Dr Kate Boyer

Dr Kate Boyer is a Reader in the School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University. Her background is in social and feminist geography, and her research focuses on social justice, feminist activism, and the politics of gendered, sexed, and embodied spatial practice.

Her research on experiences of early motherhood and breastfeeding, supported by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council, culminated in giving evidence on women’s experiences of breastfeeding in public at the UK House of Commons in 2015, as well as in her monograph Spaces and Politics of Motherhood (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

Since then, she has developed two further lines of research. The first focuses on combatting gender-based harassment and promoting more positive gender cultures. Through this work, she has explored near-peer, school-based relationships workshops in the UK and examined what local councils can do to tackle street harassment. This strand of research led to the edited collection Activist Feminist Geographies, co-edited with LaToya Eaves and Jennifer Fluri (Bristol University Press, 2023), and to her role as an advisor to the English Local Governor’s Association on community safety.

Her second line of research examines the menopause as a lived experience. With support from the British Academy, she and her colleague and Co-Investigator Kirstie O’Neill have undertaken research with a diverse group of women in London, Bristol, Stroud, and rural Monmouthshire. This work seeks to move beyond medicalised frameworks to understand menopause as a relational, emotional, and spatial practice lived in everyday life.

She is American, completed her postgraduate work in British Columbia and Montreal in the 1990s, and moved to the UK in 2007. She lives in Bristol with her partner and her 18-year-old son.