Feminist economic geographer — urban political economy, gender & everyday urban life
Hello, and welcome. I am a feminist economic geographer working on urban mobilities, care and inequalities, with a particular focus on how gendered divisions of labour shape everyday life in cities. My research examines how labour market structures, welfare arrangements and cultural norms organise work and care, and how these dynamics are lived and negotiated through everyday mobility practices. Grounded empirically in Tokyo, I use cycling as an entry point to analyse how mobility is embedded in context-specific political economies of gender, and to develop a comparative perspective across different urban, cultural, and political contexts.
I am currently completing a DPhil in Sustainable Urban Development at the University of Oxford (submission June 2026), while working as a Policy Analyst and Project Manager at the OECD on inclusive urban development and transport policy. Alongside this, I am a lecturer and course convener at Sciences Po, where I deliver a Master’s-level course on inclusive urban mobility planning, combining theoretical approaches with applied and experiential learning formats.
Before joining the OECD, I was Scientific Director at 6t, a Paris-based research bureau specialising in sustainable mobility, where I led applied research for public authorities and private stakeholders. I was trained at Sciences Po, the London School of Economics (MSc in Regional and Urban Planning Studies), and the University of Oxford.
Research
My doctoral research sits at the intersection of urban political economy and feminist geography. It asks how labour-market structures, welfare arrangements and cultural norms organise paid and unpaid work in Tokyo — and how those arrangements shape the embodied experience and meanings of cycling as an everyday urban practice.
Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with fifty participants in Tokyo — combining audio travel diaries, in-depth interviews and mobility biographies — I argue that cycling becomes a strategy through which women with caring responsibilities develop agency under conditions of structural inequality. That agency, in turn, makes them dependent on the bicycle even when riding conditions are poor.
The thesis engages critically with the largely Western-centric literature on gender disparities in cycling uptake, using Tokyo not as an exceptional case but as a vantage point for rethinking how cycling, care and gender are theorised across world regions. In this sense the work speaks to wider debates on comparative and transnational urbanism — on how macro political-economic structures and circulating urban models interact with locally embedded practices that reproduce context-specific forms of gender inequality. It argues for a fundamental reconsideration of care in transport planning: not a contextual constraint reducible to trip-chaining or time pressures, but a force that structures the affective, cognitive and embodied experience of moving through urban space.
Mobile methods including audio travel diaries, mobility biographies and in-depth interviews; comparative policy analysis; participatory workshops. Fieldwork conducted in Japanese.
Work in Progress
Argues that mothers' reliance on cycling in Tokyo is shaped by structural gender inequalities. Cycling enhances everyday agency in managing care and work, while simultaneously reflecting and sustaining the gendered organisation of social reproduction.
Examines how childcare responsibilities are carried through cycling and reshape women's embodied and spatial engagement with urban environments. Care-based mobilities rely on flexible, negotiated uses of space that reveal the limits of infrastructure-centred explanations of gendered cycling.
Analyses how Tokyo's cycling policy privileges productive mobility over care-based mobility through gender-insensitive narratives, knowledge practices and technocratic governance.
Publications
Teaching
Sciences Po Paris, 2023–present (now in its fourth year)
I designed and deliver an original Masters-level course on inclusive urban mobility planning. The course asks students to critically interrogate policies framed as "inclusive" by examining their underlying assumptions, reconstructing the perspectives of different stakeholders, and assessing their implications for different social groups.
Teaching combines conceptual material with experiential learning — including role-play, structured presentations and debates in which students develop and defend their own policy orientations and articulate the trade-offs they faced. The full syllabus, readings and assessment structure are my own design.
Undergraduate & postgraduate audiences across European institutions
Sciences Po and applied research contexts
I supervised a Master's dissertation at Sciences Po's Executive Master's in Territorial Governance and Urban Development, providing one-to-one guidance on research design, methodology and academic writing. Alongside this, I bring over a decade of experience mentoring junior researchers and project managers in applied research settings — including structured feedback, capacity-building, and helping colleagues navigate professional and intellectual challenges.
Teaching languages
I teach in English and French, and have given invited academic presentations in Spanish and Japanese. I have experience conducting research interviews in English, French, Japanese and Spanish.
Contact
I'm always happy to hear from colleagues and prospective collaborators interested in feminist urban geography, gender and mobility, or comparative urban policy. If you're in Paris, London or Oxford, drop me a line.