Professor Jessica Pykett

PhD, University of Bristol

MSc Society and Space, University of Bristol

BSc Geography, University of Bristol

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

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.

• Year 1 Fieldcourse; Research Methods; Contemporary Human Geography; Tutorials and Study Skills for Geographers
• Year 2 Social and Political Geography; Research Methods for Human Geographers; Research Labs and Fieldwork
• Year 3 Welfare, Work and Wealth; Welfare, Migration and Alternative Economies; Geography or Planning Research
• Year 4 MSc Human Geography; Theoretical Themes; Doing Human Geography

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

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)

• Jessica co-directs the Centre for Urban Wellbeing with Professor Jennifer Cumming, engaging with policy makers to generate new interdisciplinary research focused on the community dimensions of wellbeing in cities.   
• Deputy Research Lead for Human Geography, and Chair of Embodied Geographies research group.
• Member of the Institute for Mental Health.
• Editorial Board member: Political Geography, Resilience, Citizenship Studies.
• Grant peer reviewer: Carnegie UK; Dahlem Research School, Freie Universität Berlin; ESRC; Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research; Portuguese Research Council, Research Executive Agency of the European Commission, Wellcome Trust.
• Advisory Board member: Centre for Thriving Places, Bristol.
• Contributor to Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology POSTbriefs POST-PB-0033 (2019), Preparing for a changing world, and Horizon Scan (2020).
• Member of the UKRI Loneliness and Social Isolation in Mental Health Network, UCL.
• Member of British Sociological Association, Sociology of Emotions Study Group.
• Qualified Citizens Advice Bureau adviser.