and justice - especially as movement in emergency has met borders and security practices - have recently culminated in three other linked books, Evacuation: the politics and aesthetics of moving in emergency with Duke University Press (2024); the coedited special issue and edited book Pandemic (Im)mobilities (Routledge, 2025), and the short trilingual book Connections: Arts and Humanities for Just Mobility Futures (2025) from a collaboration with mobilities centres in the UK, Italy and South Korea, while my work as co-I of the Music, Migration and Mobility project led by the Royal College of Music (https://www.musicmigrationmobility.com/) has featured an array of storymaps, created by Michael Holden, on the migrations and mobilities of musicians who fled persecution to Britain (sometimes facing further persecution, incarceration and expulsion) from Nazi occupied Europe during the Second World War. 

With Tim Cresswell, Jane Jeonjae Lee, Andre Novoa, Anna Nikolaeva and Cristina Temenos, our book Moving Towards Transition: commoning mobility for a low carbon future came out with Zed Books in 2021. Our mobility transitions research built on a 3 year research programme funded by the Mobile Lives Forum which advocated for more social and cultural approaches towards mobility within policy and practice. I have continued these interests on transition within a British Academy funded project Just Transitions in Australia (2021-22) in partnership with Sarah Pink and Rob Raven and a large team of researchers in Australia and the UK, and in broader interests on futures and their anticipation.

More recently I have been supporting the development and consolidation of mobilities research in partnerships and research centres, such as in South Korea where I am a co-investigator of the Academy of Mobility Humanities at Konkuk University, which has extended its work into the ‘infrastructural humanities’ in a Korea 3.0 humanities grant. I am currently developing a new program of work and collaboration concerning the entanglement of mobility, geopolitics and climate change in several rapidly evolving technologies and infrastructures including batteries, electric vehicles and semi-conductor chips. 

I love teaching mobilities and I have co-taught or taught undergraduate courses on the topic since 2006, especially in relation to cities, security and sustainability. For over 10 years I was on the management board of an interdisciplinary PhD training centre for cyber security, and have supervised a range of extraordinary PhD students whose work has ranged from airports and artistic practice to the geopolitics of video games, from the politics of the search algorithm to the mobilities of run-commuting.

I would be interested to hear from prospective PhD students on projects that relate to my core interests:

• Air-travel and infrastructures and emerging technologies; verticality and volumetric power; automation and autonomy; airpower; aerial and subterranean spatialities; aeropolitics; semi-conductor geopolitics
• The climate emergency, just transitions to decarbonisation and low-carbon mobilities; sustainable mobility transitions; batteries, EVs; mobility and transitions justice;
• A climate of emergency; the emotions and affects of emergency and its governance; concepts of emergency and crisis; civil protection; disaster risk reduction; evacuation; mobilities governance; borders; biopolitics of security; airports and port security; futures, emergencies and crisis management